No to Blair’s academies

Education for the millions, not the millionaires!

NEW LABOUR’S ‘flagship’ City Academies, schools run by millionaires
and private institutions but paid for overwhelmingly by us, are in
disarray. Their own workforces are coming into conflict with them.

Roger Shrives

Members of the NASUWT teachers union at Unity City Academy in
Middlesbrough are walking out over proposed job losses and worsened pay
and conditions. The school had just become the first of Blair’s pet
academies to fail an Ofsted inspection. The government had bailed out
the school to the tune of £1.4 million but they wanted the teachers to
pay the cost.

Even Labour’s own backbenchers don’t trust the academies. Earlier
this year the Commons education committee said the scheme should get no
funding until it showed signs of being cost-effective. They said each
place cost £21,000 per pupil compared to £14,000 per pupil at a new
comprehensive.

New Labour recently commissioned a ‘more positive’ report from
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) a private company that makes most of its
huge stack of money out of privatisation. But the best the PWC report
could come up with was that 60% of students at Academies thought the new
buildings had "made a difference."

Nobody’s going to argue against schools needing to invest in new
buildings. But the academies are trying to solve educational problems
using millionaire power.

Private sponsors

Private sponsors, rich business people or corporations, charities or
even rival private schools, can put in up to £2 million with the
remaining £25 million or so of a new school’s finances coming from the
government.

This ‘investment’ of less than 10% brings the fat cat great power –
the sponsor can choose most of the school’s governing body and have a
big influence on its ‘ethos’. Yet exam results, normally the be-all and
end-all for New Labour, have been poor. In many cases they were worse
than the schools they were meant to be replacing.

The government now say that this is because of social factors such as
being based in poor and deprived areas. Precisely. Such problems have
been caused by decades of under-investment in education in working-class
areas.

Schools don’t need guidance from the leisure-time whims of an
unaccountable millionaire. They need real solutions, genuine investment
and democratic control.

All around the country, there are protests against these plans.
Parents, students and teachers are determined to stop the privatisation
of education!