Many schools in Britain are crumbling. The buildings are old fashioned. They leak heat, badly need repair and cost a fortune in maintenance. For years the state seemed to hope that the odd lick of paint and a ritual bollocking for teachers would be enough to ensure that future generations of workers gained the skills they needed to drive the British economy forward.
When that failed they tried curriculum reform and constant testing and examination of young people. Our children are the most tested in the world. They are tested on arrival in nurseries and then with a regularity that is frightening. From the age of 11 hardly a year goes by when they are not subjected to terrifying national examination. Added to this are the education league tables which so stress teachers and parents that many children are driven to study and revise to the point of exhaustion.
Though exam results are rising every year, though the curriculum is more and more focussed to producing “skills based” qualifications and critical thinking is discouraged, still the education system is failing to turn out young workers with the tools capital needs to continue to make healthy profits.
The Labour government has responded to this with a two fold reform programme. The curriculum is being focussed on 14-19 and schools are being rebuilt en masse as part of a programme known as Building Schools for the Future. These two are actually inextricably linked into a scheme to further intensify the skills based approach to education and to remove from educationalists what elements of autonomy exist. Under the guise of decentralisation, their effect is further increase the control of the central state over what is taught in schools.
A key element in education strategy over recent years has been the creation of specialist colleges instead of comprehensive schools. Schools were asked to get an amount of private sponsorship. In return they received additional government funding to the tune of a couple of hundred thousand pounds. They then rebadged themselves as “technology colleges”, “arts colleges”, “sports colleges”, even “humanities colleges” and subtly shifted the curriculum to match the specialism being offered. This could mean, for example, that every child studied an art GNVQ or an ICT GNVQ. These low status qualifications with low academic standards had the effect of inflating GCSE league tables due to some very dodgy accounting.1
This programme was the start of the push towards an 14-19 curriculum. Young people are asked at age 13 to make choices in their studies that will determine their future working life. They are discouraged from anything that might expand their horizons or from learning a foreign language. Instead they are encouraged on to a skills based path that will last them through college and on to either a job or university.
When the state finally realised it needed to rebuild nearly every secondary school in the country, the decision was also taken to build on this earlier strategy. This time the role of the private sector in state education was to be enhanced. The first option chosen was simple. Private Financing Initiatives let corporations build the schools. The local councils then rent them back off the financiers. As new schools cost upwards of £25 million each this seemed attractive. However, the rents charged would put the Council Charge up so much that many chose not to go down this road.
The state then responded by dusting down an old, discredited Tory policy of building City Technology Colleges (CTCs), called them Academies and plan to build 200 of them by 2010.
CTCs were supposed to replace “failing schools”. This usually meant closing schools in poorer working class communities and reopening them with new management and sometimes staff. They significantly failed to raise exam results and the programme looked to be heading for the dustbin.
The new policy was to invite private sponsors to find £2 million to invest in a new school. In return the government would find the remainder. In return for this money, the sponsor would gain control of the school’s governors, control over what is taught in the school and crucially also control over the pay and conditions for staff working there and the admissions policy of the academy.2
The sponsors who came forward fall into three main categories: businesses and corporations, public bodies like universities and religious groups. This latter has caused the most controversy. A number of high profile sponsors are Christian fundamentalists who object to science lessons teaching evolution. Instead they insist that nonsensical fairy tales about “intelligent design” and “creationism” are taught as being equally valid theories. Other sponsors include the Church of England who are using Academies as a backdoor way of gaining more control over education. Religious sponsors include Oasis and Edutrust and car salesman Reg Vardy.
Control over what is taught is increasing the number of “specialist” schools. In Manchester, for example, Manchester Airport has an Academy. A key aspect of the curriculum there is “leisure and tourism”. Others teach engineering. One in Sunderland has installed a mock call centre. The list is endless. The effect is to produce a generation of young people pre-programmed for particular industries with limited visions of the world.
This curriculum control comes through control of the governing body. The sponsor is able to nominate over half of the governors. They are not just a rubber stamp for the head. Aggressive governing bodies actually do control their schools.
Staff at all levels stand to do badly at these new institutions, except of course the Head and Deputies (nowadays called the Senior Leadership Team). Currently wages and conditions are nationally negotiated. This means that education workers in low cost parts of the country earn the same (outside London) as those in the south east. The new Academies will do away with this. We can expect a general lowering of wages and a worsening of conditions in these new schools. In at least one, Salford Academy, the new owners clearly sought to head off opposition. They explicitly decided when building the school to have no social areas for staff. So for example, there is no staff room. This removes from teachers, technicians and teaching assistants the opportunity to get together and talk about their workplace and plan ways of resisting worsening conditions.
Control over admissions means the Academies can pick and choose who they let in. They don’t have to take anyone. This means it is harder for children with learning difficulties to get in, which can mean they are denied the chance to go to their local school with their friends and can add the further burden of travelling to other schools further away. Further this control means they can suspend and expel more freely. Academy schools already have. The Anti-Academy Alliance report on their website that, “According to the 2007 national Audit Office report, permanent exclusion rates in Academies are nearly 4 times higher than the national average.”
This is possible because the Academies are outside the control of the Local Authorities. It may seem strange that anarchists are concerned about which part of the state controls education, surely all are bad? Whilst this is on one level true, it also means that the new schools are removed from opportunities for staff training and development. Local Authorities provide training packages for teachers and teaching assistances. Although the provision of these is becoming increasingly market driven, they are comparatively accessible and give staff the opportunity to improve their skills and knowledge. Academies will have no recourse to these, unless they choose to negotiate them and pay for them. We firmly expect to see the growth of an industry of private consultants growing fat off the training needs of these institutions, but providing a package that lacks the variety or depth that is currently available. We also expect to see staff being forced to undertake training in their free time, rather than being released during the day.
Clearly, Academies being outside the control of the Local Authorities will not mean they escape state control. They will be under the scrutiny of the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) who will be inspecting every two or three years. This means the only real control comes from the central state. To make the regime of inspection more draconian, schools are already being put through a process of “self-evaluation” coupled with regular “performance management” targets. Rather than being an example of more self-management, these mean that every person in the school has a permanent inspector in their own head, doing the work of OFSTED for it.
A final note on the way these schools will treat young people. They are planned to be large institutions. They will have many open communal areas that are easily spied on either by CCTV or by staff. The students will find it hard to escape the glaze of a disapproving adult. Secondly we are aware that in some authorities they will have seriously reduced areas for sport and leisure activities. In Oldham, for example, there are plans to shut schools with swimming pools, Astroturf and other pitches. These will not be replaced in the new schools which will be on significantly smaller sites. Not only will this risk the health of young people, denying them the opportunity to play and exercise, it also removes valuable resources from already poor neighbouring communities.
Academies are unpopular with education workers and there are a number of campaigns against them. This is something we, as anarchists, should be firmly supporting. The problem lies in the nature of the campaigns and the responses of the unions to academies. The campaigns are relying heavily on demonstrations and lobbying, rather than in trying to build industrial and community opposition. The view of the main teaching unions firmly supports this approach. When confronted in Oldham with the need to take industrial action to secure working conditions, the General Secretary of the NUT, Steve Sinnott, became apoplectic and launched into a tirade of abuse against the speaker who had suggested it. The unions don’t like the idea of academies, but they see their main task as being to gain representation within them when they open. They even rule out of the possibility of strike action in the new schools for fear of alienating parents, even though this would be the most effective way of ensuring decent pay and conditions for workers there.
The opposition had hoped that Gordon Brown would ditch the programme when he became leader. At a meeting sponsored by the NUT in Manchester, the writer of this article clearly heard this fantasy proposed by local NUT officials and even backed up by the SWP, although their line was that he needed to be “forced” by a popular demonstration with big name speakers to do that. Brown has certainly not scrapped the plans however.
Clearly we need to be organising both in our workplaces, as staff and students if we are in education, and in our communities to fight this. It needs to focus on the effects on those working in education, on the effects on young people and on the way it will deprive communities of existing resources. It should be led by those involved themselves and needs to understand the motives behind the plans for academies as well as realising that relying on officials is unlikely to succeed. We also need to be wary of support from opposition politicians. Experience shows that this is likely to evaporate as quickly as it arises, especially after an election has returned them to power.
Finally, we should point out that this article does not begin to tackle the question of what anarchists think education should really be like. We have tried to show how the current government’s plans are leading to even greater control and more restricted learning opportunities for young people which are aimed at making industry more profitable. Education in an anarchist society would clearly look nothing like any of the current systems on offer, whether the old comprehensives or the new academies. However, discussion on that area is for another article.
1 Intermediate GNVQs are supposed to have the equivalence of 4 GCSEs at Grades A*- C. There is considerable debate as to whether this is true. Schools manage to teach them in between 3 and 5 hours a week. We know of at least one school which has taught GNVQ Art, then entered the students for Art and Graphic design GCSE. Amazingly their results soared. This has been mirrored across the country. Most of the “improvements” recorded by the new Academy schools have come from this route.
2 The government quickly backtracked on the requirements for this £2 million. First they announced that it could be cash, in-kind or services provided. So, instead of spending anything, a PC company could donate ICT equipment at market rates. Companies could provide the services of executives as in-kind aid, at inflated salaries. All these are, of course, tax deductible. Recently the government has announced that it is thinking of removing the need for any contribution whatsoever. They are merely going to give the new academies to the sponsors.