New Labour's education failure

Why our classrooms miss out on Blair's 'bounty'

EDUCATION IS one issue where New Labour think they have a clear advantage in this general election campaign. They claim to have made big spending increases totaling some £19 billion.

But has this money brought real improvements? The increased staffing that teachers, parents and students need? Smaller class sizes in schools?

BOB SULATYCKI investigates.

MUCH OF this £19 billion 'new spending' has been double-counted, unfortunately very little of these "increases" reaches classrooms. In some areas, London for example, pupil-teacher ratios and therefore class size, are at their worst for 30 years.

Government spending on education under New Labour remains well below the average for developed countries. The pupil-teacher ratio lags behind all other developed countries except the Czech Republic, Mexico, Korea and Turkey.

The average UK state school primary class now has 26.8 pupils, compared to an OECD average of just 22.1. Of the major developed countries, only Korea and Japan have bigger classes in both primary and secondary schools.

Last year, English primary schools lost 800 teachers who were not replaced and class sizes increased. Thousands more infants (5-7 year-olds) are being taught in classes over 30.

New Labour has not increased overall funding. Two years into a Labour government, education spending fell to just 4.5% of GDP, the lowest proportion for 40 years. Spending rose slightly after then, but the extra money hasn't made a difference in most schools.

This additional funding was used in pet projects such as the misnamed 'Excellence in Cities' scheme. Some of this spending also goes on inflated salaries for head teachers and extra money for a few specialist schools. And they spent £22 million on management consultants over the past five years and £200 million a year on the OFSTED inspection body.

A financial crisis looms in schools, foreshadowed by the numbers of redundancies made in the summer term. Is that why the government is so keen to press ahead with the 'remodelling' exercise? This will enable thousands of classroom assistants to be employed as, in effect cheap labour, replacing qualified teachers.

Labour selling off state education

STATE EDUCATION has been a tremendous gain for the working class but New Labour has attacked the principles of a comprehensive state education system even harder than the Tories did.

Labour's Five Year Plan envisages the role of local councils in education being even further reduced. Local planning and admissions policies will be thrown out. Fragmentation and competition between schools will become the norm.

Last July Charles Clarke, then education minister, spelt out his 'blueprint' for the next five years. The strategy was to entice the middle classes from private schools back into the state sector. To achieve this, more streaming, more uniform, more 'guarantees' of privilege and selection will be forced upon state education.

New Labour forlornly hopes that business and private money comes to state education's rescue. But business will only get involved if there's profit to be made. Where they do, it will not be to the benefit of education.

Private schools

Labour wants to give private schools and private-sector capital an enhanced role in building and running schools. The programme's centrepiece is accelerating the 'academy' programme - semi-independent schools funded by taxes and private sponsorship (see article opposite).

New Labour has already done more than any previous government to expand the private sector's role in education but this drive towards privatisation has run into difficulties. A £340 million Private Finance Initiative (PFI) school building scheme in Tower Hamlets came grinding to a halt in 2003 after construction company Ballast plc went bust.

Some popular comprehensive schools have been threatened with closure because the penalties involved in closing unpopular PFI schools would be so great. Of course socialists don't support any schools' closure. But local authorities are forced to put education considerations aside when bound by PFI contracts. Dozens of schools built under PFI could have a lifespan of under 20 years, but local authorities will be forced to maintain their contracts with PFI schools.

Handing over "failing" education departments to private companies has also had considerable problems. WS Atkins pulled out of a £28 million a year, five-year contract to run education in Southwark in 2003 leaving schools' administration in disarray.

We have seen a proliferation of private agencies, supplying teachers from round the world to fill gaps created by teacher vacancies, but making their profits by paying teachers on their books below nationally set rates. Now they are expanding into the supply of even lower-paid cover supervisors.

Then there's the independent schools, the misnamed 'public' schools attended by around 7% of pupils. These school's pupil-teacher ratios are on average 45% better than state schools while spending per pupil on buildings and equipment is on average five times higher.

These businesses are deemed charities, so getting enormous direct and indirect tax subsidies. New Labour's Charity Bill recently entrenched this £100 million tax break. The Independent Schools Council said the Bill was 'what we were hoping for.'

A socialist programme for education

FOR THE last 20 years, a succession of ill-thought out and reactionary policies have hit education. We need to unite parents, school students, staff and the wider community in a struggle for better-resourced, non-selective comprehensive schools.

Socialists stand for free, high quality education for all, from nursery to university. We call for a massive increase in public spending to provide more staffing, smaller class sizes and good-quality resources. That's what's needed to ensure the best education and individual support for every child.
To recruit and retain teachers, there should be an immediate end to performance pay, a minimum 20% non-contact time for teachers and significant pay rises for all school staff. There should be a campaign to recruit greater numbers of Black and Asian teachers and to expand mother tongue provision.
Private-sector involvement in running schools and Local Education Authorities (LEAs) should be ended.
Teachers should be employed through fully democratic LEAs run by elected representatives, subject to recall, including school teachers and non-teaching staff, parents, local trade unionists, community organisations and secondary school students. Similar democratic governing committees should also run schools. Headteachers should be elected.
To allow more working-class parents to become involved, governors should receive paid time-off to attend governors meetings during the day. Adequate time must be allowed for trade union organisation and for school students to develop their own unions.
Selection on any grounds, whether by ability, aptitude or religion, should be abolished. All schools, including church and fee-paying public schools, should be brought under local democratic control.
We stand for a democratically planned equitable admissions policy based on genuinely comprehensive, co-educational, neighbourhood schools.
The present national curriculum must be abolished together with Ofsted inspections and compulsory religious education. Pupils of all backgrounds and abilities should experience a lively, relevant, broad and balanced, polytechnical education.
Abolish SATs and school league tables. Diagnostic testing and moderated teacher assessment can play a role but a socialist education system would be based on learning and attainment rather than exams.

City academies - what's the big idea?

DAVID BLUNKETT'S controversial initiative aimed, in 2000, to replace 'failing' inner-city schools with privately backed 'city academies'. 17 academies are already running, another 40 projects are underway while the government hopes to create 200 by 2010, costing £5 billion.

New Labour are giving handouts to rich private sponsors to run academies that are independent of local control. These privateers - individuals or companies - need have no prior experience running schools. They just need to give a relatively small sum - up to £2 million.

In return they get a large degree of control. They can appoint most governors and senior managers - state schools are currently governed by elected parents, teaching and non-teaching staff, local councillors and local people.

Control

Now the sponsors can control the school's curriculum and "adopt innovative approaches to content and delivery." Each academy specialises in a subject reflecting its sponsors' interests. These are usually business-based or faith-based such as the two academies run by the Christian fundamentalist Peter Vardy Foundation that teach 'creationism' as a serious scientific theory.

Blair opened one of the Vardy Foundation schools in person last year, saying its prospectus was "one of the best examples of modern social justice I can think of."

Academies are semi-independent schools funded by public money. They're bad for teachers as well as school students and parents. Sponsors can determine staff pay and conditions.

Academy schools aren't bound by national agreements on teachers' pay and conditions. Teaching unions say some of their members in academies are forced to work longer hours.

Are the academies working?

EVEN BY the very narrow measurements beloved by New Labour, no! Academies have failed, even in improving exam results. The 2004 league tables for 14 year olds show that nine of the eleven academies that existed then came in the bottom 200 schools in England.

At Bexley Business academy - which Blair hailed as "the future" of secondary education - the 14-year-old year group failed to meet the levels expected of 11-year-olds.

Even the Commons education select committee report has called on the government to scale down the programme until it had been properly evaluated.

The scheme is expensive. Building an academy costs on average over £25 million, compared to a £14.6 million average for new school buildings. And it's divisive. A confidential government report warned that these academies could create a two-tier system based on social class and introduce a "quasi-market" in education.

New academies with newer buildings and better resources could draw pupils away from local authority-run faculties, possibly causing some other schools to close.

Who pays for these schools?

THE GOVERNMENT has lowered the contribution that sponsors pay. At first the privateers were asked to contribute 20% to the costs, but they have had their outlay capped at £2 million - that's as little as 5% in some cases. And even that is often more "gifts in kind' than hard cash.

So who really pays for them? The taxpayer, who else? Public money contributes an average of £23 million to each school (at least 11 times the sponsor's contribution) whilst all later running costs are paid directly to the school from central government funds, so the school can run independently of the rest of the state sector.

We beat Blair's 'shame academy'

BLAIR'S ACADEMIES can be beaten! In this article reprinted from the socialist last autumn, Linda Taaffe of Waltham Forest National Union of Teachers (NUT) explains how they did it.

A VIGOROUS local campaign by parents, support staff and teachers, spearheaded by a socialist leadership in the local NUT branch and backed up by UNISON and T&G union members, won this big victory.

We forced Jasper Conran, multi-millionaire designer of fashions, homeware, jewellery and fragrances, to withdraw as sponsor of one of Blair's proposed academies. He wanted to add McEntee Secondary School to his assets.

We took our campaign outwards and made it visible and noisy. McEntee school had a history of problems (although it was improving significantly). Both the government and Conran thought an academy would be meekly accepted in a socially deprived area.

And it might well have gone through, but we stressed how his bright new school would have no places for McEntee students, who'd be farmed out to other overcrowded local schools.

We showed how an academy can control admissions which would be in the hands of a new governing body, totally controlled by business interests. They could select the intake. It would be the school choosing the children, not the other way round!

Only chance

People already knew what privatisation had meant in the NHS, railways etc. and did not want their children's only chance for a secondary education to be subjected to such experimentation.

This motivated a really strong group of parents, whose participation was decisive. One community leader declared that she'd get 200 parents chained to the school railings if an academy was agreed!

We quickly realised that petitions were never going to make the councillors change their minds. A rumour was gaining credence. If councillors rejected an academy, no money would be released for refurbishing all the other secondary schools. Some even admitted that if this were the only way to get £24 million, they'd vote for it, even though they opposed the principle of academies!

We took the campaign outwards. We challenged Conran to a debate, but got no reply. Then we organised a picket of Debenhams where Conran has an outlet. Plans were also afoot to take the message to other town centres. However on the eve of the Oxford Street protest, Conran withdrew!

Our victory came on the heels of another victory against a second Vardy Academy in Doncaster. There parents, many of whom were involved in the 1984-85 miners' strike warned - they've taken our mines, they've taken our jobs, they're NOT taking our schools!

In this spirit we will continue our fight into a round two when a new sponsor, the United Learning Trust (the church schools company) could step in!

'Super-schools' and collapsing ceilings

STEVE SCORE, Socialist Party general election candidate in Leicester West told the socialist how New Labour's Tory education policies have hit Leicester.

"THE COUNCIL are talking about a city academy replacing a school they closed a few years ago. It will be run by the Church of England and financed by David Samworth, the 173rd richest man in Britain! He owns big food processing firms like Ginsters Pies.

They're also proposing a Muslim city academy. So apart from the questions around privatisation, there will be issues of ghettoisation of different religious groups in different schools in Leicester. We think this could be dangerous.

They're proposing a third city academy on the site of New College which, a few years ago was heralded as the new super-school to replace six schools the council closed down. But that school did not solve any of the problems facing education.

What's more, the issue of closing schools and ignoring the wishes of local working-class people keeps coming back. In the past the council decided, bureaucratically, to close schools on council estates and merge them into one 'super-school'.

Now they're doing exactly the same. They're closing the super-school they built and replacing it with a privatised city academy to 'solve all the problems'. The difference this time is that private companies are involved, and they give even less democratic control to local communities.

Special schools

The Socialist Party recently campaigned against six special schools being closed. The parents, particularly of children with learning difficulties, are irate. Without consultation or any debate, the council wants to shut down successful schools.

There's a massive scheme for rebuilding Leicester's secondary schools with PFI involvement. But that will bring a £100 million funding shortfall over 25 years. This will inevitably come from cuts in school budgets.

And this money's all going into secondary schools while primary schools are in total disrepair. In one Leicester school teachers wear hard hats to avoid bits of the ceiling falling on them and they've netting down the corridors to stop debris falling on the children.

The councillors say they're 'aware' of repairs but can't say when they'd be done. So while they're trumpeting all the money coming in from private finance, primary schools are actually falling down!"

Food, privatised food

THE GOVERNMENT and private companies have known for years that the food provided in schools has a profound effect. Psychological research shows that pupils' concentration, behaviour and academic performance are all improved by balanced healthy meals.

Jamie Sinclair, Vicki Chalk, Helen Walker and Tim Hughes, Swindon

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can be eased when the intake of junk food is decreased; asthma can also be helped with a better diet as shown in Jamie Oliver's recent TV series.

So if school meals can help children's education then why isn't this being done? Most schools or local authorities don't control school meals. They are usually contracted out to private companies that are more interested in profits than what their sub-standard food products do to children.

These businesses won't change the way they act, so to improve school meals' quality (and behaviour) we must retake control. Companies providing school meals need to be democratically elected and publicly owned. This is the only way we can have any influence on school meals' content and the nutrition they provide.

As long as private companies are involved in education they will simply soak up any extra funds the government throws at the problem. We must be sure that all people have the means to feed themselves in a healthy way. This is not currently being done.

We intend to take this issue further and campaign to take private companies out of schools.

Tesco - every two billion helps

Socialists' city-wide challenge

Anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) A socialist approach

New Labour's education failure

Liberal Democrats: Phoney radicals - no different to the rest

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