In a radical dismantling of the state comprehensive system, the government is planning to promote competition and the private sector within the education system...

Regeneration for youth — or a “five year strategy” of destruction?

WORKERS, NOV 2004 ISSUE

"Market forces create winners and losers," said Steve Sinnott, new NUT General Secretary, to a recent meeting of Divisional Secretaries from around the country, "and it is absurd to expect those forces to come to the rescue of those who have lost."

Sinnott was speaking about the government's stated intention to promote competition and the private sector within the education system. Apart from its obviously divisive effects, the strategy fails utterly to address its own published analysis of why so many children fail to achieve anything like their educational potential.

Poverty and achievement
Within the first few pages of the DfES publication Five-Year Strategy for Children and Learners (see Box below) there is a graph showing the influence of "socio-economic status" on educational achievement. This demonstrates that the poorer the child, the more poverty, family unemployment, poor housing etc that the child experiences, the less successful that child is likely to be in educational achievement.

It shows that even such children who score highly in their very early years decline in achievement as time goes on.

The fine-sounding analysis in the strategy concludes:

"We also fail our most disadvantaged children and young people... internationally, our rate of child poverty is still high, as are the rates of worklessness in one-parent families, the rate of teenage pregnancy and the level of poor diet amongst children. The links between poor health, disadvantage and low education outcomes are stark."

This conclusion is damning of the current economic and political system - but it is hardly a new discovery. Proponents of state education at the end of the 19th century were pointing to it. Research throughout the 20th century demonstrated its truth over and over again. Now the government restates it for the twenty first century.

How enlightened! You might think that they would go on to detail policy for overcoming poverty, putting right disadvantage in order to raise education achievement. You might...but of course you would be wrong. They know that poverty goes together with capitalism as brain damage does with being continually battered about the head. It's going to happen.

No challenge
And of course their project does not, cannot, include a challenge to capitalism. So instead of dealing with the causes of low education achievement that they rightly identify, the five-year strategy immediately turns to promoting radical change within the education system.

All the research - most recently the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) research conducted by the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development - shows that the state comprehensive education system is the most effective system in terms of providing opportunity for all young people, including those brought down by poverty.

Not only does the government's strategy fail to tackle the disadvantage it condemns, it sets about the most radical dismantling of the state comprehensive system.

All this is in the name of "diversity". It clearly fragments and divides, but this is held to be positive - as the resulting competition together with "rigorous teaching and learning reviews" - particularly in schools that continue as state comprehensives - is expected to (of course) drive up standards. Never mind the findings of research, feel the spin!

Alongside the five-year strategy policy of disintegration, differential funding and competition between schools, the Tomlinson Report appeared. Mike Tomlinson, ex Chief School Inspector, no doubt genuinely wanted to reduce children's underachievement. But again, instead of attempting to deal with the social damage caused by capitalism and destroyed communities, he recommends changes to the school system to remotivate these children.

There will be a new diploma to replace GCSE, A levels and any other exam route that schools might be offering. It will start at 14 and end at 19. It will include both academic and vocational learning. So far so good. But though the diploma will include both academic and vocational training, not all pupils will have the benefit of both. Vocational education is not in the core to be followed by all. It is an option. In fact, it will be the basis of study for those disaffected from the broad curriculum that others more motivated will continue to study.

Does this matter? Of course it does. It strikes at the dignity and the unity of the working class, the vast majority in our society.

The Tomlinson proposals would use the education system to divide workers, between the manual and non-manual workers. At 14 many young people will be studying that version of the diploma dominated by vocational training. They could have effectively left school as part of this process, attending instead further education college and working on employers' premises. They would even be said to be following young apprenticeships.

Back to the 1950s?
Put this together with the five- year strategy. Will we see doubly funded academies for some, and underfunded schools offering young apprenticeships for others? Will we have schools designated specialist academic and specialist vocational, selecting children at 11 according to their likely pathway at 14? This paints a picture reminiscent of 1950s education, long discredited, with secondary modern schools for the failures.

Let's look further. The government proposes to remodel the school workforce by putting people without teaching qualifications in charge of teaching whole classes of children.

Not all classes, of course. They are particularly keen - though not exclusively so - to see such unqualified staff taking classes in which specialist skills might be required. Will our specialist vocational school prepare its young people by drafting in teaching assistants without teaching qualifications to supervise them, while the academy or the foundation school down the road staffs its academic curriculum with qualified teachers?

Attack on pay
Just to make this process complete, the government is proposing to the STRB, the teachers' statutory pay review body, that it promote local pay structures and individual pay bargaining within every school.

To sum up the destructive effects of the government's plans for teachers and pupils, they will foster:

What a "strategy"! What "proposals for change"! What "remodelling"! It is a recipe for anarchy on top of low educational achievement.

We need to state our alternative future for education very clearly. After his telling remarks about government strategy, Steve Sinnott went on to describe how the NUT would be delivering its own major Statement on Education in November and how this would become part of a focus of work to bring together all properly interested parties to develop an alternative strategy for education.

Real regeneration
Natural participants? Certainly teachers, other school staff, parents, governors and LEAs. But also all those who want to see a real regeneration of our economy, our manufacturing industries, our city centres and our countryside. Because that is what is needed to stop pupil disaffection, to overcome low education attainment, underachievement and waste of young potential.

We need a diverse but integrated and fairly funded system of lifelong learning, training and full employment. How about that for a challenge to government?

But of course they can't take it up. They are wedded to capitalism, and to all the ramifications of it, including the deregulation, fgmentation and privatisation inherent in the globalisation agenda.

Why educate your own workers when you can either export capital and employ workers abroad on the cheap - or create the conditions under which hundreds of thousands of workers are roaming the globe as economic migrants, and you can simply import them when you want them?

That is the twisted logic of capitalism in the twenty first century. That's why they don't want an integrated and systematic delivery of education. That's why they are prepared to write off big sections of working class youth.

But we are not so prepared - and we are stronger than they are if we wish to be. Let's make a start!

How the government aims to transform state education
The government's new plan for education was published, typically, shortly before the summer holidays, leaving teachers and educationists little time to react. But now the full impact of the proposals is becoming clear. Within the five years the government plans a number of points of attack:
  • DEVELOP 200 ACADEMIES
    These schools are state funded, and also receive substantial funding from private profit making companies and from other bodies such as religious foundations. These run the academies outside of local education authority or state control and accountability. There are currently 12 of them. When quizzed about these, and asked if they should be subject to evaluation, Charles Clarke, Education Secretary said, with disarmingly honesty, "You might argue that. The problem with any policy announcement is that you have a set date, and I do not think we could postpone that." The five-year growth in academies is planned to be "just the start".

  • BOOST FOUNDATION SCHOOLS
    It aims to dramatically increase the number and the level of individual independence of foundation schools. These are the old opted-out schools and those fundamentally run (sometimes in both senses of the phrase) by the Christian church. More religion to be rammed down our children's throats.

  • ALLOW OVERSUBSCRIBED SCHOOLS TO EXPAND
    The government wants to do this against even the advice of Ofsted, which warned that this would create a spiral of decline in others. They will give half-million pound grants to allow the expansion - and nothing to those that decline as a result.

  • CREATE DIVERSITY BY CREATING SPECIALIST SCHOOLS
    The plan is for a radical acceleration of the process of designating secondary schools as specialist schools and colleges, giving extra funding to those that accept this status and none to those who do not. Specialist schools need to find funding from private sector sources as part of the challenge, and so double up their additional funds.

  • MORE RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS
    It will encourage more charities, religious bodies and interest groups to set up their own schools with state funding.
The report is available at www.dfes. gov.uk/publications/5yearstrategy/

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