Academies

NEW LABOUR’S SCHOOLS MARKET - DESTROYING COMPREHENSIVE EDUCATION

Martin Powell-Davies (Lewisham NUT)

A DECADE ago, Tony Blair famously announced that “education, education, education” would be his top priority. What followed has been a bitter disappointment for the majority of parents, students and school staff.

New Labour has turned its back on the “comprehensive” ethos that underpinned previous post-war Labour governments’ education policy. Then, the needs of an expanding economy, combined with pressure from the trade union movement, helped open up opportunities for working-class children previously restricted to grammar school pupils. Now the ladder is being pulled up once again.

Some areas are still blighted by open selection at the age of 11. The number of pupils at grammar schools has jumped by 20% since Labour came to power. The retention of “secondary moderns” for children deemed ‘failures’ at 11 in Lincolnshire and Kent meant these two authorities had the highest numbers of schools in the “bottom 100” in the latest GCSE exam league tables.

But the growing inequalities in schooling under New Labour are generally more obscured. Rather than blatantly reintroducing the “11-plus”, they are encouraging a “free market” to take hold, where schools compete with each other for pupils and resources. Such elements of genuine comprehensive education as existed are being fragmented as schools seek a competitive advantage by becoming “specialist” schools, “trust” schools or “Academies”.

Blair and Brown’s neo-liberal advisers theorise that such competition between schools and other public services will ‘drive up standards’. But the real result of marketisation is a growing polarisation between schools at the top and bottom of the league tables and a widening class divide in education. This is evident in England but also in countries like Sweden where similar policies have been pursued.

Despite Brown’s promises, Britain has one dubious claim to being a world leader in education: An international study found that the difference in class sizes between private and state schools is bigger in the UK than in any other developed country.

Lacking real resources and caught in the spotlight of league tables, even schools that have firmly embraced the comprehensive ideal in the past are being driven to find a way to get ahead of others – or risk falling to the bottom of the pile themselves.

While this or that ‘school improvement’ technique can have some effect, there is really only one fundamental factor that determines a school’s league table position – its pupil intake. Schools ‘succeed’ if they manage to attract pupils who are most likely to succeed in the examination hall and who can be easily taught with the minimum of staffing and attention.

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Schools ‘succeed’ if they manage to attract pupils who are most likely to succeed in the examination hall and who can be easily taught with the minimum of staffing and attention.

PCS opted to combine all the issues they faced into one combined ballot

he key factor remains social class. That is not in any way to accept the reactionary idea that middle-class children are inevitably ‘brighter’ than working-class youngsters. It is simply that relative affluence can offer countless advantages, such as a good diet, decent housing, access to books and the internet, time to read and play together and much more besides.

These class factors would challenge even a genuinely comprehensive system. In Blair and Brown’s capitalist Britain they are a huge barrier to genuine equality. As a 2006 analysis of nearly a million individual pupils’ results by London University academics concluded, “For schools the message is clear. Selecting children who are in high-status neighbourhoods is one of the most effective ways of retaining a high position in the league table”.

New Labour’s privately-sponsored academy schools are able to try and put this advice into practice. They are allowed to set their own admissions criteria, independent of any Local Authority arrangements.

Labour’s national Admissions Code still leaves Academies plenty of leeway to set policies that help them improve their intake at the expense of neighbouring community schools.

Figures also show that permanent exclusion rates at academies often far exceed those of neighbouring schools as the sponsors seek to unload their more challenging pupils. Similarly, the proportion of pupils with special needs has drastically fallen at academies in Walsall and Bristol.

Even so, and despite the massive investment in new infrastructure, the promised examination successes in academies have been, at best, limited. Yet Labour claim that the private sponsors’ influence will improve schools. Whether having lectures in ‘enterprise’ from a carpet millionaire or a curriculum that expounds the particular religious views of your fundamentalist sponsor helps pupils to learn is questionable!

The benefits to the sponsor are far more obvious. In return for a few per cent of the total cost, they are given an expensively rebuilt independent school and public funding to use to impose their particular beliefs on young people. In the case of Bob Edmiston, sponsor of the Grace academy in Solihull, the returns appear to be more concrete. The school has awarded £300,000 of contracts to a company run by … Mr.Edmiston!

In case anyone was under any illusions that he may have a different agenda to Blair, Gordon Brown recently publicly endorsed Labour’s plan to set up 400 academies altogether. And the expansion of “trust schools” allowed for under the latest Education Act is just as serious a threat.

Like academies, trust schools can also set their own admission policies. Both also employ their own staff, a direct threat to undermine unions by fragmenting national pay and conditions arrangements. Unlike most academies, many of the schools now contemplating becoming ‘trusts’ are already high in the league tables. Trusts will inevitably use their new status to consolidate their advantageous position at the expense of neighbouring schools.

Local democracy is also at stake. New Labour’s vision sees councils as “commissioners, not providers” of education. Instead of elected local authorities planning the admissions and funding of local community schools, New Labour’s market policies could give rise to a chaotic system of competing enterprises run by unaccountable sponsors.

There is an urgent need for trade unions and local communities to organise in defence of comprehensive education and to demand the resources that would really allow every child’s needs to be met.

Campaign groups of parents and staff have been mounting local battles across the country against school closures, cuts and academy proposals, sometimes successfully. But a national lead to seriously challenge the government and its Tory allies has been sadly missing.

The National Union of Teachers has produced some well-argued materials opposing New Labour policy but has largely restricted its campaign to parliamentary lobbying. It proved completely ineffectual in opposing the Education Act. NUT General Secretary Steve Sinnott’s misplaced illusions in Gordon Brown will also soon be shattered. The need for parents, students and staff to build their own political voice will become ever clearer.

Just as with other public services such as the NHS, local campaigns need to be brought together in a national campaign. But it is the workplace unions, particularly the NUT, that have the strength and resources to give the campaign a solid basis.

The threat to teachers’ conditions from Labour’s market policies should be reason enough for the unions to take collective industrial action. When our children’s futures are at stake, surely it’s time to act!

THE DIVIDE between schools is acute in a big city like London. With so many schools close to each other, there is growing competition to attract the ‘best’ pupils.

Where the local authority still has control over admissions, some degree of common planning is possible. My borough, Lewisham, operates an “area banding” system. Pupils are placed into five ability bands and each secondary school is then allocated 20% of its intake from each band.

The system ensures a number of genuinely comprehensive community schools still thrive in Lewisham. But it is under increasing pressure from schools that run their own admissions procedures, within and outside the borough.

Most notoriously, the privileged Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham Academy has long used its independent control over admissions to attract able pupils from across Lewisham and beyond. In 2006, it admitted just 7% of its pupils from Lewisham’s lowest band. Far from being ostracised for undermining other local secondaries, Aske’s was allowed to polarise local admissions even further when it was given control of a second academy, Knight’s.

Aske’s’ empire-building hasn’t stopped there. They are bidding to run another academy in Haringey. Lewisham’s New Labour council also plans to give the Hatcham Academy control of a nearby primary to create a 3-18 school.

But for every ‘winner’ there will also be losers. Two community schools have been thrown into real difficulties. Unable to attract many children from the highest ability bands, the schools instead fill with pupils with needs that are much harder to meet. In contrast to Aske’s, one school admitted only 4% of last September’s intake from the highest band, over 40% from the lowest. Many need individual support which the schools simply aren’t resourced to provide.

NUT meetings in both schools have been held to seek to organise and defend staff worn down by the challenges of teaching in such difficult circumstances.

These problems will grow across the country unless Labour’s market policies are challenged. All schools have to be brought under democratic local control so that a commonly agreed comprehensive admissions policy can be applied right across a locality. At the same time, schools have to be funded to provide the qualified staffing and resources to meet every child’s needs.