Why teachers have had enough

The two main teachers’ unions, representing about 500,000 teachers, today begin a series of rolling strikes culminating in an all-out national strike for one day before the end of the year. They have simply had enough and it’s easy to see why.

Nowhere is the lack of democracy that is a feature of our age more apparent than in education. Education secretary Michael Gove has shut his ears to the education experts, the teachers themselves, their unions and most parents too. 

In line with what is happening in most other workplaces, Gove wants every teacher to take on more duties, work longer for less pay and agree to lower pensions. And he plans to dismantle the national pay bargaining system which is a direct attack on the unions.

Head teachers will get more power (and money) while the teachers themselves, at the sharp end, get pay cuts. They are expected to toe the government line, swallow their principles, and carry on teaching in a set-up that they most of them think should serve all children better.

And they are not consulted or listened to. Such is the arrogance of this Tory Party. They know best.

The Labour Party’s answer? Shadow minister Stephen Twigg’s speech at the recent party conference was almost pure waffle. There was nothing on the pay and conditions of teachers, nothing on performance-related pay, so impractical and unpopular with teachers.

And, of course, there was no commitment to return the new academies and free schools to local authority control — which would restore some fairness to the system. No surprise there as New Labour introduced academies in the first place. On the role of teachers to help work out Labour policy on education, there was not a word.

“Our vision of one nation is one of high aspirations for all,” said Twigg. “The Tories will tell us that we shouldn’t aim high for all. That’s what makes them conservative. Out for the privileged few. Wrong choices, wrong priorities. But as the progressives of British politics, we reject their defeatism. One nation is about high aspiration. On childcare. On the forgotten 50%. On higher education. Opening up power wealth and opportunity....”

Blah, blah, blah.  

Labour would make a few tweaks to the education system here and there, and some small policy changes such as wrap-around-care of pupils from 8.00am to 6.00pm, but would not challenge the Tory grand plan.

Gove’s ambition is the fragmentation of state education into competing schools, some with fancy new names and extra money, and some destined to become “sink schools”. Some would be able to select their intake of new pupils, others would end up with the so-called problem children, mostly the poor, and those on free school meals.

A few would have to teach to the narrow and prescriptive national curriculum, while the new academies and free schools, like the public schools, can ignore it.

The idea of having a co-operative family of schools in a region or of providing a good community school in each catchment area, is simply not on the agenda of the three main parties. It is the “global race”, the necessity of keeping UK PLC competitive and more profitable than the next country, that drives everything, including education policy.

Private schools are the model the Tories are heading towards. They, together with high-achieving state schools, can select the future entrepreneurs and scientists that the capitalist economy needs. The rest can join the race to the bottom.

There are other models of education, of course, that can be developed through practice and discussion. In a different world, they would set out to develop the talents and aspirations of all children, not for capitalism or the nation but for themselves and humanity as a whole.  

Peter Arkell

No time for burying heads in the sand

Political innocence is one thing. But desperately hanging on to a blinkered point of view in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is altogether more dangerous.

A blunt refusal to grasp that the system of capitalism is in crisis was all too evident at an anti-cuts conference called by the South East Region of the Trades Union Congress (SERTUC) at the weekend.

SERTUC President Martin Gould told union representatives that the LibCon spending cuts were “ideologically” driven. The economic situation, he insisted, was “the bankers’ crisis, not our crisis”.

He was taking his cue from TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, who repeated the mantra that government policy is, “not driven by economics but by a political project” (October 21). And that the spending review was “not an economic necessity but a political choice” (October 19).

There was not the remotest suggestion from leaders who spoke that there might be a real, objective global economic crisis, manifested in mountains of debt. that was driving the British state to withdraw from its post-World War II role of providing social support.

On the contrary, they said that “a lot of money can be squeezed out of the rich and the bankers”. In the face of “60% of the population believing that the cuts are necessary and inevitable”, Christine Blower of the National Union of Teachers said that a campaign of education was the answer. She compared the cuts agenda with the sinking of the Titanic, in which the rich passengers got the lifeboats while the poor had no chance. Heather Wakefield of UNITE called for “a battle of ideas” and “mass mobilisation”, saying there was a need to “get political” and “challenge council officials”.

Never the remotest suggestion that it was time to get off the sinking ship of capitalism altogether and transfer ownership and management of resources into the hands of the majority in society.

Behind the claim that there is no serious debt or financial crisis and that pouring money into job creation (a total failure in the US) is the answer, lies an unstated assumption. The trade unions and working class must be kept chained inside the system of production for profit and the political status quo. Of course, if the cuts are purely “ideological” in their nature, it follows that they can be reversed or halted through pressure – within the system.

The Public and Commercial Services union has issued a popular pamphlet “There is an alternative”, which calls for resistance to the cuts and for a “new economic strategy”. Nonetheless, it says that the government should be forced to implement it. Yes, the PCS is right. We need a new vision. But the notion that the LibCons or New Labour will deliver it is totally in their dreams.

Jenny Sutton, chair of the London Region of University and College Union was the only speaker who took the bull by the horns. “We can’t wait until spring. There must be something before Christmas to embolden people – and not just a protest – we must stop that wheel from turning. There must be a real commitment to a general strike.”

Yes, real action is needed but that action must have a strategy that goes beyond resistance and protest if it is to be successful. The cuts agenda is evidence that the existing economic and political system is well and truly broken and cannot provide for the needs of the majority in society. To deny that is to bury your head in the sand at a time when it's necessary to raise our sights.

Only a truly alternative economic and political system, based not on profit, but collective stewardship, as outlined in the Manifesto of Revolutionary Solutions, can provide lasting answers to the cuts. Working for a Network of Peoples Assemblies on December 11 to implement these strategies is the way forward.

Corinna Lotz
A World to Win secretary

Tory plans will destroy state education

By inviting all head teachers in the country to re-invent their schools as independent “academies”, Michael Gove, the new Tory education secretary, is really tempting them to abandon the principles and traditions of comprehensive state education.

Taking all schools away from elected local education authorities will further disadvantage students with learning difficulties as well as those who are challenged by their background and social environment.

Furthermore, the second plank of the proposals, the so-called “free schools” that will be set up and run by parents and other groups, will almost certainly fall into the hands of private companies before long. Private profit-making companies are waiting, jaws agape, for just such an opportunity.

Of course, it was the previous New Labour government that opened the doors wide for Tory plans. Driven, as always, by the wishes of big business and the employers’ organisations, the Blair/Brown governments enforced an unpopular and restrictive national curriculum onto the schools. It went along with a regime of constant testing, league tables according to exam results and the gradual privatisation of services.

And it was New Labour who foisted 200 academies onto the education landscape, against the wishes of most teachers and their unions, as a kind of Trojan Horse, in order, principally, to de-stabilise non-selective, neighbourhood comprehensive schools.

The new Tory proposals develop naturally out of this introduction of the market into the education system and they also profit from the general disillusion and frustration of teachers and parents with the New Labour model. They will seem attractive to many at first sight. Head teachers of those schools that have been labelled as “outstanding” have been promised a fast-tracked process so they can become academy schools by September.

There is no evidence that semi-independent, state-funded academies raise standards compared with other schools. There is plenty of evidence to show that they are divisive and expensive. Private business, disguised as charities, has a key role in the running of academies. Some now teach creationism as a scientific fact in opposition to the theory of evolution.

At present academies are allowed to select up to 10% of their new pupils. With this power, which may well be extended, they are able to cream off the brightest pupils, altering the balance of all the schools in the area.

They will soon establish themselves as the school of choice at the expense of others in the area. The former two-tier system of grammar schools and secondary modern schools looms again, though the new names given to them will no doubt try to cover up the fact.

These new schools will not only have extra freedoms over admissions and the curriculum, but they will have control over salaries, introducing competition for the best teachers. This measure is a direct challenge to the unions, which presently negotiate pay agreements on a national level.

The two main unions have condemned the proposals. Chris Keates, of NAS/UWT, accused the government of breaking up state education. “It is essential that those who care about social justice, fairness and equality, who value public services and care about the future of state education, do not allow this to happen,” she said

Christine Blower of the NUT commented: "Creating academies on the scale proposed by the government will have the effect of transferring billions of pounds of publicly funded assets in the form of buildings and land into the hands of private sponsors … This is a retrograde step which will cause social division and planning gridlock...What is needed is a good local school for every child working within their local family of schools."

The question is: What will they do about it? If the union leaders are serious, they will order immediate ballots of their members with a view to challenging the coalition government’s plans with industrial action. Unions should build a united campaign with parents, communities and other public sector workers in the firing line. It's now or never for the teaching unions' leaders.

Peter Arkell

Form alliance to defeat government

Today’s strike by teachers, college lecturers and civil servants is an important challenge to the low pay and privatisation agenda that this government is inflicting on workers in the public services. It is the first national strike by teachers in the National Union of Teachers (NUT) for 21 years. For many lecturers in the University and College Union (UCU) and for civil servants in the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) it is the first time that they too have taken industrial action.

While the leaders of the unions will tend to see the strike as a protest and a chance to let off steam, for the 400,000 workers involved, it is a long-overdue opportunity to express their anger at the way they have been treated over a number of years, culminating this year with another below-inflation pay award. And beyond the pay issue, today’s strikers are all enmeshed in “an orgy of privatisation” plans, as Mark Serwotka, the leader of the PCS, has described it.

New Labour’s ringing slogan of 1997,” Education, Education, Education” turned out in practice to be the opposite of what most voters thought it meant. The Tory Education Reform Act of 1988, with the introduction of the prescriptive National Curriculum, the management of schools by themselves, the setting up of new types of school, such as the City Technology colleges, the ending of local control over these new schools and the polytechnics and FE colleges, and a regime of testing youngsters every other year, was left entirely in place by new Labour in 1997. The much-hated schools inspector Chris Woodhead, continued to oversee and terrorise schools up and down the country.

New Labour then built on this framework, encouraging competition between different schools and colleges and inviting the private sector to bid for control of so-called “failing schools” and even failing authorities (such as Islington). It created “academies” and school trusts outside the control of the local authority (but under the control of a local business, or a church or even an “intelligent design” outfit). The government outsourced school meals and school supplies and got private firms to build (and own) new schools and colleges through PFI deals. Many schools themselves are increasingly run along the lines of a business enterprise with the head teacher as the CEO.

This was called “modernisation” and was falsely touted as a means to increase parental choice. Apart from opening the door wide for businesses to cash in, it led to confusion and dismay amongst teachers, who now had to teach children to pass tests, the results of which became the all-important measure for attracting new parents.

Centralised, top-down management of education in the state sector, in schools and colleges, has largely cut across the old ideals of a learning environment, which was to encourage a genuine spirit of enquiry and discovery in youngsters. Class sizes have risen while wealth and job inequalities have manifested themselves in the form of disruptive behaviour. No wonder three out of four NUT members voted to support strike action,

The truth is that New Labour (and the Tories for that matter), dancing to the tune of the World Trade Organisation, will continue to pursue policies for the privatisation of all the public services, including the NHS and the civil service. That is the dynamic of the new market state, towards a world where eventually transnational corporations will provide everything for everyone from birth to death (in two or three distinct levels, of course, according to wealth and class).

With New Labour in a weakened and confused state in the midst of a growing global economic crisis, now is the time to force the issue, to build an alliance of all public sector unions teachers, parents and other supporters to defend services and to defeat this government of corporate globalisation and privatisation. Such an alliance can only strengthen the movement if and when it comes to confronting Cameron’s Tories. The reported meeting of the NUT and the PCS to plan for further action after today is an important first step.

Peter Arkell