Miliband's praise for Thatcher says it all

Following Ed Miliband’s speeches is a thankless task for a number of reasons. They are more often than not vague and full of phrases devoid of any obvious content. But dig a little deeper and you will find an agenda that promises a reactionary continuity in British politics.

The assault on British society that began under the Margaret Thatcher governments was carried further by New Labour from 1997-2010 and has subsequently been deepened by the ConDems. Miliband has signalled he will continue that work should next year’s election send him to Downing Street.

Last night’s lecture at The Guardian positioned the Labour leader in a line stretching all the way back to Thatcher’s governments. He praised the most destructive of prime ministers for her “sense of purpose” in driving through change, although he declined to spell out what that meant for communities all over Britain.

Miliband then outlined a programme of “public service reform” that the Blairites will be cheering. Their “reform” consisted largely of outsourcing vast areas of public spending and decision-making to the private sector in a one-sided “partnership” with the state, where the corporations always win out.

In education, this took the malign form of “academies”. These schools are essentially run by private companies outside of local authority control and are but one step away from being driven by profit making. So Miliband’s promise to give parents power to call poor-performing schools to account is nonsense because the academy system will be left in place under a future Labour government.

So too will the wrecking policies of the ConDems with regard to the National Health Service. Instead of reversing them, a future Miliband government would simply add local people to the commissioning groups of GPs that now hold the purse strings and are busily handing out contracts to the private sector.

And so it goes on. As for the surveillance state developed by New Labour and finessed by the ConDems, Miliband simply wants a “US-style debate” – whatever that is – on the gathering of personal data by the security agencies. Well, they’ve had the debate in the US and the official line is that Edward Snowden is a traitor who has betrayed his country through his whistle blowing while Chelsea Manning is locked up in prison.

Lest anyone thinks that Miliband is a threat to the state with his call to make it “accountable”, his remarks about the role of the British intelligence agencies will clear that up. He said: “My starting point in this is the intelligence services do an important job. As somebody who wants to be the prime minister of this country I know that they do an important job in seeking to keep us safe.”

That’s alright then. A little more “oversight” and we’ll all feel happier while safe in our beds at night. Meanwhile, the surveillance will continue to target legitimate protests and actions against government policies.

Only last week, Miliband won support for changes to the party’s relations with the trade unions that were a deepening of the project launched by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown back in the early 1990s. The collective approach has given way to the individualism first championed in a serious way by Thatcher.

This week he has pledged political and financial continuity, reaffirming last night that a future Labour government would make sharp spending cuts in line with ConDem budget plans. So when it comes to next year’s general election, an application of the “consumer choice” approach will invite us to hang on to our votes rather than wasting them on any of the mainstream parties. The argument that One Nation Labour will be better than the Tories is shallow and totally unconvincing.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

A big “no” to academy status

Teachers from Downhills Primary School, in Haringay, north London are on strike today against plans by the government to force them to become an Academy. They oppose the new status which would place them under the control of a private sponsor and pull them out of the local authority family of schools. The strike follows a unanimous vote by the NUT teachers to take action against education secretary of state Michael Gove. New legislation gives him the power to transform so-called “failing schools” into academies. In effect they are being privatised.

At Downhills school teachers, parents and pupils are mounting an effective resistance. They are demanding a statement from the local authority that it will retain Downhills as a community school and that it has a robust plan to achieve this. Parents are organising a picnic in the local park this afternoon with children’s author Michael Rosen giving a reading.

Many are questioning the motives behind the Government’s policy of actively encouraging (and forcing) schools in England and Wales to adopt academy status in what amounts to an attack on the existing state school system. There is no evidence that pupils’ achievements or results improve in academies. In fact there are plenty of case of failing academies.

Academy status means that a school is taken out of the control of local education authorities and funded directly by central government. This means that the culture of co-operation between schools is replaced by one of competition. Academies have to be sponsored, usually by an organisation or business (such as the Harris Federation or Ark Schools). The aim is to take over former comprehensive and community schools. They can then run them as a business, albeit with charity status. Faith organisations can also sponsor schools.

Crucially, they get extra money, and a lot of it. In effect, headteachers and parents are being bribed to transform their schools into academies. Former headteacher Peter Downes - also a Cambridgeshire county councillor and vice-president of the Liberal-Democrat Education Association - has calculated that the government is spending around £1bn on special grants to academies in existence and to schools likely to convert in the next year. This, Downes states, is nearly £600m more than the actual extra costs of converting to academy status. “It is impossible to justify spending this amount of money on a minority of schools, predominantly the most favoured”, he writes in the Anti-Academies Alliance journal http://antiacademies.org.uk/.

Gove’s claim that academies benefit from “greater freedoms to innovate and raise standards” is a cover for a damaging transformation of education for the benefit of various business and political networks which includes a schools market, as in the health service.

The advantage of these new type of privately-sponsored schools is that they have the right to vary national pay and conditions negotiated by the unions. Teachers and support staff will have to make contracts with an academy trust. The unions will be weakened, while staff are liable to have to work a longer day with fewer holidays. Only last week Gove floated the idea of each school in the country fixing the pay and conditions of its staff.

The damaging effects of marketisation are revealed in the sale of poor food at academy schools. Some 90 per cent of the 1,800 academy schools are currently selling unhealthy foods that are banned in state schools. Each school is making between £3,000 and £15,000 profit in this way.

There is little to divide Labour from the Coalition on education, as on everything else. Efforts by both New Labour and the Condems to improve pre-school facilities have failed to achieve results. The class divide in education in Britain remains one of the worst in the developed world. It truly is time to free education from the profit motive.

Peter Arkell

A World to Win

Tory master plan for a new social order

“Our school is being absolutely bullied, and we are sick to death of it”, said one parent outside Downhills Primary School in Tottenham, North London, after the sacking by the government of the entire board of governors. “Absolutely appalling. Almost like a dawn raid. We live in a democracy, I thought,” said another.

Teachers, parents, councillors, the local MP and the (former) governors at the school are resisting a decree by Michael Gove, the education secretary, for the school to be transformed into an business-sponsored Academy. A plan for improving Downhills was in place and working, say campaigners, and an Ofsted inspection in September bore this out.

The Academy programme, together with the encouragement of so-called Free Schools, is the principal way in which the government is fragmenting — perhaps “fracturing” would be a more accurate word – the state education system. Academies, which are better resourced, will inevitably lead to even greater social divisions as parents try to get their children into the best schools.

The old arrangement of co-operation between schools within a local authority is rapidly being replaced by competition between them. Running parallel to this assault on the state schools is the opening up of the National Health Service to the market place and to the private sector. Their plans require that services and courses of treatment be put out to tender. This will inevitably lead to the dismantling of the old NHS as a universal provider of healthcare at the point of need, as different suppliers compete for business for profit.

In its haste to transform both basic education and health provision, the ConDem coalition has been forced to face down almost universal condemnation of its plans by the professionals who work in the services. Only last weekend, in a poll conducted by the Royal College of Physicians, seven out of 10 hospital doctors wanted the health and social care bill to be withdrawn. In fact the entire medical community is almost unanimous in its opposition.

So why is the coalition government ignoring health and education professionals? We were given a clue over the weekend when it announced that national pay rates for teachers, nurses and civil servants (among others) were to be scrapped. Workers in poorer parts of the country will have their pay frozen until they come into line with local private sector rates.

In the name of “more flexibility”, “genuine decision-making at the local level” and a “modern and responsive work-force”, the government is in fact driving fast towards a society where trade unions are sidelined, an atomised society divided in countless ways, but especially in the quality of health care and education on offer to different income groups.

Driven by the rolling economic crisis and by private sector outfits expressing their “dismay” at the quality of education and demanding a slice of the NHS and education budgets, the government is feeling its way towards a new social order with tax cuts for the rich, unemployment and poverty for the working-class youth. As a statement from the Anti-Academies Alliance puts it: “There will be winners and losers, mergers and acquisitions and fear and uncertainty as the grip of corporate raiders tightens on our schools”. And on our NHS it could be added.

Looking to the Labour Party for leadership, as most of the trade union leaders still do, is the road to ruin. The last Labour governments, after all, developed the Academy programme and accelerated the privatisation process in schools and the NHS. Labour's priority, like that of the Tories and the Lib Dems, is to save the capitalist system whatever the human cost.

So how else can the gathering opposition to this government be manifested except through local people’s assemblies where all community groups — including parents, teachers, health workers and users of NHS services — can work out new policies based on the needs of the people in general? A mass challenge aimed at replacing Tory rule for good is the only option left.

Peter Arkell

Market destroying state education

Coalition measures to encourage the creation of more academies and “free schools” point are creating a market for learning, destroying at a stroke the right of all children to a decent state education.

This market takes the form of setting up, in each area, a number of different types of school, all in competition with each other for students and exam results.

Where once there was a community of comprehensive schools, cared for by a single authority, there are now academies, free schools, technology colleges, comprehensive schools and church schools, all in competition with each other.

This chaotic free-for-all, trumpeted by the Tories for giving parents the freedom of choice, is in fact leading to a two-tier or even three-tier education system that guarantees unfairness.

The academies have private sponsors though they are funded directly by the state, the free schools are run by private outfits (often churches or businesses) and they all have different selection criteria, a situation which quickly leads to a polarisation

As is often the case with Tory policies, the impetus and the pioneering work for this unfair system comes from New Labour. It was the Blair government that turned its back on the comprehensive model towards a return to the old divisive grammar school/ secondary modern system, but with different names.

New Labour set up academies in the secondary sector and encouraged the growth of so-called faith schools. The Tories have seized on the idea, inviting any school to apply for academy status. Many of the strongest secondary schools, as well as some primaries, have done exactly that. Michael Gove, the education secretary, has recently announced that the “weakest” 200 primary schools will become academies in September 2012, thus undermining early-school education.

It is usually the head teacher, supported by the governors, who decides to convert to academy status because they see financial advantages for the school, and because they will have some control over selection – i.e. they can select unfairly, and can keep out problem children and those on school meals.

Parents and the teaching staff (who, unbelievably are not amongst those groups that the government suggests should be consulted) often do not agree. Conflict follows. Teachers and parents at Haverstock School, in Camden, North London, succeeded last week in forcing the head teacher and the governors to abandon their plan to become an academy.

The school, which boasts both Milliband brothers as former pupils, is a high-achieving one, but the prompt formation of a protest campaign forced a rapid re-think by the head, who said the school was not willing to be at the centre of a politicised debate for a long period.

For the Tories, breaking up state education has obvious advantages. As a pamphlet produced by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers points out. Instead of a national education service, locally administered, the ATL says, we are moving towards a national service, privately administered, funded by the taxpayer, but with all democratic accountability lost.

Private companies can move in, and many are queuing up for a slice of the action. Babcock Education made £23.6 million out of education in 2009, and has dreams of running a chain of 1,000 schools. ARK (Absolute Return for Kids) which calls itself a “philanthropic co-operative” runs eight academies and was set up and run by hedge fund managers.

The other great advantage for the Tories of creating academies and free schools is that they operate under private school legislation. They are not bound by any national or local agreements with the teaching unions. The considerable power of the unions can be gradually eroded, teacher’ pay cut, while head teachers become “fat cats”.

State schools are being re-organised to benefit the middle classes and churchgoers. As the private companies move in, looking for profits even if they are charities, so the life chances for children living in families on or below the poverty line plummet.

Peter Arkell

Deprivation and inequality - New Labour's record

You didn’t have to wait for the Lib-Tory coalition for the assault to begin on living standards, health and education. All you had to do was endure years of New Labour and watch inequality rise sharply.

Take life expectancy. The gap between average life expectancy and that of the poorest in England has actually widened over the last decade. A National Audit Office (NAO) report finds that life expectancy is now 77.9 years for men and 82 years for women but in many working class areas it falls to 75.8 and 80.4 years.

From 1995-97 to 2006-08 the life expectancy gap grew by 7% for men and 14% for women. The NAO is not known for its social concern, being more worried about “value for money” and “efficiency” in the public sector. However, this time it rises to the occasion and reports that the system "does not provide enough of an incentive" to encourage GPs to focus on the neediest groups in their practices.

The reason, which the NAO doesn’t go into, is of course that surgeries are driven by an internal market imposed on the National Health Service by the Blair/Brown governments. The main thrust of Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) is actually to keep costs under control, which clouds the work of doctors in local surgeries.

There are, of course, other factors too. The NAO points out those poorer areas in England often have fewer surgeries in the first place, which makes seeing a doctor difficult to start with. Above all, there is the fact of low wages, high unemployment and poor housing – all of which New Labour did nothing about.

With cash in short supply, diet in poorer households often suffers as a consequence, with money going on cheaper junk food. As Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University says: “Food poverty is worse diet, worse access, worse health, higher percentage of income on food and less choice from a restricted range of foods. Above all food poverty is about less or almost no consumption of fruit and vegetables.”

Who would have thought that it would be left to the British Medical Association to call for policies “to narrow the income gap between the poorest and the richest in society” as the action necessary to tackle health inequalities.

Then there is educational inequality. After abandoning active support for equal opportunities in well-resourced comprehensive schools, New Labour condemned many school students to life in an “Academy”. Largely freed from local authority control and often sponsored by big business, academies would, it was claimed, raise standards and give students a better chance of finding a job.

How hollow that claim has proved is revealed in another report, this time from the think-tank Civitas. Its research shows that GCSE exam results are inflated and distorted because the Academies load up non-academic subjects. When like-for-like comparisons are made, Academies perform far worse than other schools.

Anastasia de Waal, Civitas’s head of education, said: “Academies are replacing academic subjects with so-called equivalents of extremely questionable value. The ultimate concern is that the already deprived are being deprived of academic learning and that un-checked this is set to continue much further.”

Piling deprivation upon deprivation. What an indictment of New Labour! Of course, the Coalition’s policies will make matters even worse. But let’s not forget that they will continue where the previous government left off. I’m so glad that I hung on to my vote in May.

Paul Feldman
Communications editor

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