The one truth that ever came out of Margaret Thatcher’s mouth was the old saying, ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’. She was correct. The wealth of society comes from natural resources together with human labour power at the cost of human effort and the depletion of nature. The rich and the powerful loot social wealth as private property leaving the remainder to be distributed through the capitalist state and rationed out to the majority. That is why 3.8 million children live in poverty while the top 10% of individuals get 40% of all personal income and a handful of aristocrats own a third of all land in the UK.
The wealthy have their ‘fee’ schools, private education for 7% of all pupils at the rate of £13,000 per year for day schools and £30,000 for boarding schools. There is no fee for the 24 new schools opening this autumn which the government and their servants in the media call ‘free’ schools. These schools, the buildings, teachers’ wages, admin staff etc, are provided by the state to a limited number of privileged children whose parents demand the advantages of private schooling, namely small classes and no national curriculum dictates, without paying the fees.
From the needy to the greedy
How has it come to pass that influential groups of individuals can now be funded by the state to set up their ‘own’ schools? It is because successive governments will not fund the state system properly and find it cheaper to buy off sections of the middle class by offering them something extra that they will not offer the majority of working class children. In effect the Department for Education diverts resources away from the majority of pupils by lavish spending on a minority. Local Education Authorities, which are responsible for the education of the vast majority of pupils, are facing a loss of £1 billion because of the millions being spent out of their budgets and going into the pockets of individuals and groups to set up ‘free’ schools and academies in their areas. The New Schools Network, a pressure group established to break up the state sector of education to the advantage of the few, received £318,890 in five separate payments between December 2010 and June 2011 for propaganda in favour of ‘free’ schools from the Department for Education while at the same time claiming ‘charity’ status for itself.
The big money
Education Secretary Michael Gove is the true heir of the neo-liberal Blair and his education vision. Both men make big money from state payouts and selling the free enterprise spin. Blair has his £300,000 PM’s severance pay, plus £64,000 pension and spin-off lecture tours and publishing. Gove worked as a Times columnist as well as being an MP for six years. He was one of the parliamentarians who wrongly claimed expenses and when that scandal was uncovered he had to pay back £7,000 for a claim that included a cot mattress for a child. In addition to his £64,766 basic MP’s salary, he received £1,196 an hour from Murdoch’s News International and Gove himself says he was paid £5,750 for three hours work. He currently has a contract with the Murdoch publisher Harper Collins to write a historical biography. His continued closeness to the Murdoch press is no doubt guaranteed by the employment of his wife, Sarah Vine, as a Times columnist. Gove is silent on the suitability of New International’s Rebekah Brooks, who is involved in the phone-hacking scandal, to be on the board of governors of Fulwood Academy in Preston (sponsored by Carphone Warehouse tycoon Charles Dunstone).
Looting from the education budget
Enormous wages have become accepted for top education managers and headteachers and so have big payouts for severance (the sack). The Skills Funding Agency offered £300,000 payout to director Mary Conneely who was in post for just three months. A former senior executive of the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA) got a compensation package of £549,457 when she chose not to relocate from London to new offices in Manchester. In fact a total of 18 people who voluntarily left the TDA went with a package worth more than £100,000 each. The National College for School Leadership paid an ‘exit’ package of between £300,000 and £350,000 to a redundant staff member, according to its annual report. Meanwhile the modest education maintenance allowance (EMA) for 16 to 19-year-olds in education from low-income households, was abolished in January 2011. The new bursary payments are a fifth of the EMA and for most schools and colleges these work out at £5 per student per week.
What is happening is both corrupt and secretive. David Ward, Liberal Democrat MP for Bradford East where local schools face a £50 million backlog of repair work, has failed to find out how much money is being taken out of the budget for two Bradford ‘free’ schools. He says that he will pursue the issue ‘to the ends of the earth’ to get answers. ‘This is public money we are talking about which will be used to fund what I think will effectively be private schools and I am not having it.’ He will have to be very determined to get answers. The price of the 24 ‘free’ schools opening this year has been estimated at £110-£130 million but the real costs are unknown. It is criminal that huge wages, settlements and the transfer of finances to favoured groups are grabbed by some, while cuts, underfunding and unemployment are imposed on others. The British ruling class are the real looters.
Susan Davidson
FRFI 223 October/November 2011
