There is an office maintenance firm in London with the snappy slogan ‘You dirty – we clean’. This describes exactly how the Labour government views the relationship it has with working class children and their parents.
The nasty, hostile and brutal policies of Education Minister Estelle Morris, urged on by Blair, are punitive and designed to keep the working class in its place. Pupils are trapped in schools which test them from the age of seven at regular intervals, making English schoolchildren the most tested in the world. Schools are measured and judged against each other and the criterion is middle class success. From the earliest years children are baited with the vision of a world in which there are no shop workers, cleaners, refuse collectors or street sweepers, but only career professionals, media people, lawyers, educationalists, and doctors. Despite the everyday evidence of their own eyes in their streets, homes, schools and neighbourhoods that society is full of poverty, inequality and dreary low-paid work, they are relentlessly nagged by notions of ‘excellence’ ‘missions’ and ‘high achievement’.
No youth crime in this school
It was suspected that Blair was more than usually off his rocker when he declared that he would sweep away street crime by September 2002. And some of us were convinced when he placed police in school playgrounds ‘to stop truanting’. The constables did not pop up in Eton or Brompton Oratory where Blair’s sons go; no, they appeared in the usual suspect poor inner-city schools. Within hours headteachers protested to the local press and communities that they are clean, law-abiding institutions.
That will teach them a lesson
Patricia Amos was sentenced to prison for 60 days by Banbury Magistrates Court for not enforcing the school attendance of her daughters Emma, 15, and Jackie, 13. She was refused bail and was given no time to make arrangements for the care of her children. Patricia Amos was freed after her sentence was reduced to 28 days on appeal; she had already served 14 days. Morris says ‘If this is a sign that magistrates are taking truancy as seriously as I am, then I welcome it’. Of course she does! Naming and shaming is not enough – what is needed to teach the poor a lesson is punishment. But punishment is heavily disguised as morality, of course. Having attended school for a day, the sisters were given time off to visit their mother in prison. An anonymous spokesman for Oxfordshire County Council justified this against supposed public outrage that the girls were out of school again by saying ‘This was compassionate authorised absence. We are not punishing the children. If any pupil found that one of their parents was in prison it would be reasonable to allow them to visit’.
Other education authorities and private interest groups such as Cambridge Education Associates who run Islington schools, are overjoyed about the precedent set in Oxford. Fining and imprisoning feckless parents who ‘fail’ is an ideal way to show ‘can-do’ intentions. It totally displaces responsibility for providing supportive and adequate schooling from the state to the parents and introduces an additional tool against the poor.
Home Secretary David Blunkett wants to extend ‘parenting orders’ (FRFI 166) before children’s behaviour ‘becomes criminal’. Parents who kick their children out of the house in the evening or allow them to drink alcohol are ‘as guilty of child abuse as if they had broken their arm’, he says. Children of 10 and 11, who are legally too young to be locked up, are to be taken into the ‘protective custody’ of a new breed of foster parents.
Truants, suspended and excluded pupils
All research and all familiarity with truanting pupils confirms what common sense tells us. They are, on the whole, unhappy and insecure children who need much more support from society as a whole than they have ever received. In this they are similar to suspended and excluded pupils, children who are permanently banned from school. Recent research by the Prince’s Trust on pupils excluded from school – The way it is: school’s out – gives a picture of the impact on children of a fragmented and uncaring society where consumerist values dominate and children’s needs are neglected. The number of school expulsions rose by 11% in 2000-2001 in secondary schools and by 19% in primary schools. The figures represent fluctuating government policy as the emphasis swings backwards and forwards to put blame on the teachers, pupils or parents, depending on which target is to be hit hardest.
Bad teachers must keep the
kids in school, bad parents allow their children to truant and bad pupils affect school standards. m
Who will assist the assistants?
One of the proposals from the Prince’s Trust report is for more classroom assistants to counterbalance large class sizes. This accords nicely with the government’s own proposals to increase the number of teaching assistants. This would serve partly to solve the teacher shortage and to keep the teaching wage bill down. It is also a way to knock back teacher union demands for a 35 hour week because teaching assistants would perform those time-consuming tasks, photocopying, contacting parents and so on that add up to the current average teacher’s 50 hour working week. So many demands on the teaching assistant army of the future! Next they will demanding pay parity and classroom help! No short cuts there then.
USA leads the way
It is clear that while Labour may hate the working class it sure loves the USA . The privatisations that have occurred so far in the British education system are merely paving the way for a full scale imitation of north America and the USA itself is only just getting into its stride. In Philadelphia 42 state schools will be run by a variety of private enterprises by September 2002. A school reform commission has been set up by Republican Governor Schweiker, on lines proposed by his predecessor Tom Ridge, now President Bush’s homeland security chief. 70 ‘under-performing’ schools have been allocated to a variety of education businesses. Edison Schools, the country’s largest operator in this field failed to get them all as it had hoped. It has been suggested that a lot of favours were owed to a lot of businesses and selling off the schools is a payback for political support from companies.
As with British privatisation of public services, there is no real ‘wealth creation’ involved in running schools for the working class. Taking over ‘education’ from the state is merely a transfer of income from the public to the private sphere. Edison has never made a profit and has seen its share price collapse. Nevertheless, at a time when the stock market is rocky, education is a product that can be squeezed to make it cheaper and that can be guaranteed not to disappear altogether like some dotcom bubble.
In Philadelphia pupils, parents and teachers have mounted large and noisy protests against the privatisation of their schools. They have been demonstrating outside their schools with the slogans ‘Stop Corporate Greed’ and ‘I am not for Sale – Say No to Privatisation’. FRFI will be following the progress of the Philadelphia protest against this latest assault on the provision of public services to the poor in the USA.
Susan Davidson
