Secretary of State for Education Gavin Williamson is leading the post-Brexit spin on the Tories’ ‘education revolution’. Jingoistic rhetoric is used to conjure up a vision of post-Brexit highly technically skilled British workforce building a world class biotech industry. The reality is that billions of pounds of state funding is being wasted, sucked out into the hands of private individuals and companies through unaccountable ‘free’ schools and academies, while most of the state education system faces chronic underfunding.
Further education funding lies
When the September 2019 spending round committed a paltry £400m to 16-19 funding, Williamson called it a ‘major funding boost […] to develop world-class technical and vocational education to rival countries on the continent so we can have a highly skilled and productive workforce for the future’. This was nonsense – the Further Education (FE) sector had faced the deepest cuts to funding in the education system, with school sixth forms facing cuts of 23% per pupil and further education and sixth form colleges of 12% per pupil since 2010. Research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that to fully reverse the cuts to FE funding since 2010-11 would cost £1.1bn on top of the so-called ‘major funding boost’ announced in the 2019 spending round.
Following the Budget on 11 March 2020 Williamson boasted that the £1.5bn capital funding for FE colleges showed the government’s ‘commitment to levelling up skills across the country’. Hardly. The funding is spread over five years and will only just about catch up to 2010 levels by the end of that period. Britain can’t compete FE has been part of a Tory strategy to appeal to reactionary layers of better-off working class voters and businesses who want to see a new British industry in science and technology, with jobs for British rather than EU migrant workers.
At the 2019 Tory conference Williamson made the nebulous pledge that the government would ‘supercharge’ FE aiming to ‘overtake Germany’ in technical study by 2029. This is pure fiction – the problems in FE technical education in England are deeply engrained and well documented. The quality and length of England’s 16-19 programmes are well below average in Europe; most programmes in England are only two years long and do not require students to continue the study of language, maths and other subjects alongside a technical vocation. Research published in November 2018 compared England’s FE sector to Argentina, Australia, Ivory Coast, Germany and Taiwan, and found serious failings in England including stagnant wages, casualisation and insecure working conditions for staff, funding cuts and constantly changing policies, and for-profit awarding bodies distorting and lowering the quality of qualifications.
UTCs: Business before education
The report also noted that ‘colleges’ local community roles were not supported by their governing boards which represent employers and regional interests,’ a problem compounded by the development of University Technical Colleges (UTCs) which were part of the Gove-era ‘education revolution’. UTCs were the brainchild of Lord Baker, Secretary of State for Education under Margaret Thatcher, and Lord Dearing, who in 1997 suggested that university students pay for the privilege of their education, which became law under the Blair Labour government in 1998.
The Baker Dearing Educational Trust was set up in 2009 to lobby the government to create UTCs, which the trust has since trademarked as a brand. While the Department for Education (DfE) pays the capital cost of setting up a UTC and the ongoing costs, as well as giving extra handouts to those who fail to attract enough students, the trust itself benefits from private donations. In addition each UTC pays an annual licence fee to the trust of £10,000 to use the UTC brand. The education system as a whole crumbles while these parasites suck out public money into their own pockets.
UTCs are a kind of ‘free’ school, primarily for pupils aged 14-19, set up with a university as a sponsor with ties to businesses and industries. The university and business partners dictate the curriculum, and funnel pupils into apprenticeships. The UTC programme has cost the DfE over £792m since 2010, and has been plagued with poor Ofsted results, poor teaching, low enrolment, safeguarding issues, and running up huge deficits. Ten out of 58 UTCs which opened between 2014 and 2019 failed and closed, costing over £73.6m.
‘Free’ schools stealing education
According to DfE figures published on 4 February 2020 millions of pounds have been poured into ‘free’ schools, the top five most expensive each costing over £30m for the land and building work. The figures include £1.7m spent on ‘free’ schools which did not open. Since 2011 ‘Free’ schools, the brainchild of Michael Gove, have been an attempt to bribe sections of the middle class with schooling not afforded to the rest of the working class. Rather than funding the state education system as a whole, influential groups of parents could set up their own schools with state funding, without the oversight of the local authority, and often without the expertise of qualified teachers. ‘Free’ schools have historically mainly opened in areas where there are already sufficient school places and tend to attract wealthier or better educated stdents even in poorer areas. Many ‘free’ schools are now run by academy chains, originally a Labour policy, and cases of corruption and failures abound.
One high-profile case of corruption and theft in the ‘free’ schools programme was the £2m funnelled into companies linked to or owned by the former chief executive Raja Miah and former chair of directors Alun Morgan of Collective Spirit Free School and Manchester Creative Studio School. The schools closed in 2017 and 2018 respectively after both receiving an ‘inadequate’ rating by Ofsted, and members of staff blew the whistle on the appalling lack of basic resources like books, clean toilets and edible lunches for children.
The government investigation by The Education and Skills Funding Agency, published in May 2019, found it could not prove the allegations as it could not establish a ‘reasonable audit trail’, after investigating only two years of transactions between the schools and the companies. Neither Miah nor Morgan have been officially barred from working in education or charged. Miah is now running a teaching supply agency in Manchester.
Ruby Most
Covid-19
The government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been chaotic, and failed to meet the needs of school children, or their families:
- It took nine days from the announcement of the global pandemic before the government closed schools, which are a breeding ground for viruses.
- It took another 24 hours to explain who constituted ‘key workers’ and ‘vulnerable children’, leaving school leaders scrambling to work out how to remain open with many staff off work self-isolating or sick.
- There has been no mass testing programme, or protective equipment for those remaining in school, and no clear guidelines for stopping the spread of the virus in schools, other than asking children to wash their hands and to stagger break times.
- Online schooling is not possible for those without the internet or a device to access it, and schooling at home near impossible for the 210,000 children who are either homeless or in temporary accommodation.
- Children with serious mental and physical health problems who cannot attend their normal school and whose parents need support are not able to access adequate care at home, due to the lack of community care and underfunding of child mental health services.
- The government’s programme only offers lunches for the 1.3 million children who qualify for free school meals (FSM) and does not include breakfast, or the many other children which who do not qualify for FSM, but rely on this food during the school year.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 275, March/April 2020
