Since September 2020 I have been working in schools and remotely as a teacher on the government’s much vaunted catch-up programme, the National Tutoring Programme (NTP), which supposedly aims to provide personalised tuition to the most disadvantaged children. Initially, the contracts for this initiative were laundered out to a group of private companies which monopolise supply teaching and agency work in Britain’s schools, but from September 2021 one big corporation, Randstad, will enjoy the exclusive right to provide NTP teaching in Britain’s schools. As the company skims the cream off an education system in deepening crisis, working class children are being failed between the blurring lines of government and monopoly capitalism.
The NTP sets agency workers towards trying to plug gaps in school learning, providing additional lessons to groups of children identified as needing more support. By April, 111,000 children had started their additional lessons out of an NTP target of 250,000, amounting to around 1% of school students. On 21 June, the Department for Education contradicted education secretary Gavin Williamson’s claims in Parliament that six million children would receive support by clarifying that this actually meant six million blocs of 15-hour tutoring, with some children receiving multiple courses. In practice, most schools and tutors fail to achieve even that goal because of limits set by agencies on any individual child receiving more than a single 15-hour bloc.
Who pays?
On quitting his post as the government’s education recovery ‘tsar’ in June, Kevan Collins warned that, on the government’s current £1.4bn recovery budget, the average primary school would receive just £6,000 per year, or £22 per child. He proposed a more realistic £15bn – which the government rejected. Even with the inadequate amount of funding that has been awarded, schools will be expected to pay 90% of the tutoring costs within three years as the government ‘tapers’ its subsidy. Schools will essentially be forced to line the pockets of the private corporations, while the government washes its hands of any responsibility.
Initially it was claimed that the first year of NTP would cost a miserly £350m – for perspective, £15m less than Eton College’s investment portfolio for 2019. A government backtrack in November revealed that the funds would actually be stretched over two years. With another lockdown in January, it became clear that much more support and funding would be needed. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s January concerns over the ‘lost generation’ in Britain’s schools had more to do with opposing more economy-threatening lockdowns than giving any meaningful support to learners. The result has been a system that fails both working class children and teachers.
Randstad’s monopoly
In June, it was announced that Dutch multinational conglomerate Randstad would be given an unprecedented monopoly contract to run the NTP for three years. £1bn of the government’s £1.4bn education recovery programme has been set aside for tutoring, including £218m to be spent on the NTP in addition to £215m allocated for 2021-22. This funding will be spent on Randstad’s contract and school subsidies for the tuition itself.
Operating in 39 countries, human resources consultant Randstad boasted annual revenues of €20.72bn in 2020. During the US Trump presidency in 2019 the company made headlines when it was revealed that it collaborated with a Google face recognition experiment to scan the faces of homeless people in exchange for $5 gift cards. Supply teachers in Britain know the company to be frequently incompetent, uncontactable and ruthless on matters of pay. Randstad teaching assistants earn on average £63.75 per day, less than a bottle of ‘Churchill’s favourite’ sparkling wine on the House of Commons menu.
Agency teachers face casualisation
Though the government claims that there are no limits on schools referring students for additional support, the reality is different, with workers on the frontline of delivering NTP dealing with a web of bureaucracy and exploitation. Randstad and other agencies offer tutors no way to log timesheets (and thus get paid) for students who have reached their ‘limit,’ even though the children remain on teaching timetables set by school leaderships. My own experience is that the company administrators are not interested in whether a tutor is paid for their hours – it’s a ‘computer says no’ situation, subject to arbitrary limits.
Because pay for tutoring sessions is by the hour, there are no paid breaks, with some full-time teachers working solid 7-8 hour shifts with no lunch break. Essentially zero-hours contracts, school placements can end at a moment’s notice and there is little support for ICT, with many teachers paying their own Zoom subscriptions, computers, Wifi etc. Research by the NASUWT union accepts government claims that there are no caps on student numbers but this is untrue. The limits set by government-agency collaboration mean that only three students can be taught per hour, at a rate of £6.67 per pupil to the tutor. This is essentially a wage cap and a top-down limit on numbers of students who can access the support. NTP tutors and supply teachers are also dependent on Universal Credit, which is never enough and is set to fall again.
Schools in working class areas are given two options: bring in the profiteers or get no additional support. Many school leaderships are refusing the ‘support’ of the NTP programme; providing 25% of the funding is still a cost that schools can’t afford and agency bureaucracies are horrendous. The only concerns of the Labour ‘opposition’ to Randstad’s huge contract were to point out that the company has little tutoring experience, with shadow education secretary Katie Green demanding ‘quality assurance’; if they sound like jobsworth supervisors or Ofsted bureaucrats it’s because they’re cut from the same cloth. Green’s initial concerns about Williamson misleading the House of Commons (lying) over the six million students claim have dissipated. Apparently Labour were considering further ‘points of order’ in parliament but this will be the limit of their ‘opposition.’ Using Labour as the yard stick of their own opposition, the existing unions have outlived their usefulness. While school work is fragmented, privatised and teaching staff dislocated from each other, new forms of resistance must be found to the capitalist recolonisation of working class schooling.
F.M. Fox
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 283, August/September 2021
