This Financial Times headline describes the continuous rise in payment to private businesses in the state education sector since Labour first came to power in 1997. Under the banner of ‘modernising’, this government is determined to sell off all but the core services for education.
State school outsourcing to the private sector so far totals £4.2 billion in 2004. This proportion is expected to rise at least 15% by 2006. On top of this are £4 billion in running costs (school meals, exams, information technology, cleaning contracts etc), and £800 million outgoings on Private Finance Initiatives (PFI).
These sums represent a dramatic transfer in the amount and proportion of state funds to companies offering education services. But although some of the government’s most valued initiatives are now outsourced, including the national strategies for literacy and numeracy, the business world is in it for profit. They want guarantees of long-term markets before they invest. That is why PFI schools are unable to change school dinner provision, however vile, because firms have 30-year contracts to supply meals. All the companies want assurances that their niche market will not dry up as a result of changes in local authority decisions or central government fads.
Former schools minister Stephen Twigg, who lost his seat in the General Election relished his role of selling off the state education sector to private business and performed one last task (though he did not know it at the time) in the service of capital. In March of this year he told a meeting of the CBI (Confederation of British Industry) that competitive supply markets would have an important role in the future of England’s education service, adding that the outsourcing experience was ‘something that we want to build on, not blot out’.
Violent like you
Violence by both pupils and parents in schools has been in the news again. Being the most targeted and tested pupils in the world has evidently not been good for tempers. Big elements of current policy are going very wrong, in particular league tables which lead to hierarchies of competing schools and a restrictive and outdated curriculum. Inevitably children are remorselessly and regularly labelled as failures. It’s not surprising that pupils hate school when the message goes out, day after day, that if you do not achieve you are a liability to the league position and finances of the school. Nor is it surprising that young people are bereft of strategies to express their frustration at constant rejection other than by violence and despair. Our youth have seen the pictures of torture and humiliation at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. They know what the adults do. When the Prime Minister speaks of youngsters wearing hoods and loitering in public places, he says he wants the rule of law. This from the warmonger of the illegal offensive against the people of Iraq! Look no further to find the exemplar of violence – it is illustrated daily in the doings of the ruling class.
Lord Andrew Adonis
Andrew Adonis is on record (Observer 1998) supporting constitutional reform of the House of Lords as an elected second chamber. But then Blair made him a lord in a neat manoeuvre to promote his former head of the No 10 Policy Unit to government office. Adonis has been awarded the post of Junior Education Minister which has upset some in the Labour Party, including Education Minister Ruth Kelly who allegedly refused to accept Adonis as Minister of State for schools. Adonis is the author of some of the most neo-liberal education policies, including university top-up fees, private state-funded academies, and the fantasy notion of parents’ power to choose which school to send their children. Adonis will support Blair’s intention to establish another 200 city academies – new schools given to private businesses for a very little investment and a lot of taxpayer’s money (see FRFI 183). Adonis is marginally less mad than ex-Ofsted Chief Chris Woodhead who recently stated that geography in the school curriculum is ‘a toxic mix of new-age mysticism and political correctness’. Having, together with Adonis, been utterly destructive there may be more than a touch of visionary truth in Woodhead’s predictions that he expects and ‘looks forward to the collapse of the state education system’.
Susan Davidson
FRFI 185 June / July 2005
