New Education Minister and friend of Opus Dei Ruth Kelly looks set to have her hands full, with a White Paper on 14-19 education, a Green Paper on young people and a White Paper on skills all to be presented soon. One thing is certain: every new Labour project will make money for one the many thriving education businesses.
Capita, for example, has profited by £114m on contracts from the Department for Education and Skills since the last election. The latest little earner is the Maintenance Allowance Contract, which pays 16 to 18-year-olds from low-income familes £30 per week to remain in school. Together with schools and colleges, Capita will share £37m to administer the grants. With 100,000 students still waiting for their claim, future business is assured.
But the real money is in exams. One school, Thomas Telford, earns £2m a year from the ICT exam it set up. Meanwhile Edexcel’s A-level fee rose by 6.8% to £70.50 per student last year. Schools and colleges are spending an estimated £380m a year on exams, of which £100m is a central grant. So government keeps on feeding the greed of the edubusinesses and English school kids remain the most tested and examined in the world.
This Labour government has been seduced by private sector myths of enterprise, profit making, flexibility, and deregulation. In truth, of course, private firms in the public sector are subsidised, either fully or in part, by taxes. Their work force and capital infrastructure is largely paid for by central government. They are more expensive and even less efficient than the public sector, spending on average a third more on administration.
No wonder that the Confederation of British Industry recently urged more private involvement in public services. It’s where the money is to be made.
But not always…
In October 2003 Ballast UK, the main contractor on a £120m Private Finance Initiative project covering 27 schools in Tower Hamlets, London, went bust. Schools have been left looking like demolition sites and hundreds of pupils are having lessons in mobile classrooms. Abbey National also withdrew its investment from school building projects owing to poor financial results. Jarvis, which has 20 projects covering 129 schools in England and Wales, has £230m debts and much unfinished construction work.
Blocked projects
100 years ago progressive teachers and socialist groups struggled to establish a state education system free from religious control. Labour is attempting to reverse that. Sir Peter Vardy, described by the Times Education Supplement as a ‘Christian fundamentalist car dealer’, has been handed two large local secondary schools – Emmanuel College in Gateshead and The King’s Academy in Middlesborough. The Vardy Foundation, which runs the schools, accords equal status to ‘creationism’ and theories of evolution. Both schools are favourites of Tony Blair. 200 more such schools, known as City Academies or private state schools, are planned. For a fee of £2m, payable in random instalments, private benefactors are handed effective control of brand-new state schools, selecting the governors, appointing the senior management and managing the school’s practices without having to worry about the national curriculum. The initial £20m for each school is paid by central government, as are the annual £5m running costs. Academies are not bound by national agreements on teachers’ pay and conditions. Shamefully, several Labour councils have backed these plans. However, parents are fighting back. In Conisbrough near Doncaster, Sir Peter Vardy and the elected Labour mayor made a grab for Northcliffe comprehensive school. Unimpressed with the big sell, the glossy brochures and patronising promises of success, parents and teachers organised protest meetings. Parents expressed horror at the prospect of their children being educated with ‘these extreme kind of Christian ideologies’ and without any kind of local accountability. The parents won and Northcliffe was saved. But Blair and his grovelling MPs will not stop their relentless sell-off and giveaway of state schools unless more parents protest and organise.
Susan Davidson
FRFI 183 February / March 2005
