A recent Dispatches programme, filmed undercover, exposed tactics used by schools to pass Ofsted inspections (sending difficult children out of school) and a high level of disruptive behaviour by pupils. Up to 60% of parents in London are already very anxious about secondary school provision. The government response is to deflect responsibility onto parents and spin its line about anti-social behaviour and parental duty.
Where has all the money gone?
Following a period of disastrous underfunding a huge injection of money was needed to normalise school provision. Since 1997 real spending by central and local government has risen by £16bn to £38bn a year. Most of the new cash has gone to bribe teachers to work in awful conditions and accept their imprisonment in a system of targets, tests and league tables. Teacher numbers have increased by a fifth to 432,000, while teachers’ average pay increased from £22,000 in 1997 to over £30,000 in 2003.
It’s not working
Despite increasing funding the Labour government has created a system that does not work. By dismantling a comprehensive system and opening up schools to competition in an education market, chaos has grown. This results in an uneven distribution of resources, which cannot be controlled. So, for example, more than 24,000 primary pupils (15%) are being taught in classes that are so large that they break the law, which since 2001 says that 5-to 7-year-olds must be taught in classes of 30 or fewer.
There is now an £8bn backlog in school building repairs and a threatened 10-15 year wait for basic improvements in secondary schools and an even longer wait, till 2023, for primary schools.
The use of teaching assistants (TAs) is proving problematic where they are being used to solve staffing shortages. TAs around the country are threatening strike action in September because they are already on the minimum wage and have been offered an increase of just 15p extra per hour to take classes as cover for teachers.
The most telling part of the Dispatches film was when, unscripted, a Year 10 pupil tells the teacher secretly filming her that she is writing a letter of complaint to Mr. Blair because her science class has had 26 supply teachers this year. Meanwhile the class around her was erupting into the bad behaviour of the bored and disaffected. Boys’ exclusions from school have just hit a 5-year high with almost 10% of 13 and 14-year-old boys suspended last year for poor behaviour.
Skills shortages?
On the one side the chaos of the market place, on the other authoritarian governance. Since taking office ministers have outdone each other with claims that the key to Britain’s future economic success in the global economy is to address the skills shortage and to direct education to this end.
The globalised economy, however, does not work this way. There is a lessening demand for skilled workers as jobs are restructured by out-sourcing, re-skilling, de-skilling and multi-skilling. This has polarised the workforce. At one end, one in three jobs today require no certification at all. At the other, the oversupply of qualified jobseekers has led to higher and higher entry requirements. About 6.4 million people are qualified to the equivalent of NVQ level 3 but only 4 million jobs demand this level of qualification. Training for a ‘higher technical’ middle range of jobs is weak and has staggered on with declining uptake for modern apprenticeships and foundation degrees and overall neglect by employers unwilling to make their own provision for ‘skills shortages’ as they have done traditionally.
Employability
Employers are now oversupplied with certified, if not qualified labour. As the core diminishes middle managers and other professionals are de-layered and de-skilled along with the remaining craft workers. Education is urged to train the workforce for the core skills that increasingly make up a curriculum of ‘bite-size’ training packages. Employability is the justification for increasingly narrowing learning horizons. Failing 14-year-olds and under-qualified school leavers are prepared for entry into a pool of semiskilled flexible labour to be drawn on as required.
In the future no undercover agents will be needed to expose this government’s agenda, which is the creation of a state education system in subservience to the profitability of big business. All the rest is lies.
Susan Davidson
