Medieval courts had a jester to keep the king amused and a whipping boy who would be beaten when the king was feeling impotent and annoyed. Blair’s first move on return to England from a Barbados millionaire tax-haven holiday was to announce zero tolerance of working class parents, his whipping boy. The duty of parents to keep good order and control will be the main focus of the next parliament, he said, in a cynical effort to divert attention away from the horrors of Iraq, the growing oil crisis, the bombing of London, rates of infection in the health system, the rise in racist attacks and the government’s attack on civil rights.
Truancy rates rise by 10% to highest level ever recorded
No sooner had Blair threatened new legislation to punish parents than research was published showing that a previous ‘zero tolerance’ policy had crashed. The New Philanthropy Council (NPC) reported that government spending of over £1 billion together with new police powers to detain truants has failed to reduce the numbers of the 70,000 children who regularly bunk off school each day. The government’s punitive response has been to promise that thousands more working class parents will face gaol sentences. As we have predicted in Education Notes over the last few years, an increasingly competitive and hostile school regime will drive away children who are valued only so far as their SATS results improve the economic viability of the school by league table position. Again the government directs blame on the convenient poor, ‘a stubborn minority of pupils’, to explain away the failure of the education system they have created.
No tolerance for failure
Never mind, ploughing on regardless, another ‘zero tolerance’ policy was announced the following week, this time by Education Minister Kelly. ‘Failing schools’ will be allowed only one year to improve. If they don’t they will be closed down, donated to the private sector (academies) or given to religious groups (faith schools). Since there are 285 schools in this category and others enter and leave the ‘failing’ category in cycles, we look forward to a lively year and a growth in zero tolerance for this disgraceful government.
Buy three, get one free
Academies are privately-sponsored state schools where private firms or organisations like the Vardy Fellowship, a fundamentalist Christian group under car salesman Peter Vardy, purchase schools. Blair’s government has vowed to set up 200 of these schools by 2010. The deal is that for £2 million up front a buyer can sponsor a state school dictating curriculum and ethos while the state will pay the rest and running costs. So desperate is Labour to achieve this target that education ministers are now offering four schools for the price of three. There are even knock-down offers, as in the London Borough of Greenwich where the council is so keen to set up a new academy that it is selling off the school playing fields of St Paul’s Catholic Secondary School for £1.8 million which it will give to the archdiocese of Southwark so that the archdiocese can buy a new academy for just £200,000. The new academy will combine St.Paul’s and Abbey Woods School. In the words of the head of Abbey Wood School, ‘The land on which St Paul’s stands belongs to (Greenwich) council. But it is being sold to benefit not just council taxpayers but a particular group who will be able to attend the new academy. I’m speechless’.
Parents sent 1,126 letters of which 1,122 objected to the plan for the new academy but the Schools Adjudicator rejected them.
Offa the target
The Office for Fair Access is a new set-up that was created to appease critics when university top-up fees were introduced. Its task is to ensure that a targeted number of students from state schools get university places, especially in the top institutions like Oxford (53.8% state pupils) and Cambridge (57.6% state pupils). It has failed and the upward trend is now a downward trend. Throughout UK universities the percentage of state school recruits fell from 87.2 to 86.8 last year. Since only 7% of pupils are in private education it is clear that buying education remains the best way to get a university place.
Reports also show a rising dropout rate of university students in their first year largely because of rising debt levels. And this is even before top-up fees of up to £3,000 a year start in September 2006.
Susan Davidson
