Lies, bullying, threats: Labour’s class-ridden education policy

The £19 billion con trick
Close scrutiny and careful research by two investigative journalists published in The Guardian have exposed the Labour government’s lies about education expenditure. Nick Davies and Helen Mulholland show that the ‘spending bonanza’ of an extra £19 billion announced for funding for classrooms is an elaborate con trick. The existing budget for UK education for 1998/9 was £38.3 billion. On 14 July 1998 Education Minister David Blunkett announced that this would rise in 1999 by £3bn, in 2000 by £3.5bn, and finally, in 2001/2, by £3.2bn. This, of course, adds up to £9.7bn – none of which has effectively reached the classrooms that need it. Where is the rest of the £19bn? The answer is that it does not exist. Contrary to the government’s description of the £19 bn as ‘real’, nearly half of it is manufactured by the simple book-keeping trick of counting the annual increases three times and adding them altogether.

In one way none of this matters. This is a government that has used ‘announcements’ and ‘presentations’ set up by its ‘spin doctors’ so often that they are ignored and regarded as background noise like muzak in a supermarket. The credibility gap between people’s experiences of life’s hardships and the Blairite blather of the Government has grown. Lying, repetition of the same spending promises and sound-bite policies do not alter the fact that the poor are getting poorer and that their schools, hospitals and public services are getting more impoverished.

The agenda of this government is to attack and control the poor. In November 1999 School Standards Minister Estelle Morris announced a £35m plan to ‘help problem pupils and combat truancy’. In March 2000 Home Secretary Jack Straw introduced a new crime bill threatening parents with a £2,500 fine or prison for up to three months for failing to make their truanting children attend school. Last year one million children had unauthorised absence at some stage and 50,000 pupils play truant every school day.

Small wonder when schools in poor areas face difficulties that make them unpleasant and harsh environments. This Labour government, which spent less in its first two years on education than the Tories did in their last two years, is making schools even more disagreeable to many young people.

Schools are losing their playing fields. Despite the pre-election pledge to stop the selling-off of sports pitches, the Department for Education under Blunkett has approved the sale of 101 of a proposed 103 playing fields. More than 100 school playing fields have gone in the past 15 months alone.

Class sizes have risen. While average classes in the private schools are 10 pupils, the numbers of children per class are rising rapidly in state schools leading to overcrowding and lack of support. When Blair promised that his priority in government would be ‘education, education, education’ he was responding to a crisis in infant school sizes that was affecting parents across even the Tory heartlands. By 1999 the prime minister was proudly claiming 100,000 more infants in classes under 30. What he has not said is that children in every other age group, nursery, junior and secondary are being taught in classes even more overcrowded than when Labour came to power. The number of children in classes of over 40 has doubled in three years while the number of secondary classes of more than 30 is the worst for 14 years.

The increasing competition between schools in the annual League Tables of GCSE passes is matched by increasing competition within schools. ‘Excellence for All’ is more than an empty slogan for the 50% of children who left without five or more C level GCSEs after years of boredom, of testing, of being labelled a failure. The highly centralised authoritarian and limited National Curriculum turns mainstream schools into a wilderness of alienation for many children who need a curriculum supportive of their needs. Instead they are abandoned to sink or swim in a quasi-adult world of training and vocational qualifications, all wrapped up in the language and ideology of the free market. Less academic pupils are often launched upon ‘Leisure and Tourism’ courses, usually subsidised with materials from McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. This is actually a sad denial of the need for a fulfilling and relevant education.

Bullied and threatened teachers do not make for supportive, responsive teachers. Blunkett and the Chief Inspector, Chris Woodhead regularly attack teachers, schools, parents and children, publicly and abusively comparing them to the private sector. ‘Few other businesses are marketed by managers who publicly denounce their product, attack their staff; savage their local managers; and sing the praises of the competition.’ (Davies, The Guardian 8 March 2000)

The fashion for threatening the workforce was evident in the first public statement by Professor Tim Brighouse, Chair of Islington Council’s new Education Commission which will oversee the privatisation process of local schooling. Teachers were warned: ‘We’ll exhaust you for better schools’. Tough Brighouse also declared that he will not tolerate poverty as an excuse for poor exam results. This tolerance of poverty, but not as an excuse, is parroted from his masters. At the end of February Blunkett himself declared that ‘Poverty is no excuse’ for educational failure. He threatened that up to 70 secondary schools with the worst GCSE records, face closure. They would be reopened as Fresh Start Schools with £1million for refurbishment, new staff and £100,000 superheads. This was, of course, the re-announcement of a previous statement about failing schools and failing teachers.

Labour will not ever admit the fact that educational inequality is inevitable in a class system based on privilege and oppression. They still pretend they can magic working class failure out of the system by a mixture of whizkiddery and technocratic manipulation.

Even OFSTED inspectors know better. A recent report on schools in deprived areas said they need more money and more realistic targets. Only 10 such schools in the whole country get GCSE results anywhere near the national average.

It is nonsense to claim, as Labour does, that success is only a matter of high expectations and hard work, and that failure is down to incompetent teachers. After ‘naming and shaming’ and ‘special measures’, the Fresh Start programme was supposed to be the answer. Within weeks of Blunkett’s tough call, three out of the ten ‘superheads’ called in to save ‘failing schools’ after being given their own ‘fresh start’ have already thrown in the towel and resigned.

One of these schools, East Brighton College of Media Arts, re-opened last September. ‘Superhead’ Tony Garwood has resigned after less than two terms during which 18 staff left and 58 different supply teachers had to be drafted in. One teacher said the ‘fresh start’ was ‘a hundred times worse than last year’.

When Carol McAlpine took over as ‘superhead’ of Firfield Community School in a working class district of Newcastle, she sacked most of the staff and resorted to paying cash to students for turning up. It didn’t improve matters and Ms McAlpine has since resigned.

The third ‘superhead’, Torsten Friedag has given up on the old George Orwell School in Islington. The school was given a £1 million facelift when it re-opened 18 months ago and re-named The Islington Arts and Media School. Only six of the former staff were re-employed and Friedag was given scope to enrich the lives of the working class students with the delights of German-style vocational education. Within weeks of opening a riot broke out at the school sparked by a row over a bag of chips. The police were called in and, rumour has it, found ‘superhead’ Friedag hiding under his desk.

This is not just a criticism of the headteachers concerned. Labour is to blame for perpetuating the myth that educational development is all about management; that the social and economic relations embedded within the system count for nothing. Labour has no intention of providing a decent education for working class children because it would take a social and economic revolution to do so. They only want to keep the working class in its place to provide a compliant and flexible work force.

A recent report from York University showed that Local Education Authorities with fully comprehensive systems add more educational value than those with grammar schools. Wouldn’t it make sense then, if you really intended to raise educational standards, to tackle the selective system? But Labour will not challenge the independent and grammar school elite, for these are the privileged halls of their middle class constituency. Blunkett explained away his pre-election promise to end selection by saying it was ‘a joke’. Nothing could better illustrate the hypocrisy of Labour’s education policy – a web of tricks and deceits spun in the vain hope of obscuring the class inequalities of the capitalist system.