Schools

On Tuesday 27 March, facing the threat of a solid strike, management at Central Foundation Girls’ School in East London backed down on their threat of compulsory redundancies. Support staff at the school had voted by a huge 94% in a legal ballot to take strike action. The following is a report written before the management backed down. *** The strike is to take place on Wednesday and Thursday (28/29 March) next week. The redundancy threat came about as a result of a restructure of the admin department. The restructure is a blatant attempt by school management to remove certain people from...

By Liam Conway, Central Notts NUT The big news from the conference of the 230,000-strong National Union of Teachers (NUT) at Easter was a decision to ballot for a day of strike action against excessive class size. It follows several weeks of high-profile campaigning by FACE (Fight Against Cuts in Education), a grassroots organisation of parents and school governors. Won against hard-fought opposition by the NUT Executive, the vote on class-size action also linked the NUT at a national level to the FACE activity, for the first time. FACE has grown out of protests in areas with big cuts in...

All class-divided societies have inequality in education. Britain is not unique in that. What is unusual in Britain is the frenzy of the “postcode lottery” for favoured schools, now supplemented in Brighton by a literal lottery. What makes the “postcode lottery”, or literal lottery, so frenzied in Britain is not just the inevitable inequalities of class society, but specific things, including the school league tables (which tend to be self-reinforcing, pushing “up” schools high in the tables and “down” schools low in them); the virtual absence of publicly-funded nursery education; and the...

Some other issues need to be considered in the light of the debate over the lottery system. The best predictor of a school's educational achievement is, apparently, the proportion of students getting free school dinners. It should come as no surprise that, within a class society, the most important factor in education is social class. No education system can magic this fact away until socialism abolishes class society. That is why socialists have supported an education system that mixes people from all backgrounds, a comprehensive system of schools where children of all backgrounds and...

Brighton’s schools have hit the headlines with the row over a lottery system for admissions to secondary schools. The plans for a lottery have lead to local protests and splits in the Labour group on the council. Under the new scheme that narrowly won through, those in the new catchment areas for local schools will be able to go to the schools allotted to them, but where there are two schools in the catchment area and one school is oversubscribed children will enter a ballot to decide who gets the school of their choice. In Brighton and Hove most schools are on the edges of the city, a...