Speeches from the opening session of Ideas for Freedom 2010, "How do we fight the Tories' plans for schools?" (10 July)
The chair was Gemma Short, a first year teacher and AWL member from Sheffield.
Jean Lane, teaching assistant and UNISON activist in Tower Hamlets
I’d like to concentrate on the cuts we’ve faced up until now and how they are going to multiply in the coming period, particularly after the October spending review.
Turning outstanding schools into academies is going to take money out of the central Local Education Authorities that fund all of the schools in their area and all of the services around schools in their area, and put that into academies, leaving the rest of the schools in that area impoverished.
It’s going to be a massive class divide in terms of who can get what education and who can get what funding.
In Tower Hamlets we’ve already seen cuts along these lines; we’ve already had the education workers working directly for the LEA, in the borough offices, threatened with redundancies, loss of pay, changes in the services that they provide, changes in the jobs that they do, presumably in preparation for what’s to come.
Local government has already started to anticipate what the government’s to do to it, and already started putting in place ways of ensuring that they can cut their budgets by enormous amounts. They've already started cutting. School managements have already started as well and that’s before they’ve even been told numbers, before they’ve been told exactly how much they've got to save. They're clearly not anticipating not balancing the books. They're not saying “we refuse to pass these cuts on to our local people”, because they’ve already started applying them.
When you look at the things that local authorities do, apart from what goes on in school itself, it's such essential stuff, which if it disappears will affect working class people and their children so much, it’s really quite frightening. We’re talking about support for very vulnerable people, Special Educational Needs support. Middle-class people and Tories sneer at the idea of SEN, they sneer about dyslexia, all of those things that they consider to be add-ons to the basic education that kids "need". Having seen it from the inside for about seven or eight years now, don’t let anyone sneer.
I work in school with students who come into school bringing all the problems they have at home, we are talking quite severe problems. I work with students whose wrists are bleeding when I’m trying to teach them to add up fractions, who have got such problems at home that the idea of being able to learn something in the classroom is not on the cards. Without the support services, without the SEN funding, without all of that extra stuff that goes on outside of just teaching in the classroom they would not survive school.
I think school’s already difficult enough for your average teenager who’s got a hormonal imbalance that looks like the high seas, but for somebody that’s got all that extra crap going on in their lives, it’d impossible to survive it if they didn’t have those kinds of services that we provide.
We’ve already been told that all the money that goes to training teaching assistants in our borough has stopped; I was told this on Thursday.
All the money that comes from the Teachers’ Development Agency, which provides NVQs, initial training and then further training for Teaching Assistants, which gets local people into education jobs and then up a career ladder, has stopped.
I’m sitting there with my paper and pencil listening to this on Thursday, and I said “OK, when’s this going to happen?” And he said “No, it’s happened, it’s just stopped”. I said “Were you consulted?” “No, we’ve just got a letter; the funding’s not coming anymore.”
It’s hundreds of thousands of pounds, but you get a letter saying “Sorry, the cheque won’t be coming this time” and it’s not.
That means the training I received to work with these kids that I’ve just been describing - I’m talking worst case scenario - but there’s all sorts of other things going on outside of looking at a whiteboard and listening to a teacher, there’s huge amounts of stuff going on. You’re not going to have the people trained to deal with this, you’re not going to have the people who can create a space for those children to learn, beyond just staring at a teacher in front of the room as one of 30 or, if the Tories have their way, even more people, staring at them, and thinking “What’s he going on about?”
So, it’s already started. I asked at that meeting on Thursday what do you consider to be a frontline service, because we’ve been told those will be alright, we’re not going to touch those, we’re only going to touch the add-on extras. So transport to school for disabled kids is an add-on extra, clearly, training for people who can be qualified to deal with kids with really complex needs, must be an added extra, that’s not considered a frontline service.
The LEA said to me we consider anyone who comes into contact with the children, who has anything to do with getting those children into school and working with those kids in school as a frontline service, but that’s words because in practice what’s happening is very different.
In schools, individual head teachers have already started. I’ve got one school in my borough that’s threatening 21 redundancies. If they get away with it - which is unlikely - the members of staff left behind will have all of that work to do with far fewer staff to do it; they are threatened with having their pay cut quite drastically, losing thousands of pounds a year to continue to do the job that they normally do, plus.
The headteachers don’t apologise for it. They just do it. They are paying consultants £500 a day to get all this stuff together, to work out how they are going to do it. And the people that they are attacking to save the school’s budget are the lowest paid workers in the school. It’s got nothing to do with helping the school’s budget, there’s eight TA’s in a school - about the equivalent of a deputy head or even an assistant head. If they wanted to save that money off the budget, one deputy head – and your average secondary school has got three or four of them – and you don’t have to get rid of eight teaching assistants.
This is nonsense, it’s got nothing to do with helping the budget, it’s got to do with attacking those workers who might be of a mind to fight back, it’s attacking their union, so that when the rest of the cuts come in, they are going to meet with less resistance.
We’ve got a big job of work getting our trade union movement fit for purpose for fighting this, because at the moment they’re really not up to it. In actual fact, I can see a scenario where our members are streets ahead of even the activists, let alone the bureaucrats when it comes to being angry about this, and we’ll be running along behind trying to catch up with them. I certainly hope that’s the situation.
I’ve seen sparks of it already, but we’ve also got a job of work to do not just with our labour movement and our trade union movement but with the left as well, organising anti-cuts campaigns, doing stuff on the streets, talking to parents and to students, and getting all of the service workers and users together to make sure that they don’t get away with this, or at least that there’s a bloody good fight and we prevent a lot of it.
Liam Conway, secretary of Nottinghamshire National Union of Teachers
One thing that ties the academies thing and the cuts thing together is a simple thing, and it was in our paper last week, class war. Because what the government has done is to declare class war in its schools programme on a massive scale.
Some of us believed that Labour in some ways had a class war in its education; we are dealing now with a horse of a different colour. I want to talk about that aspect of it as well as start the most important discussion that we’ve got to have which is how we are going to fight this stuff.
I was at a meeting last night, because I’m president of the trades council in Notts as well, where we gave some plaques to people who were active in the miners’ strike. And I was reading a book there about the miners’ strike and it struck me very quickly that what the Tories did in the miners’ strike is a parallel to what they are about to do in terms of public sector. It’s class war in the same way.
Class war in the way that in the miners’ strike they used all the forces of the state to pummel the miners into submission. They used incredible amounts, they used £5 million in 1984 money to destroy it, they used the media to distort events, so that the general public and other trade unionists thought that miners were provoking violence when the police were provoking violence.
To me it’s likely that they are going to do similar things in the fight to come in the public sector. But as Jean has pointed out, this is an absolutely vicious attack on the interests of our class, on the interests of working-class kids. That’s how it should be seen, both cuts and the academies programme.
What we’ve got to fight for in the unions is for them to say things that they never said under Labour. They’ve got to say things about the need to attack the rich, to get the resources from where the resources are, for the TUC and all the trade unions to point the finger and to say to working-class people, there’s not a problem here of shortages, to point out what can be done, and to draw out the logic that they wouldn’t do when Labour was doing similar things.
I'll point out some very obvious things. One of the things that Cameron said in one of his speeches is that everyone is going to suffer. Well, the people who have been turning up at auctions in Sotheby’s and the Chelsea Barracks and Christie’s don’t seem to have heard what Cameron said, because they are still going there and they are smashing records for art, antiques, old cars, for traditional 19th-century billiard tables, whatever one of those is, the money is just flowing everywhere as far as they are concerned.
In my sociology lessons, once a year I buy the Sunday Times. Once a year there’s a thing call the rich list. The ST prints the rich list as a celebration of the wonders of the rich, one of the first things in the rich list magazine is a big thing about the philanthropy of the rich, how good they are at giving to worthy causes, building them up as genuinely nice people. Now, one thing I try to do with my sociology students is I try to tell them, and I think this is important to tell working-class people, is that rich people hate working-class people. They hate us. And, actually, working class people don’t hate the rich enough. They should hate them a lot more.
My niece worked at Wimbledon, most of the people she was working with were public school kids, at universities, and one of the things that struck her was how hostile they are to poor people. How they hate them, how they talk about plebs, and riff-raff on the streets, and stuff like that in their posh accents. And that’s what Cameron thinks, that’s what Clegg thinks, that’s what all these people really think about us. You can see that in the way they do things.
Anyway, in the rich list this year, the rich in one year increased their wealth by £77bn. Now the Tories are planning to cut education, the schools budget for building, by £7bn. And the rich, just their increase in wealth, not what they already had, which was already stinking at the highest nostril level, £77bn they made in one single year, and the Times was celebrating that.
Now, for us that is basically a case of saying that money over there, you do with it what you do with trade unions when they decide to take strike action, you sequestrate it and redirect it toward the services that we need, toward services in schools and so on.
Cameron said recently the rich have had a big hit already; I thought, has something happened overnight? Have they upped the tax to the 87%-90% levels, like it was in the 1970s? Not at all.
The other side of this is that when the ruling class want to hit the rich, or when the governments want to hit the rich, they actually do, they can be hit. The argument that you can’t take that money away from them because it’s got to be used for reinvestment and all that sort of stuff was really exposed in the situation where we’ve got all the shit in the Atlantic Ocean that was put there by British Petroleum because actually, legally, it’s only liable to pay $69m in compensation. But it’s going to be paying £13bn to clean up that shit, there’s no newspaper making a big outcry about the fact that they’ve got to pay £13bn to clean it up. And yet if there were a suggestion that £13bn should be taken off them as a windfall tax there’d have been a massive outcry here, and BP is not going to be going out of business.
Again, that is an illustration of how it is possible to argue that if BP can be forced to pay £13bn to clear up all of the shit in the Atlantic, then all of the rich and all of the corporations can be forced to pay for what is necessary to clean up the shit that they plan for our public services.
Going back to the academies programme, what the Tories have done to the academies programme is to turn it on its head. They’ve dragged out the logic that was in Blair’s mind on academies, and that Blair couldn’t actually, completely, publicly say. Because what they’ve done is to turn the world upside down. The Labour academies were mostly in deprived areas where a lot of pretty smart, new buildings were put in place, some of them in London, one of them in Nottinghamshire, where it’s just been finished in a deprived area of Mansfield. The idea of it, supposedly, was to raise standards in so-called failing schools. The Tory academies are completely different, because all of those schools lined up to become academies in the Labour scheme have now been shelved from getting any money at all for being rebuilt. But the Tories have offered academy status to any school that is outstanding.
Schools that are outstanding, as defined by OFSTED, are virtually all in leafy suburbs, that are virtually all upper- and middle class-dominated schools, and the agenda of the Tories is a straightforward class agenda. Having said that, I think that was also the agenda of Blair and I think there are links with what the Tories are doing, the Tories are taking on the logic of what Labour did.
The links are the privatisation aspect of it, the fact that the academies programme was always a privatising programme, introducing less democracy into the system, taking out the local authority. The other aspect of the academies programme under New Labour that was clearly a class-driven programme was the educational diet that was being brought into academies, which was basically a diet of vocational education, a diet preparing working class kids just for work and not for the class struggle which is a lot of socialist teachers think we should be doing, that is what I do, I hope, every day, preparing kids for the class struggle, that is what we should be doing in schools.
The Labour educational programme was a dire diet, a diet of tick-boxing, where kids are asked to do anything but think. Another link was the undermining of the unions, the academies programme was designed to destroy the unions in those schools.
I think it’s true that what is going on here is that the Tories are doing what Blair wanted to do and was trying to do, it’s just that they can cut out the crap and get on with it. Blair’s was the Third Way to class rule, whereas the Tories are taking Route One to class rule as far as the education system is concerned.
The key question is what we do about it. There is a low level of morale in the trade union movement to an extent, but there is also, as Jean pointed out, a huge amount of anger out there. Unlike the corny thing that the SWP would always say at a meeting, genuinely, people are asking what is going on? What is happening with pensions? What is happening with Building Schools? What is going to happen to our pay? Are we going to lose jobs? All those sorts of questions are being asked, and, of course, teaching assistants are going to be in the frontline of that attack because they are not always as well organised in schools as the teachers’ unions are, so it’s likely that the first huge cuts in schools are going to be in that area. That’s an area that was introduced by Labour and it’s not something really that the Tories are bothered about.
The most important thing we’ve got to do is organise the movement, reorient what we do towards this battle that’s to come, and to feed on what people are saying, and building in the unions for strike action as early as possible.
This week’s paper has got a headline which is an obvious thing that the trade union movement should be doing, given that the cuts are happening in every single country in Europe - having European-wide action in the public sector against cuts. These are the sorts of approaches we’ve got to take; we’ve got to build the confidence of the membership of the trade union movement across the board in order to take on this full frontal assault on our class. And it certainly can be done. When you go into schools and explain what’s going on and feed off their anger, they are up for a fight, they will take on their bullying managers and they will take on a bullying government bent on class war.
Tali Janner-Klausner, London School Students’ Union and National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts activist
I’m going to talk more about the details of academies. The main issue that we need to think about is the process of schools becoming academies, that it has no community involvement, that it’s been rushed upon many schools, and that thousands of schools in the next couple of years could just become academies without there being a chance of a big movement of resistance.
Also the implications of academies and free schools alongside the cuts that are taking place and the possibilities for resistance.
At the moment there are, I think, 203 academies, 5% of comprehensives have registered interest, including the school that I was at until last week. They registered an interest on the day that I left.
The academies scheme under New Labour was a bold privatisation move that Thatcher wouldn’t have dared, but at least it was couched in terms of social justice. Like Liam described, it did provide investment for schools in deprived areas, although new buildings don’t mean better standards, at least it wasn’t the same kind of bare faced stuff at the Tories are doing.
Under Gove the nearest thing he does to try to justify academies, is to say that they pull up standards, which there is no proof for at all. Some academies do do better, some academies but some academies do worse, across the board there is no proof that academies have a better standard of teaching and learning than in normal schools.
What will happen is that education across the board will become less equal, there will be more problems, there will be problems for students, teachers, local community.
In terms of democracy, even the National Governors’ Association (NGA) said that “in its first piece of education legislation, the government has effectively disenfranchised local communities.”
The academies bill going through parliament now doesn’t allow for anyone in the local community, not parents, not teachers, not people whose kids would be going to the school, to have any say in whether the school becomes an academy. The only people involved in this process are governors, the sponsor and central government.
There’s no requirement for even a consultation, this is obviously a big contrast with the fluffy big society idea – we’re empowering parents and ordinary people - there just seems to be no element of that rhetoric in the actual content of the bill.
The second reading of the bill is on the 19th July. There will be a protest.
As well as in the process of becoming academies, academies will be undemocratic in that governors instead of being appointed by the elected councillors of the local authority and elected by parents so you have parent governors, you have teacher governors, most academies have about five governors, all appointed by the sponsor and no teacher governors.
I was speaking to someone who works in an academy. She said of the five governors, one of whom is the sponsor, one of whom is the sponsor’s wife, one is a parent governor who was appointed and two of them are friends of the sponsor. That’s a typical situation and these people control the school.
The people who will get hit by that are the people who are most vulnerable, SEN, the admissions policy, academies will have through overt and covert means more flexibility to choose admissions. Local authorities can only ask them very nicely to take on SEN needs children which, as you need more resources for them, academies have in the past said, no, we won’t take on SEN children, they will go to the schools that have less resources to deal with them. Women and LGBT students are faced with academies that don’t even have to teach sex education and can teach what they want about homosexuality. When faith groups take on academies, consider the implications of that.
As for staff, academies can choose their own pay and conditions, academies at the moment have higher staff turnover rates, national pay agreements don’t have to be honoured. What could happen over the years is similar to FE colleges where, across the board, staff have lower pay, both teachers and support staff.
Also for the students, the whole ethos of academies is decided by the sponsor. Many academies have immediately gone to really tight discipline, most academies have increased exclusions. They want to show that they have the best students, so if there is a student who’s causing a problem instead of work with them they will chuck them out.
And the fact that they have more of a free rein over admissions is problematic: the government could say whatever it wants, these are still comprehensives essentially, but if they can through whatever means be more selective, that’s not a comprehensive, that entrenches more inequality.
Alongside that you’ve got free schools which is when parents, teaching groups, church groups can set up their own independent school. There’s a danger that some people on left might think this is good because we could set up our own school away from the National Curriculum, but actually a lot of the groups that will do this will run them for profit – as in Sweden where 75% of free schools are run for profit. They might be put in unsuitable accommodation, for example, office blocks or old shops, and could also undermine the state school system.
In broader perspective, the privatisation and cuts work together to deepen inequality. We saw in the past week that the Building Schools for the Future scheme has been scrapped. In some areas academies were basically forced on local authorities as a condition of accepting BSF programmes. Now they don’t have the new school buildings, they just have the academies. We’ve also had in the past month that plans to extend free school meals have been scrapped which also links into academies. Of the outstanding schools which are offered to get fast-tracked to academies, have 40% fewer children on free school meals.
We are put on the defensive here. We need to remember that even though all these things are really awful and we need to oppose them, the system that we are defending has a lot of problems in it as well. We still need to keep in mind exams, school discipline, military recruitment in schools, tuition fees; we need to oppose these things as well.
There is a lot of opposition to academies. Teachers and parents instinctively don’t want a corporation or an unaccountable group running their school. Academies was the least popular policy in the Queen’s Speech. But this opposition has been really muted. The main reason for that, I think, is that academies will get more money. Again, this links into cuts; they think, well, we’re going to get 25% cuts, how can we make sure that our school is not affected by those, well, academies get more money!
Under New Labour that was the case in some schools, but there is no guarantee that this will continue to be the case, and when it is it’s at the expense of other schools in the area.
The person I spoke to who works in an academy said to me that we can give people iPods as prizes for best attendance, you can see how that could be an attractive prospect - but she also says that they are not going to get any more money for the foreseeable future, that these kinds of things will stop, that it’s essential a bribe and that the flipside of that is she talked to the sponsor of the academy about school trips which she’s in charge of and she said, we need to carry out risk assessment, and the sponsor says “It doesn’t matter about risk assessments, my lawyers will handle it.” That’s the flipside of sponsors and academies having a lot of money.
There’s also been a massive rush and a lot of confusion around the bill. In my school the governing body held an Extraordinary General Meeting; they wanted to register interest straightaway, because they didn’t know what the process would be like, they didn’t even tell the teachers, tell any of the parents about the meeting. They just decided that we are going to register our interest and then we can withdraw if need be, which is just disgraceful.
They are able to do that because there’s such a rush, because there’s such confusion, because it’s just before the summer holidays.
Another aspect of this is the trade unions. I think the people in the NUT have talked about strike action over academies but perhaps they might want to wait to fight over pay and conditions and pensions over the next couple of years rather than on a political issue like this. Those of us who are in the NUT or NASUWT or the other teaching or support unions, that’s really an important issue to be pushing.
(Contributions from the floor and summaries will be posted later.)
