‘Education for the People’: an alternative programme for the education system

The attack on state education is deepening. The school funding freeze, massive cuts to Local Authority support services, acceleration of Free School and Academy programs, abolition of EMA, cuts to university funding and increase in student fees  - all these and more are designed to  undermine and privatise state education.

As Thatcher’s despised Secretary of State, Kenneth Baker, said of the latest attack – the child labour oriented “University Technical Colleges” –“The real joy of all this is that employers can make sure that schools produce what they want, and those same employers can write the curriculum”.

They use education to secure capitalism - covertly through the divisive structures, teaching each generation to “know their place” - and overtly with the increasing promotion of capitalist economics – even in primary school “enterprise education”. Niall Ferguson, the open advocate of 21^st century imperialism, is now government senior advisor on the Secondary history curriculum.

Organisations such as Baker’s “Career Academies UK”, think-tanks “Reform” and “Civitas” and the “charity” Education Business Partnership actively promote the role of monopoly capital in the running of schools and the curriculum. Education businessman Professor James Tooley put it well. “Education is too important to be excluded from the virtues of the profit motive”

We’ve put up spirited resistance to Academy and related programs. Government has had to resort to bullying and bribery to get any sizeable response from schools. But there is evidence that as state schools are undermined, some Headteachers, governors and parents seek to defend “their school” by seeking to “go it alone”. World wide evidence shows that such moves lead to increasing control by education businesses.

We need to develop our own alternative program for education, a “People’s Charter for Education”.

How about these 10 points – all emerging from a wealth of conferences, policy debates and local meetings of our unions?

1. We need an integrated national plan for education, vocational training and employment – based on the needs of the citizen in the 21^st century, and the development of an economy capable of meeting those needs
2. Access to education must be completely universalised - outlawing hidden school costs to parents, reinstating the EMA, replacing tuition fees with a decent grants.
3. A national curriculum with both “academic” and “vocational” elements, as well as cultural and physical education and life skills - developing, for example, skills in new technologies… but also in being able to analyse, question and criticise.
4. A halt to all fragmentation and privatisation, resuming public control and increasing popular democratic participation through new Local Education Authorities
5. Raising the proportion of GDP spent on education to the OECD average, investing in
   1.  the educational infrastructure,
   2. the recruitment of more professional staff
   3. the establishment of professional wage levels for all education workers
   4. class sizes and pupil funding in the state sector – allowing spending to progressively rise to match those in the private sector
   5. The integrity of the teaching profession should be re-established with
   6. A requirement that all teaching staff be appropriately qualified, not replaced by lesser qualified staff on inferior pay and condition
   7. The abolition of divisive inspection regimes, with recognition that education is a co-operative and collective process
   8. An end to competitive “performance related” individual pay and a  return to national collective bargaining

The transformation of education from a process of reinforcing the values of a dog-eat-dog, “free market” society, where the needs and practices of big business predominate. The development of an education system designed to “question everything” and stimulate social change.

Research activity in our universities should be freed from the narrow control of business and the military – and brought under the control of democratic institutions.

Educational practices should be democratised and socialised, being conducted through debate and discussion rather than top-down “what, when and how to teach” diktat.

The scrapping of current competitive and destructive structures of assessment – where individual success can only be secured by the underachievement of others, and overhauling the pedagogical theory used in schools, colleges and universities.

These are just a start to what could be a very important debate around a “People’s Charter for Education”. We all need to be involved.

Bill Greenshields

is a past President of the National Union of Teachers and Chair of the Communist Party of Britain

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