Bill has spoken at many
meetings and seminars on many different topics, and organised by many
different organisations, campaign groups, political parties etc. Here we report in varying detail his contributions to meetings of
three political parties – the Conservative, Labour and Communist Parties
In his welcome to Tory Party delegates to the
At a recent Labour Party Socialist Education
Association AGM, he took part in a "round table" discussion and Q&A
reported thus by the SEA
“Any
Questions”
David Kidney, MP, Dr Alistair Hunter, President UCU and Bill Greenshields,
Past
President NUT.
Key Issues
Bill
Greenshields. Poverty and Class were the issues that underpinned the failures of the
education system. Where did this sit alongside Government 2020 child poverty
targets? Government must address this fundamental issue. Child Poverty and the
defence of State Education are the twin concerns.
Alistair
Hunter.
Funding issues were central to participation in FE and HE. “It is the money
stupid!” Open access is the principle worth fighting for if the wider access we
want becomes a reality.
David
Kidney.
How do we influence the next cycle of education change? If we accept that the
neo-liberal competition, testing and league tables as a cycle is about to end?
Localsm is about to return as a new cycle. What does localism actually look
like?
Interface
Bill
Greenshields. Where is the evidence that the neo-liberalism cycle is about to end –
Conservative? Labour? Liberal Democrat? All argue to the contrary. Localism
will be a local neo-liberalism model.
Alistair
Hunter.
The influence of the private sector determines the character of localism. A new
Labour Government could be different in its approach?
David
Kidney.
It would be more desirable to spend more money on everything! But this demands
an answer to the fundamental issues of public spending i.e. whether or not we
follow the Anglo Saxon or the European model? This requires brave political
parties and even braver voters!
Questions
§ “Old” Labour Party
leadership used its experience and knowledge of the educational profession.
This changed with “New” Labour. How do we get back in?
§ Academies as opposed to
community schools – where is the way forward?
§ What about the nature of
political patronage in comparison to a system of parliamentary election to
cabinet government.
Answers
§ Parliament should hold
the executive to question and a new Speaker will hopefully do this. (DK)
§ Whereas campaigns to
oppose opting out were decided on a vote of local people, this no longer exists
as an option where academies are concerned (BG).
§ Public funding is a
bottomless pit as far as the
§ Social partnership is a
closed shop as far as NUT is concerned? There are new alliances that can be
forged. (BG)
Questions
§ Get back to democratic
basics in terms of organising education provision and also talk to teachers?
Answer
§ Schools need to reflect
the values of the local community rather than choose to reflect the values of
society. Schools are often at variance with the communities they serve.(BG)
§ Leicester City NUT Co-operative
Plan – another way of avoiding the academy model. (BG)
§ The Achilles heel was the
failure, in the 1960s, to tackle the private schools system. (AH)
§ 50% tax rate was rejected
by both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown until forced to accept it by recent events
(DK)
§ Citizenship should reap
rewards eventually (DK)
At
a Communist Party seminar on the
issues facing the education service, Bill chose as his topic “The
marketisation, commodification and privatisation of education” – addressing the
issue thus
I was pleased to be asked
to introduce this workshop. I have been representing the NUT recently at
Conferences of the main parliamentary parties, with their neoliberal consensus,
and so I’m very pleased to be here at something rather different! The
commodification of education is my focus – and we need to discuss that
commodification as it appears right across our education service and not just
school education.
What we are not here to do
is to simply catalogue the damage being done by the commodification process,
but to try to understand not just what it is (though that could take all
day in itself) but also the intent that lies behind it, the methods employed to
bring it about, and how we might not only resist it, but how we might, in the
course of that struggle, develop our own plans for the future direction of our
services. Quite a task for an hour’s workshop!
Neither education and
health systems have ever had a “golden age” in which everything was fine and
all that needed to have been achieved had been achieved. In fact, it is the
very fact that our education and health services have always struggled
for resources and development – and have often fallen short of meeting people’s
needs - that the “modernisers”, the “marketisers”, the “commodifiers” and the
“privatisers” depend on to attempt to denigrate their real achievements, and to
propose a “market solution”. We learn from our history of struggle, but in
order to look forward, not back.
Those words – “marketisation”,
“commodification”, and “privatisation” are often used interchangeably – but in
fact of course they have distinct though closely related meanings.
Marketisation is the
process by which competitive free market mechanisms are introduced into the
education management – individual institutions competing for resources and for
student numbers, seeking “efficiency savings”, using targets, results and
league tables to attract “customers” - both students and funders/sponsors…. And
using the methods of the private sector in the management and control of what
is spoken of as “the workforce”.
Privatisation is the
handing of control and/or ownership of public education to the private sector.
Commodification is the
process by which both places at educational institutions and educational courses/qualifications
are sold directly to those customers. This “selling” can involve everything
form parental choice of schools to actual direct payments – as in student fees,
employer funding of university courses etc. And of course, there’s also the “commodification”
of the labour power of that workforce again.
The end game of this
direction of travel is inevitably - if
we don’t stop it - the full privatisation of our education system to for-profit
providers.
Can I start by quoting from
the most recent copy of the Times Higher Education Supplement?
One-to-one assistance from a personal
tutor is part of the education experience for more and more students - but at
what cost?
Alpha Tutors, one of the
The firm, which is based in
Benjamin Wyllie, its account manager,
said university-level business had grown by 40 per cent over the past two
years. Mr Wyllie said he was expecting a major increase in this sector in the
next academic term.
He said many students struggled where
there were large class sizes. That's not the fault of universities, it's just
the result of numbers. Private tuition redresses the balance."
Pat Hill, an academic skills tutor
giving official one-to-one help at
Malcolm Keight, head of higher
education at the University College Union, said the rise of private tuition in
higher education showed that students were increasingly isolated from their
universities.
"It's a sad reflection of the
fact that the commodification of higher education is taking away from the sense
of academic community. That is being eroded."
And in another article…
As a mature student, Emily Jones never
expected to use private tuition when she started her modern languages degree but
soon found lack of time with academic staff meant she had no choice if she
wanted to keep up.
"I employed a private tutor and
she helped me through the first year.
Ms Jones continued with private
tuition through Fleet Tutors throughout her second year and will probably
continue into her third. She said: "I do it online. It's costing a lot of
money, £200 per month for two sessions a week, but I need it."
Now there has always been private tuition, but never before has it been so
integrally linked to our Higher Education Institutions. It is just one example
of how education is “sold” as a commodity… but there are much more serious
aspects of the commodification process.
The same copy of the Times Higher Education Supplement carries the
following advertsiement for a Globalisation of Universities Conference to be
held in just one week’s time at The Commonwealth Club in
Higher education is global: Where is your institution
positioned?
Some 300,000 overseas students are
currently in the
Why should you attend?
• Learn from successful university
case-studies how to market your institution to overseas students
• Understand the long-term benefits of
providing a high quality student experience
• Apply financial and cultural trends
to your future planning
• Network and identify opportunities
for growth
Join our leading panel of experts:
Sir Graeme Davies, vice chancellor,
David Greenaway, vice chancellor,
Sir Drummond Bone, former vice
chancellor,
Pat Killingley, director of
educational services, British Council
“Apply financial and cultural trends
to your future planning”. Just what does this mean? Clearly it
means that academic staff should be developing courses on the basis of the
money to be made from them, and looking world-wide for customers through
learning how to “market your
institution”.
And of course, Higher
Education is not just for sale to overseas students. As a leading academic
recently observed. “Macro-capitalism has
sold us out, turning education into a consumable – a privilege to be bought
rather than a right to be aspired to.” There is a total student and
graduate debt of £18 billion, as a result of their need to buy their education
– or rather their qualifications – through student fees. The process of Higher
Education has been largely turned into a means to that end. £6 billion of the
total debt has just been sold by the Government to private investment companies
– the Government promising the NUS that the sale of the loans ’should not
affect’ the inflation related interest rate currently set on graduate
repayments; however, the government has provided no details of what subsidies
it has planned to counter commercial rates of interest. Of course, the average
student’s debt of £18000 is not all to the student loan scheme – private loan
companies are making a killing, even though most students now also hold down
substantial part-time jobs outside of university hours and terms to avoid even
more crippling debts.
“The net effect of
this,” says the same academic, “is that education has now become a
commodity, and students have been transformed into consumers, entrenching
social division and negating aspiration.”
Meanwhile other “education customers” are encouraged to buy their
courses through such institutions as the Government’s University for Industry
and its LearnDirect programme.
“More than 2.4 million people have taken over
6.5 million learndirect courses since October
2000, and on average 7,700 learners log on and learn with learndirect
every day,” UfI claims on its website. Such courses are paid for directly
by the learner, or by their employers. Their purpose? A major strand is
LearnDirectBusiness “Through learndirect
business, Ufi seeks to offer employers a high quality,
affordable and innovative way to train their workforce to increase individuals’
employability, business performance and national productivity”
The need
for Universities to provide for the demands of private sector employers is a
central strand, indeed a priority of the Government, clearly expressed in
letters from the DfeS as it then was, and this year from the new Department for
Innovation, Universities and Skills to the Government body set up to fund
Universities, the Higher education Funding Council. The HEFC is tasked with
devising funding formulae which encourage competition between universities, and
to manage and allocate funding according to market efficiency criteria.
For 2007/8 Alan
Johnson, Education Sec wrote “We need… models of HE that make available relevant, flexible
and responsive provision that meets the high skill needs of employers and their
staff. We shall need to consider in the light of experience what growth trajectory
to adopt. It is possible that growth will initially be concentrated in a
relatively small number of institutions which show themselves to be willing to
embrace this agenda.”
The last statement illustrates that Johnson recognised
that this employer led starategy of turning HE into a commodity for their use
is deeply unpopular with all but a “small number of institutions”. But all need
the funding and are to be forced down that route
This year, the letter from John Denham, Innovation,
Universities and Skills Sec rammed the message home
“ A priority
is to continue to accelerate progress towards a new relationship between
employers and higher education. This is an ambitious and
ground-breaking plan, but even at the end of this period we shall still have a
long way to go. We will look for more substantial growth in this kind of
provision from 2011, with increasing volumes of employer co-funding being brought
to bear to support skills development. This in part will mean a new approach to
funding, on which I know you are working. But the need for innovation and
cultural change goes well beyond that. Providers will need a growing
appreciation of the requirements of employers, and the general employability
skills that are increasingly wanted in the workplace; to provide and adapt
courses swiftly in response to demand; to offer provision tailored to
individual businesses; and make it accessible in ways that suit employers and
students”
The HEFC proudly respond
Workforce development programme
We are developing a programme of activities in
order to meet the priorities for employer engagement set out in the Government's
2007 and 2008 grant letters,
§ supporting projects
from HE providers focused on developing employer co-funded provision - we aim
to include a number of smaller, niche market-focused or more experimental
projects
§
implementing new and flexible funding
arrangements for 2008 to 2011 that enable HE providers to respond to the
fluctuations of the employer market
§
developing the longer term strategy and
funding methodology to achieve larger scale co-funded employer engagement from
2011 onwards
The immediate results are that
students now take part in increasingly standardised and compartmentalised, “competence”
based courses to meet the needs of industry – indeed often designed directly by
employers – and pay through the nose for the opportunity to do so.
The courses are homogenised in order
to be interchangeable and recognisable to employers across the European Union
in particular. Students can “trade” between these courses through “credits”,
thus maximising the opportunity for employers to move skilled workers to the
geographical “zones” of the EU where they wish to invest in search of high rates of profit.
The whole employer led commodification
process is proudly proclaimed in the IMF’s structural adjustment programmes.
It’s there in the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty (the revamped Constitution),
the EU Services Directive, the “
The process is mirrored in the
changing nature of University research. This from a contribution to the
pamphlet “Education For The People”. “Research
is becoming increasingly hitched to business needs or which can draw direct
funding from the private sector, or from Research Councils ever more pressed to
demonstrate the “public outcomes” of their investment. The result is a
narrowing of the range of research activity to subjects which quickly
demonstrate business outcomes. Whole branches of scientific research and the
majority of arts and humanities research are structurally vulnerable when
measured against the socially impoverished index of showing their utility to
British businesses. Direct sponsorship and control of research by British and
US oil, mineral, pharmaceutical monopolies such as BP, Shell, Zeneca and Glaxo
Wellcombe is being encouraged and welcomed. Universities are also being urged
to engage as closely as possible with small and medium enterprises in their
regions, tailoring their research and teaching as closely as possible to the
needs of private capital. The insecurity of funding and employment structures
also acts to stifle innovation and creativity, while the requirement to create
a research labour force with more generic skills threatens to homogenise
research activity around lowest-common-denominator transferable skills”.
Apart from that, everything’s OK.
All this has led to the University and
College Union responding thus
“UCU today said
that the government needed to trust education experts, rather than allowing
business to dictate funding policy for our universities.
Commenting on a leaked report from the Department for
Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS), UCU said the
UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, said: 'University is about so much more than
just getting students through their degree and out the other side. We should be
celebrating universities that are prepared to take risks and push the
boundaries in their pursuit of knowledge and research. We need to trust people
who have spent their lives working in education, not allowing business to
dictate the short-term direction universities should be taking.
'The creeping marketisation of higher education seems only concerned with a
bottom line and treating students as commodities. Identikit institutions in all
our towns and cities churning our graduates in a couple of years is not what
the country needs to protect its proud position as world leader in teaching
excellence or innovative research.'
There is a very similar
story in tertiary education – what was known as Further Education. 15 years ago
FE Colleges were taken out of local authority control and accountability, and
made “independent”. Increasingly since that time there has been an inexorable
move towards the provision of courses aimed at improving “employability”, these
courses being largely determined by the employers themselves – and increasingly
delivered by private sector training companies or on employers’ premises. Many
of these courses are thought by staff to equip students only for McJobs, to the
extent that one disaffected lecturer rigged up an improvised banner over the
admissions desk for such a course carrying the words “Would you like fries with that?”
The competition between colleges encourages this
process. As a lecturer quoted on a Kings College London Department of education
website says,
“Students are accepted on courses for
which they are unsuited – indeed here student failure can be financially
productive as students are kept-on for 'a second bite'. The student becomes
de-personalised and is primarily ‘valued’ as a source of income. The student
has exchange value in the economy of education funding. Look, it's dog eat dog
nowadays in (local area). We’ll take them on intermediate (GNVQ) courses even
if we know they are not up to it because if we don’t, someone else will... And
we know they will drop off. So we encourage them to transfer routes and we are
providing strong pastoral support to ensure that we retain them for a second
bite at the apple. We’ve got to hold our numbers you know (laughs).
Commodification of FE courses
has extended to the colleges “buying in” private education and training
companies to “deliver” the courses… which are directly tailored to the needs of
the businesses that use that provider. This is bad enough when it works… but
sometimes it ends in tears – well that’s the market for you… win some, lose
some – except of course the real losers either way are the students.
One “training giant”,
Carter and Carter recently collapsed, resulting in UCU issuing the following
press release
'End marketisation of
further education' call as private training provider collapses
UCU has called for an end to
government efforts to bring a market into further education, after the collapse
of training company Carter & Carter.
Carter & Carter has been offering to take over parts of
FE colleges' curriculum, such as the teaching of automotive maintenance, and in
several colleges managed to do so. For teaching staff in many colleges this
created uncertainty about their future. UCU has expressed doubts about a
possible long term risk to lecturers' pay and conditions as well as to the
quality of teaching.
Barry Lovejoy, head of further education at UCU, said: 'Carter & Carter's
troubles are no surprise and introducing the profit motive into education
provision is now proven not to be the answer. It has only added to uncertainty
and instability.
'UCU calls on the government to stop its damaging ideological push for
marketisation and 'contestability' and concentrate on supporting and properly
funding good quality, broad, public education for all.'
Well press releases and
calls on government are all well and good – but we need a deep seated campaign,
bringing together education workers, students and our local communities if we
are to really challenge such commodification.
The process of
commodification of schools is at an earlier stage – largely at the stage of
marketisation.
The process of the
development of state schooling and schools had followed since its beginnings in
the late 19th century followed a path of increasingly systematic and
integrated provision – through “filling the gaps” where voluntary, largely
church schools didn’t exist, to LEAs, to the 1944 Act providing for education
beyond “elementary education” for working class children, to the struggle for
comprehensivisation in the 1960s and 1970s. This process was won by struggle by
the working class, coupled with the demands of the increasingly technological
and sophisticated means of production.
In the late 1970’s
Callaghan’s Great Education Debate – ostensibly aimed at improving
opportunities for working class children – gave credence to those who actually
opposed these aims.
Systematic provision of
education came under attack. We can’t go
into detail here, but a “direction of travel was put in place” which took us to
a place that would not have been supported by many of those who were very keen
on the first steps. The fragmentation has taken place through Local Financial
Management of schools, and then Local Management of Schools which passed
increasing control of schools to their individual governing bodies. This
“independence” was accelerated by a series of experiments – City Technology
Colleges, “opted-out” Grant maintained Schools, Education Action Zones,
The
2002 Education Act again accelerated the process, allowing school governing bodies to
constitute themselves as companies
Increasingly schools involved individuals from the private sector in their
management bodies in the belief or hope that they would bring “market
expertise” to this process.
Now we have the Academy
school programme which gives control of schools, and ownership of the buildings
and grounds, to millionaires and the private sector – though this is often
“prettied up” now by also involving Universities and FE colleges – which
themselves have been “commodified” as we have seen – as sponsors. If there is a
need for a new school to be built and opened, Local Authorities have to “offer”
it to be run by the private sector.
Every Local Authority has
to set up a “Local Education Partnership” in which the private sector have 80%
control. This is a limited company which has oversight of the development of
educational provision in their area.
Now New Labour promise an
acceleration of the process, the Lib Dems propose another version called “free
schools”, and the Tories aim to “put rocket boosters under the process” by
enabling “any voluntary group, group of parents or other organisation” to open
a school – its success or failure being determined through “choice and voice” –
a New Labour term for increasingly unfettered parental choice.
In order to undermine the
notion of sending your children to your local school, and exercising control
through elected parent governors and LEA management, successive governments
have “marketised” education by promoting the concept of “good” and “bad”
schools through published inspection reports, rigid testing, publication of
league tables etc.
Schools therefore need to
compete, through conforming to tests, through marketing, through refusing to
co-operate on “best practice” with other schools, through bidding for extra
funds, through sponsorship by the private sector.
Currently, British school
education is exempted from the otherwise legally binding provisions of the WTO
GATS programme, and from the EU Services Directive, as it is covered by an
exemption clause dealing with services “provided largely as a function of
government” and thus largely publicly funded. Both WTO and education union
lawyers, starting from different positions agree that if the process of
marketisation and commodification continue, this exemption is likely to be
challenged.
The next steps in this
direction of travel will take us toward the US model of “education vouchers” by
which parents are given “their share” of the education budget to spend where
they like – and this will lead to “top up fees”… where parents pay real money
to get them into the school of their choice. Real commodification, real
privatisation.
Clearly there are already
real examples of the commodification of the school system. Private sector
teacher supply agencies have progressed through providing cover staff for short
term teacher absences, to supplying teachers on fixed term contracts, to being
the major source of recruitment of teachers for permanent posts in some areas.
For each of these services, they charge a fee, either taken out of teachers’
pay, or charged to the school budget. Often teachers are told that there are
posts available , but only on “teacher assistant” pay rates – about half the
teacher rate..
The Private Finance
Initiative is the major source of funding for new school building – and it
underpins the Government’s massive “Building Schools For the Future” programme
of refurbishing or rebuilding every secondary school in the country of a 15
year cycle. Not only does the PFI company get a huge return on its initial
investment, but it also manages the school buildings and site, employing
maintenance staff and letting out the school facilities “out of hours”. The
profits are huge. BSF money from government to Local Authorities is conditional
on the Authority agreeing to “diversity and choice” – ie their active
participation in developing Academy and
So if marketisation and
commodification are the order of the day – how do we understand the process?
The concept of society
revolving around the production and exchange of commodities is the central
feature of capitalism, as Marx explained – and in these days of the current
crisis of finance capital, and the developing recession, everybody is quoting Marx. Under capitalism, everything becomes a
commodity, everything can be sold – and the principal focus of production is
not on production for usefulness – “use value” – but on production for profit
through “exchange value”. Products are just a means to the end of the
accumulation of profit. The money system dominates all social relations and
“needs” – so society is not a means of meeting the real needs of its members,
just the desire on the part of the capitalist to accumulate profit. Thus the
famous “There is no such thing as society…” remark from Thatcher.
Marx wrote of the
“fetishisation” of commodities by which commodities are marketed as though they
necessarily have intrinsic value. This masks both the real motivation in their
production – profit – and the class relationships of the society that produces,
sells and fetishises those commodities.
Of course there is another
central commodity involved in this production process. Labour power – the
ability of the producer, the worker to sell their labour power. And it is in
the underpayment for that labour power that the employer extracts surplus vale,
exploiting the worker to make profit.
Marx defines labour power
thus “…the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a
human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any
description”
Teachers and lecturers
both apply and sell their labour power as a commodity, and in the process
create a new commodity – the labour power of the next generation of workers.
It could be said that
teachers and lecturers are the most central part of the labour force in an
advanced capitalist society that requires workers generally to have high levels
of certain knowledge, abilities and skills. However, the independence and
ability to question the system that good teaching also produces are to say the
least inconvenient to the capitalist system.
We can see that within a
marketised and commodified education system, there is an imperative to reduce education
to a system of narrow vocational training for many students.
In schools and FE Colleges
this is reflected in the government’s 14-19 agenda, supported by all the
parliamentary parties. Though they state the complete opposite, this widens the
gap between vocational education diplomas, and traditional academic “pathways”.
This is also reflected in the expansion of Higher Education “vocational”
degrees and diplomas.
As part of the
commodification process, teachers and lecturers are part of a “profession
previously held in reverent awe” which has been “stripped of its halo” as Marx
wrote.
Professional judgement and
control is undermined through a centralised “what, when and how to teach”
regime, linked to the tests and league tables so central to the commodification
of the whole education process.
Teachers and lecturers
constantly complain of crushing workloads brought about by bureaucratic systems
and too many students to a class.
Teacher qualifications are
undermined, and legal changes have been made to allow teaching assistants without
qualified teacher status to do teachers’ jobs at half the rate of pay – in the
name of “workforce remodelling” and “flexibility”
Initial Teacher Training/Education
has been stripped of philosophy, of understanding of history and pedagogy, and
is now largely focussed on “tick box” competencies – encouraging new teachers
to conform to new deprofessionalised regimes. Increasingly new teachers stay in
the profession for less than five years.
Finally National pay and conditions
are undermined, and individual pay bargaining through performance pay and
competition for “responsibility payments” is encouraged.
All of these are essential
if the privatisation agenda is to be completed.
As education is
fragmented, marketised, commodified and finally privatised –moving it from the
world of “public service” to that of commodity “exchange value” production, to
the world of profit, the teaching profession is facing the same issues as any
other group of workers. They face the same issues of overwork, “flexibility”
and job insecurity that others face… and, where profit is extracted from the
process, they too are exploited through the sale of their labour power.
It is essential that
teachers particularly, and working people generally understand this process and
why it is occurring. It is not a result of “bad policy”, of the government
“failing to hear our message”, of “out of touch politicians”.
It is the result of the
determination of capitalism to establish the dominance of commodity production
for profit, analysed by Marx 150 years ago.