Seminar on the commodification of education
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
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
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 homogeonised 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 our Party pamphlet on Education department “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 demonstarate the “public outcomes” of
their investment. The result is a narrowing of the range of reasearch
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 docially 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 in February 2008
“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
11 March 2008
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 enable “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.
So… what is to be done? Over to you….