I was very pleased to attend the seminar, representing my political party ("Bill in his own write"). The subject matter was the fragmentation, deregulation and privatisation of education systems in Europe, and the nature of the curriculum within the context of 'globalisation'. . I report it to you as its focus is very central to us at the moment, though clearly I was not representing the Union.

 

It was clear that the pressures for fragmentation, marketisation and privatisation – while variously presented, and leading to varying processes – are being experienced across national boundaries.

 

The main thrust of the Conference was to examine the Lisbon strategy/agenda – which is the result of the EU ministers meeting in Lisbon in 2000, revisited in 2005 to review progress on the 2000 objectives. These original objectives were concerned with education, employment, community development & cohesion and the ecology. The 2005 revisit effectively “slimmed” the objectives to accelerating the neoliberal agenda in education and employment. The Conference also considered the Bologna Process – mainly concerned with Higher Education, which the Seminar came to call the “Bolognisation” process. In fact the Seminar generally saw the main targets – in immediate terms – as being Further and Higher Education, “Lifelong Learning” etc – as is reflected in the general response to the European Service Directive.

A number of West European parties  ) also raised the threat to schools through legislation such as the current Education & Inspections Bill here, coupled with GATS – and with the US voucher system offering a route from a fragmented and marketised service to full profit making privatisation.

 

Contribution from the British delegation.

 In making some remarks on the crisis facing British education, or specifically the situation in England, as Scotland and Wales have education systems largely run by national Assemblies currently with more progressive policies, I want to begin with a few contextual quotes.

 

“In the wake of other major public services which have been subject to extensive privatisation and deregulation, public education is increasingly being targeted by predatory and powerful entrepreneurial interests. The latter are aiming at nothing less than its dismantling by subjecting it to international competition…”  Education International, February 2000

“In the global economy where neo-liberal values of privatisation and market competition are dominant, it is crucial for those committed to public education to reaffirm the principle that education is a right and not a merchandise…. The forces of economic globalisation, rapid technological changes in information technology, and the increasing commercialisation and privatisation of teaching and research are radically reshaping education. At the same time, efforts to expand the scope and application of international trade and investment regimes, through instruments like the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), threaten to impose serious constraints on the ability of governments to implement educational policies in response to these challenges. At its heart, the GATS is much more than a trade agreement. It is a legally binding instrument that commits members to a liberalisation agenda, not just by eliminating barriers to trade and investment, but also by encouraging and locking-in domestic regulation in the form of privatisation, deregulation, and the contracting out of public services. We strongly believe that, at it root, GATS is in conflict with educational values. GATS is a commercial agreement designed to expand business opportunities for private investors. Education, by contrast is a human right and public good that must not be treated as a commodity subject to commercial trade rules.”   Education International ‘TradEducation’, March 2006

“There are two essential challenges of modernisation. The first is to create an economy fully attuned to a new global market. The second is to fashion a modern welfare state where the role of Government changes so it does not necessarily provide all social provision.”

Tony Blair at the Trades Union Congress, September 1997

 

“The public sector cannot hope to match the incentives of the private sector. The way forward for education is to bring in these incentives. Education is far too important to be excluded from the virtues of the profit motive...” Professor James Tooley, Newcastle University, UK –neoliberal theorist.

 

Every aspect of the education service in England, from early years education, primary and secondary schooling, to further and higher education – and on to employment based vocational training… every aspect is currently undergoing attack. Educational opportunities and the pay, conditions and status of education workers are threatened. I want to focus today on the attack on schools.

 

Current and recent areas of struggle include

·         “Workforce remodelling” – the attempted substitution of colleagues without teaching qualifications to replace qualified teachers is intended to cut costs, increase exploitation, and undermine trade unionism. Currently fought on a school by school basis

·         Pay cuts and individualised pay bargaining – by abolishing established pay allowances, and introducing a new system designed to cost less overall, the Government attempted to encourage teachers to compete with each other for pay. The strength of the school union group is crucial.

·         Pensions – Government proposals to raise the pension age for teachers and other public sector workers were defeated by the threat of united public sector strike action. Local government workers are still in struggle over this.

·         Testing & “league tables” – schools forced to administer inappropriate tests and publish  “league tables” purporting to give parents “evidence” of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ schools

·         The Education Bill – establishes private control – voluntary groups, faith groups, businesses – over many schools to be known as Trust Schools. Blair asserts that he wants every school to be a Trust School, an independent school – with the ability to “innovate” with the curriculum, management practices and teachers’ pay and conditions.

·         Different “pathways” and schools – for “academic” pupils and a narrow “vocational” curriculum for “disaffected” pupils

 

To read the documentation you would think that we as teachers were to be part of an invigorating process of developing “choice”, “diversity”, “flexibility”, “innovation” and “expansion of opportunity”. But from experience, teachers know that the process is one of fragmentation, deregulation, growing inequalities, exploitation, marketisation and privatisation – in pursuit of Blair’s “two essential challenges of modernisation”.

 

The first, “to create an economy fully attuned to a new global market.” – ie. an economy that demands high levels of knowledge, application and innovatory approaches from relatively small numbers of workers, and, from the majority, high levels of “flexibility”, compliance, geographical mobility, and willingness to compete with other workers for jobs and pay. Such workers do not even have to be ‘produced’ by the national education system. They can be ‘bought in’ as migrant labour when required, or the work can be exported to where they are ready for super-exploitation. Blair’s “new economy” is one in which manufacturing jobs are being destroyed faster than they were under the Thatcher onslaught and in which the poverty gap between rich and poor is increasing.

 

The second of Blair’s “essential challenges” was to fragment and privatise the public services. State ownership of some industries and services has long been a feature of the UK. Social-democrats encouraged workers to believe that Britain was a “mixed economy” in which there would always be a substantial public sector. They claimed that the motivation for this state ownership was social fairness and progress.  In fact workers had campaigned and fought for the state to play this role – starting with the post war Labour Government. But, of course, this was never the motivation of the state. The state acted on behalf of monopoly capitalism in taking control of certain industries, and providing essential services for their benefit. 

 

Big Business has always had their eyes on the big money in these industries and services. The infamous Private Finance Initiative (PFI) is one case in point. It began under the Tories, and continues to this day as an economic and political weapon. Private finance capital is used to build a hospital, school, sports centre, public building etc. The public authority then leases or ‘rents’ the building back for a 25 or 30-year period, paying far more over that time than the cost incurred in the first place. The private company then charges a fee to manage the building during that time, and also employs many of the workers who were previously public employees. By driving down their wages and conditions, by cutting maintenance costs, by charging high management fees, by 101 hiring out the facilities commercially, the PFI companies make their profits, in addition to the ‘rent’. And the Government is able to say that this is private spending – and so stay within EU limits on public expenditure.

 

In the 1980s, when PFI was just beginning, the privatisation process became known as the Thatcher revolution. It served two purposes. Firstly, profit. Secondly, a context for a frontal attack on trades unionism and the jobs, pay and conditions of millions of workers – an attack for which our trade union movement was far from prepared.

 

Thatcher did not dare to propose the privatisation of schools. Education for the most part survived as a public service – albeit starved of funding, housed in crumbling buildings with demoralised and massively overworked staff – and significantly, as a result, with a loss of confidence in some schools – particularly those in the inner cities – on the part of parents and communities.

 

It is important that we understand a little of the history of UK schools. In 1870 the state first intervened in the provision of education. The 1870 Act of Parliament providing that the uneven and unequal patchwork of voluntary provision of schools – largely through the Church – was massively supplemented by new state schools. All children received a very basic ‘elementary education’ – the result of both the demand by capitalists for literate and numerate workers, and by workers and our organisations for social progress.

 

Despite very different motivations, there was an apparent “consensus” of both capital and labour that following the War, the physical and social reconstruction of Britain should include all children being educated beyond any level or standard seen before. But they were to be “selected” by test at 11 for “academic” education in Grammar schools, “technical” education for those with a particular vocational aptitude, and for “senior/secondary modern” schools, which would provide a lower level education, usually without qualification, and preparation for life as a worker.

 

G C T Giles, the President of the National Union of Teachers in 1944, put it like this, “The Government and the general public can count on the enthusiastic support of the National Union of Teachers in establishing in post-war Britain a reconstructed, unified, democratic system of education. But can equality be achieved within the three types of school? Or must we, as my experience convinces me, evolve from our rich tradition and history a school of a new type, more in line with modern life – a synthesis of all that is best in our senior, grammar and technical schools.” Thus, even before the new “tripartite” system was underway, progressive educationalists, trades unionists and socialists were arguing for the development of the “common school” or the comprehensive school system, as it became known.

 

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the struggle against the selection and division of children for different educational curricula and schools was waged - increasingly successfully. The research indicated then, as it does now, that the factor most affecting educational success is social class – parental employment, income, housing, nutrition etc. Selection for different types of schools inevitably identified working class children as ‘less able’, created a sense of failure in them, and then reinforced the situation by providing a lower level education. The struggle for comprehensive education was, and is a genuine class struggle.

 

This struggle was never completely won. 10% of UK children still live in areas where schools never became comprehensives. All schools reflected the social class composition of their neighbourhoods. Some schools were more “popular” and better funded than others. Those in the inner cities continued to be housed in substandard buildings with corresponding facilities. But, though comprehensive education never developed to its potential, there were huge advances in the educational attainment of working class children - at every stage attacked by those who reject the very concept of high-level working class education. They spread misinformation about the new schools. They trivialise the achievements of the teachers and pupils. They vilify schools and teachers, and demonise young people living in the most disadvantaged areas. They attack both the concept and operation of comprehensive and, for that matter, all state schools – and propagandise for the small private sector, encouraging “the public” to think that “private is always better”.

 

GCT Giles had warned in 1944, “The reactionary die-hard forces, which too often in the past have succeeded in strangling educational and social progress have not undergone a sudden and miraculous change of heart. They will have their successors.”

 

Indeed they have. Over the last two decades we have seen repeated attempts by both Tory and “New Labour” Governments to undermine state education and to force schools to compete with each other. These have been resisted by teachers’ unions and other organisations – parents, school governors etc – and have been largely unsuccessful. Local Management of Schools, Education Action Zones, the Assisted Places Scheme, City Technology Colleges, “opting out”, Grant Maintained Schools– these and many more initiatives, each of which would take too long to describe, became horribly familiar and threatening to education workers. Each encouraged schools to compete rather than co-operate. Each meant that some schools (a few) were better funded than others (most). Each encouraged school managers to disregard teachers’ national pay and conditions arrangements, and local policies agreed with the unions. Each encouraged individual schools to go their own way. Each insisted on the further and deeper involvement and control of the ‘private sector’, of capitalism and capitalists – and their market mechanisms.

 

But teachers had become very adept at “subverting” attacks if not defeating them – and none of these schemes made the impact that governments had hoped, most being incorporated by teachers and “defused”.

 

More successful from the Government point of view was their publication of a narrow range of school results in the form of “league tables” of schools. They established in the public mind that there were “good schools” and “bad schools” – and that “bad schools” and “bad teachers” should be punished. They have also been more successful in undermining the professional standards of teachers by enforcing “workforce remodelling” – a deregulation process that replaces teachers with workers without teaching qualifications, enforced by inadequate budgets and leading to ‘cheap labour’ solutions

 

This brings me to the current Education Bill. It is the most important piece of legislation that the Blair Government is introducing. Yet despite the large Labour majority in parliament, Blair needs the support of the Tories to get it through. In the last vote, 52 Labour MPs voted against, 25 abstained; others voted in favour under great duress from Labour Party ‘Whips’, yet others voted in favour in order to gain credibility for amendments they want to put that will wreck the Bill!

 

Outside of parliament, all the education Unions, the TUC, the Labour Party’s Socialist Education Association the parent’s organisations and many broad coalitions of education campaigners are opposed. A campaign that has to date focussed on lobbying MPs is about to be rejuvenated by turning its attention to building broad coalitions in every community around every school to voice opposition.

 

The Government wanted to avoid this debate. It introduced PFI without debate, by coercion. It was simple. If a school Governing Body refused to take PFI money and control, there would be no money for buildings. The school, its pupils and staff would be left to rot. Some took that principled position. Many more – in fact most – succumbed to the pressure. As some defeatist TUC leader said at the time, “It’s the only card game in town…” In other words, blackmail.

 

Similarly with “Academies”. If you have £2million you can ‘buy’ an Academy and give it your own name if you want to. The Government provide another £25-30million to build your school. They go on meeting the costs out of public money, but you, your private company, your religious group etc. actually run the school. We have Academies run by a used-car salesman Christian fundamentalist, whose schools teach “creationism” straight out of the bible “as a theory equal to that of evolution”. We have Academies run by a chain of carpet warehouses. We are going to have “Skills Academies” which will be lead by local employers, where “skills” are taught by non-teachers, and children of 14 are sent to work for two days each week. Again, unless we the workers force the issue, the Government gets away with no debate. Local Authorities are told that unless they accept Academies locally, there will be no money to refurbish schools in their areas.

 

But now, a more systematic approach to destruction. The Education and Inspections Bill. This Bill would provide all the necessary legislative framework for the break up of not just comprehensive education, but state education itself. It is intended to be, in Blair’s words, “irreversible”. Of course that is not how it is presented. It is presented as a Bill all about “freedom of schools”, about “diversity of communities”, about “choice for parents”.

 

At its heart lie “Trust Schools”. A Trust School is either an existing school or a new school that forms a “partnership” with another body – which could be a voluntary group, a “faith group” or a local business etc, and runs itself as an independent school – ie independent of the state, local and national, which provides the funding out of taxpayers money. The Trust will own the property and the land, appoint the Governors, decide the curriculum, employ the staff, and can ask the Secretary of State for Education for the right to “be innovative with” (ie abandon) teachers’ national pay and conditions

 

In addition to this fragmentation, parents are told that they can choose where to send their children. Schools will be encouraged to compete for pupils and use all the techniques of the market place. Free transport will be provided to take children out of their own community to a school of their parents’ choice. “Popular” schools will be provided with “high-quality temporary classrooms” to accommodate these extra pupils. “Unpopular” schools will have their funding cut as they lose children. If they get too small, they will be closed. The children lose a school, the community loses a major resource….  and parents lose their so-called “choice”. Of course, the “popular” school will actually choose which children it wants, and which it doesn’t. The latter will just have to attend the “unpopular” school. We anticipate that there will be a large number of very unhappy schools, with disaffected and demoralised pupils… but the Government has thought of this. It is proposing to offer a different curriculum for such pupils and such schools. A “vocational” work-based “pathway” for the difficult pupil – while others follow an “academic” pathway leading to University.

 

But even where there is opposition to the Bill, there is a surprising lack of analysis about why Blair is attacking comprehensive state education. Yet the answers are clear. The demands of global capital are not hard to discern. They are written in the still-just-alive European Constitution, in the very-much-alive European Services Directive, and in the World Trade Organisation’s General Agreement on Trade In Services. They are in the neoliberal papers of the Lisbon strategy so recently revisited and revitalised. Make no mistake. The Education Bill is not the end of the story. It is intended that once it has done its job of fragmenting the English education system, that system will be subject to the GATS legally enforceable regulations (their own emphasis). Just three years ago, New Labour Lord Adonis, now Education Minister, then No 10 personal adviser to Blair, took a number of opinion-forming education journalists to Milwaukee to see a full blown privatised voucher-based education system. And everyone knows, when America sneezes, the UK catches cold.

 

So our policy of opposition to fragmentation, deregulation, and marketisation must be broad enough and deep seated enough to apply enormous pressure. There are Unions in Britain who don’t think this is possible. So in the politics of desperation, they get deeply embedded with Government in a “Social Partnership”, with closed confidential discussions, agreements by all involved to promote any agreements reached, and with no influence from their members.  Those who fight and campaign – like my union the NUT are excluded from such partnership. But those who are involved, have lost their way, and are increasingly lost. Now they seek compromise deals with Government, and minor concessions, which they then seek to sell to their members as ‘great advances’. It is the opposite of the organising agenda for unions and communities that we need to develop in order to meet the attack. So we have to fight on a number of fronts - one within our own workers’ movement.

 

In Britain, we have the TUC as a major forum and organising centre for our Unions. Until the last Congress of the TUC in September 2005, the TUC leadership had been promoting the European Union as a source of all things pleasant – with no mandate for doing so, and choosing to ignore the EU’s neoliberal privatisation agenda. This began under Margaret Thatcher, when the social legislation from the EU seemed to offer some protection from her government’s onslaught.

 

But in fact, even as it became more than apparent that Trade Union members recognised the EU as a bosses’ club with a neoliberal rulebook, the TUC leaders maintained their position of support. John Monks, then the General Secretary of the TUC, and major fan of the EU, was even prepared to admit in the press that he was “out of step” with the overwhelming majority of Union members. The fact is he allowed himself and the TUC to be used as surrogates by the Labour Party, who, knowing how unpopular the EU is with the British people wanted the TUC to promote first “the Euro” and then the proposed Constitution… in order to keep Labour’s hands clean.  TUC Congress of 2006 I am pleased to say decisively rejected the EU constitution recognising it as a tool of the transnational privatisation agenda. Subsequently the TUC has taken a much more positive line. But the point is that we need to make the connection between the Education Bill, similar attacks on other public services, and the world agenda of monopoly capitalism as expressed through the “globalised” structures and organisations I’ve referred to, including the European Union.

 

To end with positive news. At a packed meeting in a House of Commons committee room very recently, 14 Trade Union General Secretaries and Executive members pledged themselves to build community campaigns around the slogan “Public Services, Not Private Profit”. In June there will be a demonstration at Parliament, bringing together all the issues of deregulation, fragmentation and privatisation across all our public services… giving renewed energy to local organisation to defend education and to develop our own community based policies for educational development.

 

Workers are under attack in Britain, and education workers are in the front line. United action of working people to defend all public services will actually succeed in protecting education – it can’t be done as a special case, though it provides a very sharp focus. Unity is everything, both within Britain, and with you in your similar struggles. Let me finish by again quoting GCT Giles in 1944. “With the aid of the common people we can conquer the future for all children; with their aid we can secure as the prize of our victory over Fascism and Reaction a free and prosperous Britain. That victory will open up new opportunities, new hopes and new visions. It will lay upon us the responsibility of seeing that these hopes are not betrayed.”

 

 

Press release

“The participants, delegates of 18 communist parties and scientists from 19 countries, considered the meeting as particularly timely and constructive, making a significant contribution to the joint communist and workers’ parties initiatives, which had been put forward in the international meeting of communist and workers´ parties held in Athens in November 2005.

They greeted and expressed their full solidarity with the mass, militant struggle of the young and working people in France, for the immediate withdrawal of the offensive law for the “First Employment Contract”, which aims at the direct implementation of the reactionary “Lisbon Strategy”. The participants stated their commitment towards the further development of the international solidarity movement and stressed the need that solidarity is expressed in a more coordinate and determined way within the numerous resistance struggles in the education field, throughout Europe.

Through the facts presented by the participants, it has become clear that a widespread sweeping attack is currently taking place, both within and outside of the EU, in the field of education, in order to reform it in a reactionary direction.  This attack, as has been stressed by the participants, is the result of the international demand of capital to adapt education and human beings to harsher, more exploitative “new” working relations and living conditions; to intensify the manipulation and control of the minds of the young generation. Several speakers underscored the devastating effects that the Bologna process will have on the highest education.

Especially following the Lisbon Summit, as well as the discussions in the frame of GATS, the course of adapting education to the rules of the capitalist market has been accelerated, since this is dictated by the efforts to deal with the crisis, the quest of new sectors of activity for the big capital, as well as the acute competition of the markets of the three imperialist centers (EU, USA, Japan).

This explains why education restructuring, in spite of differences in pace and methods in each country, has common characteristics, like the following:

 1. The expansion of privatization, by decreasing the state expenses on education and by transferring the cost of education straight to learners and their families; also by the intrusion of private entrepreneurs into fundamental operations of education of all levels, beginning with Higher Education. This privatisation entails the operation of state education units on competitive, private-sector criteria, as well as the pursuit of means of self-financing, through the profiteering invasion of the private sector as “sponsors”.

 2. The strengthening of selection mechanisms and of class barriers aiming at the social selection of the elite, and the exclusion of the majority of students to short term vocational, instead of systematic, broad education; also, aiming at the division and classification of students of all levels in class differentiated categories and forms of education and training.

 3. The narrowing of general education and the flagrant commercialization and downgrading of knowledge through the substitution of mass education by individual forms of “life-long learning”, utilitarian skills and subservient “competencies”, for life-long wandering between training and unemployment.

 4. Discrimination against immigrants, nationalistic and chauvinistic stances, the defamation of peoples and other cultures by promoting in the same time “euro-nationalism”.

 5. The complete perversion of the social mission of science through the control of its orientation, direction, and even its results, by the monopolies and imperialist organizations (NATO, EU), which interfere in a flagrant way and determine the scientific activity of universities and research institutions.

6. Systematic measures of obscurity, of anti-dialectic outlook on social evolution, of distortion and defamation of national liberation, social, antifascist and class oriented struggles, as well as attempts for the penalisation of any resistance and any progressive and communist ideology.

The participants noted that the harsh consequences, for the working class and the people, of the education restructuring, and agreed to take steps to demolish the myth of the bourgeois policy that it is an attempt to qualitatively renew and modernise education on the basis of evolution in science, technology and production. Within this framework, it was underscored that the modern response of the workers’ movement should be the essential, and currently viable, quantitative and qualitative expansion of broad education of all young people, as a minimum prerequisite for any life-long choice and for the upgrading of vocational or scientific education that will be followed.

 At the same time, the delegates condemned the deeply hypocritical claim of governments and of the EU, that the restructuring aims at fighting unemployment, underlining that the reasons for unemployment are not to be attributed to education, but to the capitalistic mode of production, which presupposes a permanent reserve of unemployed people in order to compress the demands of the workers to the lowest level and to intensify their exploitation.

Quite a few participants noted that the resistance and the struggles will be intensified. That in the face of the uniform strategy of the reactionary forces, there is an immediate need to intensify the joint processes and exchange of experiences regarding all education levels; to strengthen the bonds with the young people, with teachers, the parents and other personalities involved in education; to take concrete steps towards strengthening solidarity with the struggles for a better education.

 The participants, expressed their readiness to intensify their cooperation, coordination and efforts on a national and European level, struggling for:

 • A Unified Popular Education, through a free and state education system, in contrast to the privatised and class-differentiated education, which extends social inequalities, actually starting from an early age. This need a general public refinancing of education.

 •  Scientific research at the service of modern needs of the people, not of the monopolies, in order for science to stop being a tool for the acquisition of more profits and of overexploitation of the workers; for it to become a means for people to free themselves from material deprivation and intellectual chains.

 •  The coordination of the education movement with the workers’ popular movement in a joint struggle against the capitalist restructuring in education, work and social life, against monopolies and imperialist institutions which impose a deeply class oriented policy. A struggle which will aim both at the imperative rebuilding of education and the reorganisation of society as a whole. This is because, as long as profit is the measure of progress, neither education, nor science or people can be above it. Besides, problems in education derive from general social problems, and as such it is one of the most important issues which demonstrates the necessity and contemporary relevance of socialism. 

 In order to put forward the above mentioned objectives, significant contributions could be actions such as

 1.  Systematic mutual exchange of information on the current developments as well as the periodical sharing of conclusions and joint action in the face of the measures deriving from the EU and other imperialist institutions.

2. To project and disseminate the fundamental elaborations and proposals of the parties and of progressive marxist intellectuals from the field of education.

 3. To examine the possibility of joint initiatives on a European level, either taken by the parties or by the movement with the opening of the new school year at September, as well as at the end of 2006 and on other occasions

 4. To inform each other and coordinate action, so that solidarity is more systematically expressed on party and movement level.

 5. To promote joint action within the movements and the intensification of the ideological front of struggle, taking into consideration the fact that education is an important tool of ideological control.

 6. To address an appeal and invitation to progressive intelligentsia and teachers, to resist the reactionary reforms, not to yield or allow themselves to be converted into tools and vehicles of the new reactionary reforms

 

 

 

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