Australian Education Union Conference
New South Wales Teachers’ Federation
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T |
he New South Wales
Teachers Federation – part of the Australian Education Union - has about
70,000 members. It has a Council of 300 locally elected representatives that
meets about every 5 or 6 weeks, and 18 member Executive that meets every 2
weeks. Conference consists of both policy reports and recommendations from
these bodies - subject to amendment and debate from the delegates - original
motions form local braches, presentations etc.
I was the Conference international
guest – my contribution forming a "keynote presentation". The Australian
Thatcherite National-Liberal government under the leadership of Howard is
likely to be defeated in the coming General Election, by the “New Labour” Labor
Party under the leadership of Rudd. I was invited to be a “keynote speaker” on
the experience of Blair’s decade on education – “Education and the neoliberal
agenda”
Blair’s decade in
education:
Education and the neoliberal agenda
Bill’s speech to New South Wales Teachers Federation Conference, 2nd July 2007. He used powerpoint presentation to back his speech up
Slide 1
Our nations are bound
together by both the history of imperialism and colonialism, and also by
working class history. The cruelties and injustices which accompanied the
colonisation of Australia by the British ruling class, and their attacks on the
aboriginal people – physical, psychological, social and political – were
reflected in the attacks on the working people in Britain.
I can’t apologise for the
devastating harm that was inflicted on the indigenous people of Australia. It
is not my place. It was not inflicted by my class. But I can express and extend
solidarity to them, and to generations of ordinary working class Australians
It gives me great pleasure
to be with you at this time of change for both our nations – potentially real
social change, and potentially a politically “spun” illusion of change. It’s
largely up to us, by our own efforts and those of trades unionists generally to
make it the former rather than the latter – nothing will be given to us.
Slide 2
Let me tell you a little
bit about the National Union of Teachers. We are the oldest and largest of the
British teaching unions – and the only one that recruits only qualified
teachers, and all qualified teachers from Newly Qualified to
Headteachers– the equivalent of your School Principals - from nursery and early
years to post-16 education. In fact we are the largest union of teachers in
Europe. Our policy is to work towards establishing a single union for all
teachers in Britain, and we work hard at it. We are acutely aware that disunity
amongst our five teacher unions in Britain plays directly into the hands of
those opposed to us.
But its also our policy
to remain absolutely independent of the government and employers. Very
dangerously in our view, there are both in Britain and further afield
government attempts to head off opposition to their policies by incorporating
favoured trade unions into “Social Partnership” arrangements with employers and
government – offering a place at their table, but with strings that tie the
union participants to “selling” the outcome of these private talks to their
members. This “Social Partnership” arrangement denies the nature of our
society. It denies that there are differences between the interests of workers
and employers - and thus differences with any government that is dominated by
the employers – and that these interests are often irreconcilable differences.
Such differences are most often seen in terms of pay, working conditions,
working hours etc – but may be reflected in a wide range of policy issues. The
fact is we are NOT all in the same boat – and it essential that workers are
directly represented by their unions – essential not just for the section of
workers concerned – in our case teachers – but for the very basis of democratic
society. The elimination of opposition by its incorporation into the machinery
of the employers or the state under New Labour is as big an attack on democracy
as was the imprisonment of trade union leaders and the sequestration of union
funds under the Thatcher government. Both attempt to emasculate and silence our
trade union movement.
The NUT will not take
part in these ‘Partnership’ arrangements; our role is to represent the views of
our members to government – not vice-versa! And so the government seeks to
isolate and attack the NUT whenever possible, and to promote those unions that
agree to their “Partnership” terms.
I became a teacher in
1975, and joined the union straight away… and was soon a local officer. I wear
my National Vice-President badge with great pride, but with equal pride I wear
another one too. Actually, it’s six badges welded together by a metalwork
teacher mate of mine –from the different branches of the Union that I’ve been a
local branch officer in over the last three decades. You know you can imagine
the National Union getting by without its five national officers – though we’d
be a real loss! But you can’t imagine my union, any union, getting by without
its local branch officers who are the lifeblood of the organisation.
And that I think puts the
whole thing in context. Unions need to be led by their members and activists -
we need to organise from the bottom up, not top down… so it is a real pleasure
to meet here not just your national leadership but all of you so vital to the
success of your union and the whole movement – and I hope I will get to spend
some time with some of you while I’m here.
When I had just been
elected Vice-President I went to my own branch meeting, and I suppose I was
feeling pretty pleased with myself. It must have showed, because an old friend
greeted me and said, “So, Bill… you’re getting near the top of the tree now!” I
sort of nodded and he went on, “Well, just remember that expert tree climber,
the monkey – the higher up the tree he climbs, the more the rest of us get a
good look at his less attractive features.”
Slide 3
Good advice I think
Slide 4
In Australia you are
preparing for an Election. In Britain our Labour Party – currently the party of
government - formed by the Trade Unions and born as the party of the working
class out of the struggle for democracy and progress has just enthroned a new
leader.
It may well be that he,
hoping for what is known as the “Brown Bounce” – an increase in public support
for Labour simply as a result of the passing of Blair – coupled with a
reluctance on the part of the unions to provide any succour to the
Conservatives, might call a snap election. They will need not just a change of
leader, but a radical change of policy if they are not to risk defeat.
Slide 5
You would not be wrong in
thinking that we all have been living through pivotal times in educational,
political and trade union terms. As newer forms of long established economic
and political relations in the world have developed – forms known collectively
as “globalisation” – market forces have come to dominate ever more
strongly – and have even been held to
be synonymous with concepts of “freedom” and “democracy”, while in fact new
coercive politics have actually taken the field… and education has suffered.
The Trade Union movement
and the wider education community have found ourselves on the defensive, and
too much into crisis management. But, at times such as these I am comforted by
the fact (at least I was told it as a fact) that the Chinese have no single
character for “crisis”. They use two characters in combination. And those two
characters are “dangerous” and “opportunity”. I believe that this is how we
should regard the situation we are facing – and thus work carefully and with
determination to minimise the danger and maximise the opportunity.
Certainly, there can be
no moratorium on “change” – and that applies to the world of education as much
as any other. It is a natural and inevitable part of the march of history. Our
task both as Trades Unionists representing working people, and as the educators
of a new generation is not to resist change, but to struggle to take charge of
it, and to change the “line of march”, the “direction of travel” dictated to us
by the neoliberal politics emerging from the globalisation process.
Collectivity, not
individualism… the common good, not dog-eat-dog… are our way. They are not
things of the past, but things of the future for which we must be prepared to
fight. Education for the people, to meet the needs of all children and the
whole of society, rather than the commodification of education and its
subservience to the demands of the private sector… that is our mission.
Blair’s attack on state
comprehensive education has been different in many ways to that which preceded
it, but at the same time can be seen to have been a continuation of a process
started much earlier than their election in 1997.
Slide 7
At the end of the 1970s,
the then Labour Government’s inability to tackle social inequality in terms of
both wealth and power made them deeply unpopular with organised workers.
Part of this process –
for us teachers - was the launching by Prime Minister Callaghan of the “Great
Education Debate”, which appeared to give ground and legitimacy to those who
had opposed comprehensive education from its foundation.
As a consequence of its
policies the Labour Government faced widespread industrial action in 1979’s
“winter of discontent” – large scale public sector strike action. This led to
the Government’s demise, just as widespread trade union militancy had finished
off the Tory Government that came before them. The Labour Government certainly
had more stomach for fighting organised workers than attempting to limit the
powers of the employing class. The chaos caused by the resulting conflict lost
Labour the 1979 election.
Slide 8
But the election of 1979
marked a sea change in British politics. The newly elected Tories were New
Tories. Leading a radical group of right-wingers (to put it politely) in the
Tory Party Margaret Thatcher set about isolating what she called “wets”, and
embarking enthusiastically on what we now know as the neo-liberal agenda.
She presided over the
massive loss of jobs in the industrial base, wrote off the inner-cities and set
about denigrating the public sector and its workers… and developed an
all-inclusive privatisation agenda.
She backed all this up
with a sweeping “reform” of Trade Union law designed to undermine union democracy,
take the teeth out of strike action, make solidarity action illegal and to
threaten Unions with sequestration of funds and imprisonment of leaders should
they decide to ignore these draconian laws. Apart from a very few exceptions,
these laws remain in force today, despite 10 years of Labour Government.
Generally we have to
recognise that she was successful in undermining trade union and collective
thinking – and in staying in power. Eventually she went, very much weakened and
generally despised by the mass of workers… stabbed in the back by her own
people in order to hang onto power.
Slide 9
Throughout these years,
within that context, the attack on state comprehensive education was
intensified. Comprehensive education was held to blame for everything from poor
television to gang violence to teenage pregnancies, and for the entirely
fictitious “declining educational standards”, a fiction created by politicians
and media.
There was a funding
famine for education leading to crumbling school buildings, and round after
round of teacher redundancies alongside growing class sizes. State money was
used to subsidise private schools
Democratically elected
Local Education Authorities were marginalised, and schools encouraged to
compete with each other – while others were persuaded to opt out of LEA control
altogether.
Local Authorities that
failed to properly conform were punished through discriminatory funding
mechanisms.
A new breed of school,
the City Technology College was established with public money, run by private
sector companies – and though these never really took off, they provide a
partial model for future – now current – fragmentation of education.
Teachers everywhere found
themselves deprived of collective bargaining rights, seeing their pay eroded,
facing an escalating workload, fearing the loss of their jobs.
Slide10
A national curriculum was
imposed on schools in 1989, causing a massive increase in bureaucratic workload
and policed by the simultaneous imposition of an inflexible, anti-education
“top-down” testing regime and the publication of misleading “league tables” of
schools - Teachers were told by politicians what, when and how to teach.
Slide 11
When a number of Local
Education Authorities, professional bodies, teacher unions etc showed
reluctance to operate this approach to education, the Tory government imposed
OFSTED, the Office for Standards in Education, - a centralised Inspection
Service which would judge schools according to government rules and tick boxes
– and punish those schools and individual teachers “failing” the test.
But eventually, with many
contributory factors, including the dogged opposition and campaigning of the
trade union movement, including my own, the British people had had enough.
Thatcher had been politically assassinated by her own people, and the
pernicious class war governments of the Tories were becoming increasingly
associated with corruption and sleaze.
Slide 12
But a great deal of
damage had been done to the Labour Party – and what was known as “The Project”
was well underway. This was led by a smallish group, just as Thatcher’s coup in
the Tories had been. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were at the heart of “The
Project”.
This group declared
Labour “unelectable” for as long as it was identified with working class and
progressive politics – including progressive educational policy. They embraced
the “free market” and “globalisation”, rather than the weak form of social
democracy that had gone before, as the salvation of humankind.
And it was this Labour
Party – presenting itself as “Cool Britannia” and using the lyrics of BritPop
songs rather than Labour Movement anthems that came to power in 1997.
There was such a sense of
relief – even euphoria - that the Tories had gone, very few people wanted to
look too closely at what we had elected.
Slide13
So Blair came to the TUC
– our trade union central Congress – just a couple months after his election to
spell it out for us in no uncertain terms.
“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.”
September 1997
Around the same time,
though, Blair declared the three priorities of his Government to be “education,
education, education”, and this raised great hopes amongst teachers.
Moves to end the funding
famine (though much of this depended on private investment on a for-profit
basis as I will explain later), and particularly to lower and restrict class
sizes for Key Stage 1 children, won the support of teachers. But these same
teachers were soon to find though that much of what had been established by
Thatcher and subsequent Tory Governments – both educational and general social,
economic and political policy was to remain in place.
Slide 14
That is not to say that
there has not been and still is a struggle within the Labour Party, the
Government and the Department For Education and Skills. These are reflected in
two main policy strands.
The
first – and the dominant strand – is that associated with the mantra of “Diversity
& Choice”, the second with the policy “Every Child Matters”.
“Diversity
& Choice” has
at its heart the notion – given expression by Blair’s personal media spokesman
Alistair Campbell – that the days of “bog standard, one size fits all
comprehensive schools are over” - there should be a range of schools with
different “specialisms”, differently managed, some directly involving the
private sector in management, some run by faith groups, some by the charity and
voluntary sector, some offering vocational ‘pathways’, others ‘academic’
pathways, some with funding sponsors – some disapplying national pay and
conditions agreements…. all competing with each other for pupils, by allowing
‘freedom of choice’ for parents – known to Government as “Choice &
Voice”. The model is one of increasingly independent schools, with
increasing private sector involvement and control.
The other strand – “Every
Child Matters” – is based on schools working together to share expertise,
professional development and an extended
curriculum offer to the whole community - incompatible of course with
the dominant “diversity and choice” agenda.
However, for the most
part Government initiatives in reality promote the first “diversity” strand –
that based on fragmentation, marketisation, commodification and privatisation.
Slide15
Let me be specific and review the major “reforms”, that we have faced – and challenged - under the Blair government. It is interesting to note in this regard the very direct language of the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit document on “The UK Government’s Approach to Public Service Reform”
"Given these goals, the Government's approach to public service reform has four main elements
-
top down performance management (pressure from government);
-
the introduction of greater competition and contestability in the provision of public services;
-
the introduction of greater pressure from citizens including through choice and voice; and
-
measures to strengthen the capability and capacity of civil and public servants and of central and local government to deliver improved public services.
It is clear from this
perhaps that the major policy developments we are facing are little to do with
an education agenda and everything to do with a general macroeconomic and
political agenda of the dominance of “the market” and the globalised economy.
Slide16
Educational
opportunities for children, the duties, pay, conditions and status of education
workers and the very existence of state comprehensive education are threatened.
Each has evoked opposition from the NUT amongst a wide range of organisations
and individuals.
Current
and recent areas of struggle include
·
“Workforce remodelling” – this is the attempted substitution of colleagues without
teaching qualifications – known as “teaching assistants” who have until
recently been just that - to replace qualified teachers in teaching
whole classes. This is intended to cut costs, increase exploitation, and
undermine teacher pay and trade unionism.
·
Teacher Workload. Despite the claims that the “remodelling” exercise is
designed to reduce teacher workload, independent studies have shown that this
workload has not reduced at all during its operation.
·
Teacher Stress. Teaching is recognised as the profession with the highest
incidence of work related stress – not just from workload, but from all four of
the government’s ‘elements’ for bringing about public sector reform. This has
led to problems of recruitment The recruitment of Headteachers – your School
Principals - in particular has reached
crisis proportions.
·
Performance Related Pay,
pay cuts and individualised pay bargaining – by the imposition of a form of performance related pay,
and a new cost-cutting pay structure the Government attempted to encourage
teachers to compete with each other for pay. On a national level the Government
has imposed multi-year “pay freeze” – resulting in actual pay cuts – and has
failed to restore collective bargaining removed under the Tories.
·
Pensions – Government proposals to raise the pension age for existing
teachers and other public sector workers, and to do away with final salary
pension schemes were defeated by the threat of united public sector strike
action.
·
Curriculum change, and
undermining the balanced curriculum. In Primary Schools the SATs tests encouraged “teaching to
the test” and a narrowing of the curriculum despite widespread professional
opposition. In Secondary Schools, the establishment of “diverse and divergent
pathways” from 14, with clearly differentiated academic and vocational routes
threatens to exacerbate already powerful social class divisions.
·
Testing & “league
tables” – schools are forced to
administer inappropriate tests and publish
“league tables” purporting to give parents “evidence” of ‘good’ and
‘bad’ schools – thus undermining teachers’ professional judgement, creating a
sense of tension and failure in many children and damaging the curriculum.
·
“Academies”. For a “sponsorship” of £2 million a private company,
religious groups, wealthy individual etc “buys” a school and is given control
of the buildings, curriculum and employment of workers including teachers. The
Government then puts in about £30million, and picks up all running costs.
We have Academies run by a used-car salesman Christian
fundamentalist, whose schools teach “creationism” straight out of the Bible We
have Academies run by a chain of carpet warehouses, and others by a meat pie
manufacturer.
We are going to have “Skills Academies” which will be led
by local employers, where “skills” are taught by non-teachers, and children of
14 are sent to work for two days each week.
Slide 17
·
“Private Finance
Initiative” – a system by which the
private sector provides funding for major school building capital projects, the
schools then being leased back to Local Authorities over 25 or 30 years,
providing major profits to the PFI provider. This PFI process began under the
Tories as a road construction programme – but now under Labour extends
throughout the public sector – dominating school and hospital building
programmes.
In education it is run locally by a
“joint venture company” including the Local Authority but 80%
owned by the private sector “partners”!
·
“Trust Schools” – again establishes private control – voluntary groups,
faith groups, businesses, acting as a foundation in ostensibly local community
schools. Blair asserted that he wanted every school to be an
“increasingly independent” school – a Trust School or an Academy - 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. Cynically
overturning the report they had commissioned on the issue of vocational and
academic education while purporting to support it, the Government put in place
the provisions for a wider divide and separate education.
To
read the Government 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, as I have described, that the process is one of
fragmentation, deregulation, growing inequalities, exploitation, marketisation
and privatisation – in pursuit of Blair’s “two essential challenges of
modernisation”.
Thatcher
did not dare to propose the privatisation of schools. Now we see a Labour
government putting more money into education – but generally using that money
to take us further along the “direction of travel” towards privatisation.
Following
WW2 there was apparently a post-war consensus in the UK that schools and
education generally had to be part of a rebuilding effort that would increase
social cohesion and provide new opportunities for working class children. But
was it really a consensus, or just a tactical withdrawal on the part of those
who have always stood for privilege and class advantage?
Slide 18
The
NUT President at the time, GCT Giles, a great educationalist, and fighter for
real social change, 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.
Thus
the significance of the recent Education Act, which confirms the further
fragmentation and private sector control of education. The Labour leadership had to gain the
support of the Tory Party in Parliament – who gave it willingly - due to a revolt amongst Labour backbench MPs
which would otherwise have defeated it.
Outside
of Parliament, all the education unions, the TUC, the Labour Party’s Socialist
Education Association the parents’ organisations, many broad coalitions of
education campaigners, academics and many, many others were opposed – but not
strong enough on the ground to stop it.
Thus
the Government wanted and wants to avoid educational debate. It massively expanded
the use of PFI without debate, by coercion. It was simple. If a school
Governing Body refused to take private 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.
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. No debate… just
blackmail.
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.
Of
course, the “popular” oversubscribed school will actually choose which children
it wants, and which it doesn’t, using all sorts of “creative” means to do
so. Those children not selected will
just have to attend the “unpopular” school. So no debate over selection – just
the sleight of hand of “diversity and choice”.
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 high status University entrance.
Selection by the back door.
But
even where there is opposition to these developments, 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 pages of the European Union Constitution and
Directives, 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. We are nowhere near the end of the story. I believe that it is
intended that once the fragmention and marketisation the English education
system is achieved, that system will be subject to the GATS legally
enforceable privatisation regulations.
Slide 19
Just
four 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. They
saw those schools that had attracted the high achieving pupils demanding the
voucher plus top-up fees. Down the road were the losers – the “bog standard”
institutions for those with only the voucher to spend. Privatisation is not
just bad because it leads to private profit from public service… it’s bad
because it leads to low standards for the majority of our pupils.
You
will know that it’s not just me, or the NUT that thinks this way. Our
international education union organisation Educational International
puts it this way,
Slide 20
“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…” February 2000
Slide21
And
again, “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 is a right, not a commodity’ – Education International ‘TradEducation’, March 2006
So
our organisation of opposition to fragmentation, deregulation, and
marketisation must be broad enough and deep seated enough to apply enormous
pressure if we are to overcome these forces, and not just roll over to them -
as very many political parties which have previously purported to represent
working people seem to be doing.
But let’s not stay on the
defensive back foot – it never really inspired anybody. What people are looking
for is a new educational agenda of our own – of teachers, trades unionists and
local communities.
Firstly, lets identify
for ourselves, for our members and for government the real problems, the
real priorities facing education, facing children and their families…
and then let’s develop our own strategies for dealing with them – and measure
the performance of any government against those strategies… our very own
Performance Indicators.
Slide 22
Consider this…
“There are no simple
solutions to deep-seated problems of social, educational and economic
inequality. But in these early years of the twenty-first century, we cannot
accept the fact that too many young people fail to achieve their potential.
The research shows how it
is possible to combine socio-economic classification of the household with the
child’s overall developmental score at age 22 months to accurately
predict educational qualifications at the age of 26 years…. The
statistical analysis also reveals how, by the age of 22 months, children’s
developmental score is already stratified by social class, and how this
stratification has increased significantly by the age of 10 years.”
“Educational Failure & Working Class
White Children In Britain” Gillian Evans 2006
This should be a crime
against the individual – but in fact this under achievement by working class
children is a deep-seated and continuing feature of our social system – despite
having been clear to all for generations and certainly not a new discovery.
So why has it not been
tackled? Why are we as teachers not able to develop a strategy to deal with it?
Is it true that, as Blairite Education Secretary David Blunkett said, “Teachers
use social deprivation as an excuse for failing children.”?
Of course it is not true
– the truth is that successive governments have failed or refused to tackle the
poverty and deprivation that are embedded and essential features of the British
class system.
The wealth/poverty gap is
widening in Britain – last year an additional 200,000 children were recognised
as living in poverty in the UK, bringing the total to 3.8 million.
While educational
strategies can offset and mitigate some effects of the wealth/poverty gap, of
unemployment, poor housing, derelict communities, lack of aspiration etc… in
the end the problem is one that needs tackling at its root.
Poor education does not
cause social inequality and poverty – and therefore good education cannot
overcome it. Class divisions, huge divisions in wealth and access to power are
the result of an economic and political system that is almost defined by them,
and depends on inequality for its existence.
Slide 23
Consider these statistics
from the UK Government Office of
National Statistics
The richest 1% of the UK
population
own 34% of the total wealth
The richest 5% own 58%
The richest 10% own 71%
...and the poorest 50% of
the population own just 1% of the total wealth
This is no accident. It
is a lasting and defining characteristic of our economic system. The daily
direct and devastating effects of social and economic inequality in Britain are
not just on the pages of the research reports – they are in front of us daily
in our classrooms, in our hospitals, in our jails and on the streets of our
cities, and amongst those subject to rural poverty too.
We teachers have a responsibility here. What can we do?
Firstly, we have to do
away with the notion that education in itself can put the matter right.
In a system which relies on the existence of ‘have-nots’ in order that the
‘haves’ can have more than their share – a LOT more than their share! –
education structures continue to mirror this.
How would society work if
every child had the sort of education that the economic elite of the nation
buys for their children? From where would come those who build their homes,
deliver their post, tarmac their roads, load their lorries, and stack their
shelves, staff their offices, fight their wars?
So the unpalatable and
politically unpopular fact is, in my view, that educational underachievement
is, far from being an economic problem for our type of society, is, in
fact, an economic necessity. If it's money that makes the world go round, it is
inequality in wealth and power that keeps it turning in the way we have come to
accept as "normal".
Now, the UK Government
strategy – including the Education & Inspections Act - will bring us new
legitimacy in terms of social engineering and social division. We’ll see
“Skills Academies” and Specialist Vocational Schools for what they call
“disaffected” pupils, and Academic schools for those more “motivated” by such
education. And of course it will be the latter that are populated by the
children of those at the top of the social and economic pyramid – and it will
be the qualifications that they offer that will keep their offspring there.
Meanwhile, working class
children will be encouraged to succeed at other ‘challenges’ – challenges which
even if tackled successfully will never equip them to move into that elite.
Slide 24
The fact is that we
teachers need to be part of a wider movement that rejects the fundamental
inequalities of our globalised societies, rejects the social mechanisms that
sustain that inequality, and works strategically against these. My Union is
contributing to this process with its publication “Bringing Down The
Barriers” and activities organised around it.
Unemployment? We must
challenge why it exists. Inner-city decay? We must fight it alongside those who
live in it. Poverty wages and exploitation? We must expose those who pay them,
no matter how far up society’s tree they may be. Or should we just read the research that exposes their effects on
the children we teach – but decide that to do anything about these issues would
be “too political”?
We teachers, who see so
clearly every day the effects of social and economic inequality, have a
responsibility to be at the forefront of the national and international Trade
Union movement in opposing not just the symptoms of such inequality –
but the causes. Let’s get to the root of the matter… we teachers
worldwide must spearhead the drive for change in favour of those most
disadvantaged, and currently least able to access our education systems.
We need to work in our
individual countries, and in our international bodies. We are a powerful force,
working in solidarity with each other, and in solidarity with the people we
work for – the children, their families and the communities they live in.
Slide 25
Let
me finish by again quoting our NUT President 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 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.”
It
is clear that in the face of the policies and attacks of the Howard government
– as in the case of Britain and the Thatcher government – that the absolute
priority is to deal with that situation, and to combine with as wide a
coalition of unions and community organisations as possible in asserting a
people’s agenda. That will mean a no-holds barred battle with the Howard
government in the election period. Nothing will distract you from that task,
and rightly so.
But our experience is clear. In taking that essential and important step – for us the removal of the Conservative government – the task of pursuing a people’s agenda is only just beginning – our organisation, our policy, our campaigning strategies and our readiness to fight remain just as essential under New Labour as they were before. As I said right at the beginning of my contribution, nothing is going to be given to us by the exponents of neoliberalism – no matter what party they inhabit.
Slide 26
I
thank you for inviting me, and wish you all the very best for your important
Conference. The world is full of dangerous opportunities. Together, we can win.
Another world IS possible. Solidarity forever!
Bill Greenshields, National Vice-President, NUT