Schools
With Blair’s pledge to prioritise "education, education, education" still ringing in the ears of the electorate, New Labour clearly felt under more pressure to pump more money quickly into schools than it did to rescue the cash-strapped NHS.
The revolt against Tory education cuts across much of Blair’s cherished "middle England" had been a key to separating layers of middle class voters from Thatcherite politics and linking them with the teaching unions. So the key issue for the new government was to remove cuts as a focus for action - to give them scope to push through other Tory-style policies, leaving the teachers largely isolated from any wider public campaigning support.
So while Gordon Brown’s first budget was larded with phoney figures and hyped out of all proportion, and the squeeze on further and higher education has if anything intensified since 1997, most schools did secure sufficient extra cash to avert further cuts. Some early progress was even made to the target of cutting class sizes to 30 in first schools, although some of this was at the expense of larger classes for older children.
An early Labour initiative was to establish "Education Action Zones", supposedly to raise educational standards in schools in deprived areas: each EAZ receives an extra £750,000 a year from the government. But a key factor in EAZs is the involvement of "business partners" - which include major multinational corporations including IT and computer companies. These partners are also expected to chip in with cash (or equivalent goods and services) to a minimum value of £250,000 a year.
This link-up serves to raise funds (helping to limit state spending on education), link schools and big business, and establish the business agenda right at the centre of education management and planning. In a quick-fire succession of changes, each of them "thinking the unthinkable" under Old Labour, ministers followed up EAZs with the privatisation of management services in "failing" Local Education Authorities, and then the privatisation of the management of state schools, which began in 1998.
Blair’s team also want the new City Academies, which are supposed to replace "failing" schools, to be established outside the control of LEAs, and jointly run by businesses, churches and voluntary bodies. And the much-vaunted connection of schools to the internet involves not just a £700m bonanza for the IT industry, but the long term prospect for massive sponsorship and advertising deals targeting the purchasing power of teenage students. New Labour ministers have already floated the idea that internet-connected classrooms might even be able to dispense with trained teachers.
To cap it all, new school development projects are, like the hospital building programme, increasingly dependent upon funding through the Private Finance Initiative, which is slicing off "spare" land and assets and leaving schools hog-tied into long-term leasehold deals. The biggest schools PFI deal so far is the refurbishment of Glasgow’s 29 secondary schools for a hefty £220m, debt which will hang like a millstone around the neck of education in the city for decades to come.
Privatisation and "business methods" in education are by no means a New Labour invention. Chris Woodhead made his name as the hammer of school teachers under the Tories as head of the Ofsted inspection agency and its privatised operations. But he was kept on by Blair, to continue a policy of bullying teachers into, ostensibly, ’raising standards’.
The result of this and other Tory policies maintained by Labour, together with the macho management style enshrined in Ofsted, is increasingly bearing its own malformed fruit. There is a growing teacher shortage, which has already resulted in schools on 4-day weeks, and will inevitably end with thousands of pupils failing to get the exam results they need.
There are over 2,000 teaching vacancies across the country, 1,000 in London alone. Morale among teachers is at an all-time low, and the working through of performance related pay and performance management will make things even worse. By 2006 half of all teachers will be over 50.
Labour has increasingly resorted to desperate measures to recruit. They have offered training salaries of £6,000, an extra £4,000 for studying a ’shortage’ subject and from next September £5,000 for ’fast track’ trainees. But recruitment figures are still around 2,000 under target - a shortage of crisis dimensions looms.
Woodhead is now able to rail at Labour for ’falling standards’ from the safety of his leader column in the Daily Telegraph, and maybe soon even the Tory benches of the House of Lords. Of course he will not mention that the demoralisation, stress and fear of failure that have driven many teachers out of the job were once his favoured tools of coercion: "An element of threat is not necessarily a bad thing. I personally respond to threats. The education system has been immune to any kind of threat for too long" he said in September 1994.
Blair needed Woodhead to help force through policies teachers would have previously seen as unimaginable coming from a Labour government. Labour awarded him a 34% salary increase when teachers got a pittance. They used the threat of an Ofsted failure to drive home the attack on mixed ability teaching and the implementation of the ’literacy hour’.
Ofsted’s labelling of schools as successes or failures has increased the polarisation of education and the breakdown of the comprehensive system. But some of Labour’s policies had come into conflict with Woodhead’s even more right-wing ideas. On performance related pay for example, Woodhead believed money should be given directly to schools to pay teachers what they wished, rather than implemented through the bureaucratic, centralised scheme favoured by Labour.
He wanted to see LEAs completely dismantled. He refused to be interviewed by the Commission for Racial Equality about the impact of educational policies on the achievement of black pupils.
But will anything really change with Woodhead’s departure? His immediate successor Mike Tomlinson previously told journalists he didn’t give a ’monkey’s toss’ about teachers.
Teachers’ trade unions should take this opportunity and mobilise their members to demand the abolition of performance related pay, increased education funding, against the prescriptive National Curriculum policed by Ofsted and for decent pay for all teachers. Only then will the crisis beginning to hit education be truly averted.
We say there must be an end to private companies running schools and LEAs, and a rejection of business management methods in schools, and all business sponsorship involving advertising in schools. Costly PFI schemes must be scrapped, and new schools fully-funded by the government.
The tax breaks and phoney "charitable" status enjoyed by private schools must be abolished as a first step towards closing down the elitist sector that teaches just 7% of school pupils from the wealthiest households, but monopolises around half of all admissions to Oxford and Cambridge Universities and a disproportionate share of places throughout higher education.
There must be a new drive to eliminate selection based on ability in secondary schooling, to ensure that state schools become genuinely comprehensive in their geographical and demographic intake.
Further education
While schools face increasingly blatant intervention from private capital and big business interests, colleges of further education, seen by ministers of both main parties as a convenient low-cost dumping ground for a multitude of younger and adult learners, were long ago effectively privatised under the Tories.
Each college is now in effect a self-contained corporation, obliged to operate its own "business plan" and "compete" in an increasingly vicious fight with others in the "education market" for sufficient revenue to keep going.
FE colleges are seldom discussed in the media: but they teach more than twice as many students as do the Universities, and unlike the Universities are required to open their doors to students with ever lower levels of ability. They are at the centre of the government’s supposed commitment to "life-long learning", and to adult literacy. But they are also paid by "results", and have to deliver services with a pitifully low level of funding per head of student population. Funding for each student studying for A-levels at an FE College is a third lower than for those who stay on to study at school.
Cash pressures have already brought waves of redundancies to FE colleges around the country, while others are on the brink of bankruptcy, with a desperate need for capital investment to upgrade over-crowded, crumbling buildings, antique computers and other equipment.
Things can only get worse under New Labour’s "reforms". Increasingly demoralised, under-staffed, under-paid and under-resourced, FE lecturers now face not only a new extension of Ofsted-style inspection to cover every aspect of the college’s teaching, but a sharp increase in competition with schools, private training agencies and large local employers for the limited pool of government training cash to be allocated in each locality by the Learning Skills Council.
The scramble for this inadequate pot of cash is likely to result in reduced standards of teaching across the board, fewer real choices for students, and a devaluation of the qualifications many of them work hard to achieve.
FE occupies a key space in the educational system: but it cannot survive as a poor relation. It needs and deserves a hefty injection of new revenue and capital to enable it to staff and support a full range of educational opportunities for the young and older adults who have been failed by the schools system. FE Colleges should be brought back into the control of elected local authorities, and reps from FE College staff and students should be included in the planning of future developments at local and regional level.
Higher education
The runaway expansion of university places under the Tories and now under Labour has run alongside a continuing reduction in funding per student. Classes are bigger, classrooms more crowded, equipment more intensively used, libraries more over-stretched.
But while the quality of higher education has fallen, students have faced an ever-growing bill for the privilege of attending a university. The Tories began the process of slashing away the student grant, and (partially) replacing it with loans, to be repaid from future earnings.
But New Labour has achieved another previously unthinkable distinction - of being the party that not only scrapped the grant, but also brought in student tuition fees, a policy even Thatcher failed to take.
David Blunkett’s attempts to justify the fees centres on the notion that it generates extra resources, by effectively pre-empting what are expected to be higher future earnings of students once they have graduated and found a job. This, it is claimed, means that Universities will have more cash, enabling them to "widen access" to more students from working class families.
But the student fees are means tested, and the income tested is not that of the student, but of their parents, who in most cases are the ones who pay them. And payment of fees starts if the parents’ joint income is over £17,000. Students whose parents have a joint income of over £33,000 are liable to pay the full fees.
The claim has been that "generous loans" are available to cover these fees and the other costs of university education. In fact the loans available are £3,800 a year for two years and just £3,300 in the final year. Much or all of this in most areas would be swallowed up by students’ rent. But the loan is supposed to cover rent, food, clothes, travel, books, entertainment and everything else.
The result is that the poorer students all have to work every spare moment to raise enough cash to survive. On graduation most students will be lumbered with debts of up to £20,000, liable to interest at the rate of inflation.
Far from stepping immediately into well-paid jobs, many graduates find themselves stuck with much more limited options. That’s why New Labour has just dropped the threshold income for starting to repay the loans from £15,000 to just £10,000 a year. And of course banks and credit card companies have no threshold: they expect repayments to begin as soon as the student leaves university.
We say that the system of fees and student loans is a reactionary step backwards, penalising and deterring working class students. They should be scrapped at once in the rest of the UK, as they have been in Scotland, and replaced by student grants set at a living level and payable to all regardless of their parents’ income. At the same time of course we are for the reintroduction of progressive taxation on high earnings, which was ended under the Tories.
This and the injection of extra cash into the university system should aim to raise the funding per student and finance an expansion of teaching, new modern equipment, and new buildings to accommodate a growing student population.