Schools under New Labour
Getting down to business
The Labour government has gone much further even than the Tories in inviting business into the schools.
For many of these big companies, Labour's invitation is an opportunity to polish up their corporate image, engage in 'cause-related' marketing, or tie schools more closely to their future workforce needs.
But there is a growing sector of private companies whose business is to take over the provision of state education services for profit. Business is booming. Since 1996 their shares have risen by three times as much as those of the top 100 plcs.
This is not just New Labour's 'Third Way'. It is part of the international neo-liberal agenda. The opening up of state education systems to private companies to trade in services was one aim of the recent World Trade Organisation talks in Seattle. It is a key element in the education policy of the European Commission.
The expanding opportunities for the private sector take a number of forms:
Providing schools and facilities
Selling education management services
Running schools
Commodifying teaching and learning.
Richard Hatcher , a member of the Socialist Teachers Alliance in Birmingham and co-editor of the journal Education and Social Justice explores the issues socialists need to address in combating this concerted attack.
A test-bed for Labour's public-private vision is Education Action Zones, a Labour initiative to raise education standards in schools in socially disadvantaged areas. There are now 67. One of the features of the EAZs is that they are required to have business 'partners'.
They include major international companies such as ICI, Barclays Bank, Colgate Palmolive, John Laing Construction, Kelloggs, Tesco, McDonald's, Shell, Tate and Lyle, American Express, British Aerospace and Rolls Royce. Particularly prominent are information technology companies, including some of the biggest names: IBM, Bull Information Services, British Telecom, and Research Machines.
They are joined by a new but expanding edubusiness sector - companies such as Nord Anglia and Arthur Andersen aiming to contract-out education management and other services from schools and local authorities.
The EAZ policy assigns several roles to business. Firstly, it is expected to provide money and resources. Zones receive an extra £750,000 a year from government.
They are expected to find an additional £250,000 a year from their business 'partners' (often in kind, for example, supplying computers, or management training, or mentoring for pupils).
The reasons behind this are several: it reduces state spending on education; encourages schools to be entrepreneurial in seeking funding for themselves; and brings schools and business closer together, with the aim of increasing the influence of business agendas.
The second role is to take part in managing the Zone. Zones are run by a new form of local governance, Action Forums, separate from and not accountable to LEAs, which bring together a variety of participants, including the business 'partners'.
Thirdly, to influence the content of education. The partnership with business is intended to make schools more responsive to business agendas. Schools are encouraged to adopt a work-related curriculum and to develop employability skills which will be attractive to employers.
And finally, to apply business methods and expertise to the management of schools. What this means in practice is illustrated by the programme of a conference in March 2000 of the Education Action Zone Network.
Workshops at the conference included: 'What businesses can bring to EAZs'; 'Business links for ICT solutions', with RM (Research Machines); 'Business solutions to educational challenges', with British Aerospace; 'Classrooms in companies and companies in classrooms'; and 'Leadership Challenge - how business solutions developed by Rolls Royce are being used to bring about change in schools'.
Providing schools and facilities
Under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) the private sector finances the construction or renovation of school buildings, the provision of equipment and the operation of facilities, and is repaid by the state over a period of time (25-35 years) for their use.
Each PFI project is structured around a specially created company typically combining the construction company, financial institutions and a facilities management company. The largest PFI school project is the refurbishment of all 29 secondary schools in Glasgow at a cost of œ220 million.
Privatisation of national government education services
It was the last Conservative government which led the way by privatising school inspections. They are carried out by teams who bid for contracts from Ofsted (the Office for Standards in Education). Some are LEA advisers, but the majority of these teams are private companies, some of which carry out hundreds of inspections a year for profit.
The most recent new business opportunity at national level concerns performance-related pay (PRP) for teachers, which the government is now introducing. The contract to develop it was awarded to Hay McBer, an international management consultancy company.
They were paid œ4 million to identify the competencies by which teachers could be assessed. Then another private company, Cambridge Education Associates, was awarded a five-year contract, worth up to œ100 million, to employ 3000 or so assessors to oversee heads' assessments of staff, and to assess the heads' own performance.
Management services for LEAs
Under Labour, LEAs have been made subject to inspection by Ofsted. A number of LEAs have failed - Hackney, Islington, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Rotherham, Waltham Forest and Bradford (all areas of high social disadvantage).
The remedy imposed by government in all but one of these cases is the handing over of some or all of LEA services to private companies. This is not just an option in 'failing LEAs'. In April 2000 the policy of 'Best Value' came into force, whereby local councils are obliged to consider privatisation as an option for their service provision.
The list of government-approved providers includes new specialised education-for-profit companies and a number of corporate giants moving into the education market, including Group 4 the security company and Serco, which runs the UK's air defence warning system against missile attack.
As an example let us take Islington, the first LEA to be privatised. After a critical Ofsted report on the LEA the government sent in Price Waterhouse Coopers, a management accountancy company, to prepare a contract (at a cost of £260,000) for privatising the LEA's services.
The contract, for 7 years at œ11.5 million a year, was awarded (again) to Cambridge Education Associates, who will be responsible for personnel and payroll matters, school inspections and school improvement, governor support and special education needs. The contract is subject to tough targets and penalties set by government, and to a cap on profits of £600,000 a year.
Running schools
The most controversial aspect of private sector involvement in education has been the proposal that private companies might directly run state schools. This is already the case with several hundred schools in the US. It has now begun in the UK. In 1998 Surrey LEA invited companies to bid for the contract to run a 'failing' comprehensive school, King's Manor in Guildford.
The contract was won by 3 E's Enterprises Ltd, a private company set up as the commercial arm of Kingshurst City Technology College near Birmingham. It now plans to start a network of colleges, taking over failing schools. Meanwhile, Surrey is looking for a private company to take over another comprehensive school.
The most recent government policy initiative facilitating the privatisation of state schools, announced in March this year, is to set up City Academies to replace existing 'failing' schools.
They will be directly funded by the government, by-passing LEAs, and given the status of 'independent' - i.e. private - schools, so they will lie outside the legislative framework which governs other state-maintained schools. This includes complete freedom to devise the curriculum.
The government wants them to be run by businesses, churches or voluntary bodies. Sponsors must pay 20% of the capital costs, but ownership of the land and buildings of the existing state school, currently the property of the local council, will be transferred to them.
Around 10 will open next year. So far Boots the chemists and Reg Vardy, who owns a large chain of car dealers, have expressed an interest in sponsoring City Academies.
Technology and teaching
For education business, the Holy Grail is the transformation of the core business of schools, the teaching and learning process itself, into a tradeable commodity. It is the Internet which provides the technology to realise this vision. John T Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, one of the largest of the global Internet companies, believes that 'the next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education.
Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error.' The vision has been embraced by European business and European politicians.
The EU is now committed to connecting all schools to the Internet. In the UK the Department for Education and Employment (DFEE) is spending £700 million on connecting all 30,000 schools to the Internet by 2002, with a further £230 million on training teachers to use the new technology, all by private companies.
All teachers recognise that ICT is a revolutionary tool in the classroom, capable of motivating pupils, of opening up access to new sources of knowledge, of communicating across the globe, and of developing skills for later life. But there are a number of additional reasons for the enthusiasm of business and political leaders for the Internet in schools.
First, it is a huge 'public-private partnership' which opens up a vast market for IT companies. This is vital in order to achieve a sufficiently large customer base, among schools and parents, to support a viable European IT industry, which massive state spending on IT in schools is being used to subsidise.
Secondly, the Internet is a vehicle for advertisers to reach the increasingly important child and youth markets. Schools can deliver a captive audience of potential consumers. This is controversial in the British context, but that could change.
Schools which are short of funding may find offers of business funding hard to resist, as they have in the US, where, for example, the ZapMe Corporation provides schools with free computers and high-speed Internet access in exchange for a school's agreement to place its 13-19 year old students before a portal laden with advertisements for a certain number of hours each day. The portal provides access to selected sites while ZapMe collects a fee for delivering a generation of young consumers to its advertisers.
IT is also attractive to governments because it can save money on teachers. In the words of Margaret Hodge, School Standards Minister: 'we should be thinking of employing fewer teachers, not more. In a few years, I believe, some classes will not be led by a fully trained teacher. If pupils are working from lessons on the Internet, a trained classroom assistant may be as useful as a teacher.' (New Statesman 22 May 1998).
The fourth and most far-reaching attraction to business of the Internet in schools is its potential to transform teaching and learning into a commodity, as some universities have begun to do.
Pilot projects are already under way in schools in the UK. For example, Sun Microsystems has formed a partnership with 7 other companies and a comprehensive school in Cambridge which is developing school-produced material for commercial publication on the Internet.
At this stage the commercial companies see it as a non-profit-making pilot to test products and business arrangements, but it would be na‹ve to think that their interests will continue to be charitable, and at that point commercial and educational interests can diverge.
One issue that is posed, as it has been already for university teachers in the US, is that of intellectual property rights in teachers' work. Another is the risk to teachers' jobs.
The transformation of schooling by the Internet needs careful ideological preparation. The Labour government and the IT companies are currently engaged in a massive propaganda campaign to sell the National Grid for Learning to teachers and the wider public, principally by portraying it as the essential passport both to higher standards of attainment in the classroom and to employability in the knowledge economy. What is omitted is the role of commercial interests in the initiative.
Earning from learning - a difficult business
The construction of a new education market on terrain which has traditionally belonged to the state, providing schooling as a public service, is not an easy business. For business, the problem is how to transform the provision of a service into the sale of profitable commodities.
For government, the problem is more complicated. Firstly, contrary to the views of the extreme neo-liberal current, education is too important for government to leave it to the market. Government has to ensure a school system which meets the general needs of capitalist reproduction of future workers, citizens and families, not just the specific interests of the education-for-profit sector.
This entails a degree of centralised government control over the school system which may place unwelcome constraints on the operations of private companies. For example, Arthur Andersen, an international management company with close links with the Labour government, withdrew from the Islington LEA bid because it did not guarantee enough profit security, because of the performance clauses and penalties.
And there is no guarantee that private companies can solve problems of education performance which have proved intractable under public provision.
Secondly, the level of public funding of the school system may leave little scope for private profit. The American schools-for-profit company Edison, which runs 79 schools in the US, has investigated the UK market and has decided to withdraw, saying that it can't make enough profit.
Ironically, one reason is the low level of state spending on English schools, which is 25% less than even the poorest US school district.
(Moves into this potential market may come from another direction, Britain's existing private school sector. These take 7% of school pupils and mainly serve a relatively wealthy elite. In a speech in May at an Independent Schools Council conference, Phil Collins, director of the Social Market Foundation, urged private schools to widen access and lower prices, as in the US. 'Five to six years from now, it is feasible to imagine one third of schools being run by private companies'.)
Thirdly, professional and public opinion remains obstinately attached to the idea of education as a publicly-provided service.
So what is taking place in the UK at present is a process of commodification of schooling through pragmatic incremental policy development, designed to satisfy simultaneously the objectives of government education targets, low state spending, private profit, professional compliance and public support.
What is emerging in the foreseeable future is not the wholesale marketisation of schooling but the construction of a new settlement between commercial and state interests whose final shape is not yet clear but which is dominated by business agendas and which includes the large-scale opening up of public provision to private profit by some of the most powerful business interests on the planet.
This is the most fundamental challenge to public schooling since its inception over 100 years ago. The quasi-privatisation of schooling poses five specific threats.
A threat to the funding of education
Business is in the education business to take more money out than they put in. PFI is a good example - the overall cost is more, not less.
A threat to local democracy
LEAs and school governing bodies are not exactly models of democracy, but they are still much too interfering for edubusiness's taste.
In taking over King's Manor school, the 3 E's company insisted that it would nominate 12 of the 21 school governors. Leeds, the most recent and largest LEA to be privatised, will be run by a new board comprising two representatives of the company which wins the franchise, two LEA officers, and a chairperson approved by David Blunkett - but no places for elected councillors.
A threat to equality
The introduction of market forces into public services tends to reinforce patterns of inequality.
For example, some pupils are more profitable than others, and education-for-profit companies will prefer to cherry-pick their clientele.
A threat to the content of education
The more business penetrates the schools the more it will tend to make them conform to business interests.
Let me give a symbolic example from universities in the US, where Nike heavily sponsors sports facilities. It has just announced that it will withdraw sponsorship from universities associated with campaigns to investigate working conditions in factories in third world countries where Nike products are made.
A threat to the teaching and learning process
Particularly the role of information technology. Technology is not neutral, it tends to impose its own rhythms.
Internet-based teaching lends itself to the individualised acquisition of knowledge and competences, but not to collective dialogue which relates new knowledge to the learner's meanings and experiences.
How should we respond?
There are no easy answers. It has to be acknowledged that business claims to offer answers to the real problems of public education and the real concerns of teachers, parents and school students - low funding, low motivation, low attainment, lack of relevance of the classroom to the real world.
The existing system is experienced by many as unequal and bureaucratic. Three things follow.
Firstly, we can't simply base ourselves on a defence of the existing system.
Secondly, it is not necessarily self-evident to many teachers and parents that every encroachment of business should be opposed.
Thirdly, business cannot simply be excluded from schooling. Some of the things business offers have a dual character - the Internet is an obvious example.
So the crucial questions are ones of boundaries and of power. What do we want from business and what don't we want? And how can we ensure that we get what we want from business on our terms, not those of business?
Some boundaries are easier to draw, if not to maintain:
No to private companies running schools or LEAs.
No to business management methods in the schools - of which the cutting edge is performance pay for teachers, designed to ensure their compliance with business-style schooling.
No to business sponsorship and advertising - the state, not business, should fund education, and schools should not be a market for advertisers.
But others are more difficult:
What should happen to LEAs? Should we call for no business involvement at all, or only under effective democratic control - and if so how can that be exercised?
What about information technology?
What set of demands would provide a basis for IT on educational terms, and not just those compatible with the interests of Microsoft and British Telecom?
These are urgent issues for the whole labour movement to resolve. Perhaps the forthcoming conference of the NUT on privatisation and schools on November 21 will give a lead.