After three weeks of concentration on this blog on budget related issues, I may be spending a little less time on blogging in the week ahead as there are other issues to attend to. However, one story demanded attention this morning. This is from The Guardian:
Central to the white paper is a push for academy trusts to take over the running of schools in England, with a 2030 target date for converting council-maintained schools into academies and for them to have joined or be preparing to join a multi-academy trust (Mat).
The white paper also calls for a regulatory review of Mats, potentially paving the way for an independent regulator of school trusts and their operations.
The report added:
Academies are state-funded schools with higher degrees of autonomy in governance, use of resources and curriculum. But recently the number of schools converting to academy status has slowed, with a majority of primary schools and a fifth of secondary schools retaining their links to local authorities.
I spent more than fifteen years as a school governor when I lived in London, many as chair, so have some knowledge in this area.
What strikes me most about this proposal is how spectacularly it misses the point when it comes to education. The focus is not on teaching, except for a demand that there be a specific minimum quantity of hours of teaching when everywhere there is growing awareness that enforced attendance in a workplace for minimum time periods can reduce productivity. Nor is the focus on the needs of children, which I recall having to remind governing bodies was our focus over the many years when admin demands seemed to weigh us down. Instead the focus is on governance structure and control.
This was ever the Tory way. I recall why I was first invited to be a governor in Wandsworth. The Tories had introduced a demand that a local business representative be on school governing bodies to add some business discipline and to remind schools of the need to produce children trained for the workplace. A parent suggested me to a local school knowing full well that I opposed the whole logic of this in education terms, believing that education for life was far more important than education for work. My attitude has not changed since then.
Nor, regrettably, has that of the Tories. It is apparent that they still have three goals. The first is to undermine local democratic control. The second is to focus on business need. The third is to commodify children's education, not least for the gain of those running academy trusts, which I have long thought a form of corruption in the sense that they channel public funds in a manner that makes them exploitable for private gain.
In this policy proposal we do then see the Tory mindset at work. There is indifference to actual need. There is also no idea how to meet it. And as for funding, they are now promising to match 2010 funding levels again - the level they inherited from Labour, having failed by choice to do so for a long time.
Then there is the anti-democracy agenda, seeking to undermine what should be a natural task of local authorities.
And there is the capture of public funds for private gain.
This is practically, socially and ethically bankrupt policy pursued solely for the financial benefit of a few at cost to many. When will people realise how badly they are being conned?
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Well Richard, what would the point be in putting “hard working families” first , if the whole point of life wasn’t solely work? Note the order of the words, that establishes the order of priority: ‘hard,’ ‘working’, and somewhere far behind, to give it all a warm glow, ‘families’. Call it ‘tough love’ if you must. You really can’t put anything else first in life. Families are just a mechanism to produce disciplined workers who know how their bread is buttered …. and who butters it.
You are so right
Think about how these terms would go down politically:
Work families hard.
Hard families work.
Families hard work.
All three are simply alternatives of Neoliberal Conservatism that Conservatives would rather you didn’t think about.
Well said
Vichy France, the state set up after the French defeat in 1940, had the motto, ‘work, family, homeland’.
Marshal Petain in defending the replacement of liberty, equality and brotherhood, wrote ‘we must say to young people that real liberty cannot be exercised except under the shelter of a guiding authority which they must respect and obey.
Equality should set itself in the framework of a hierarchy founded on distinction of office and merit.
No way of having true brotherhood except within the natural groups of family, town and homeland.
I think a lot of Conservatives would be happy with that.
And where have I seen the sign “Arbeit macht frei”?
And in one case “Jedem das Seine” (literally, “to each their own”, or more figuratively “you get what you deserve”).
“Hard working families” is one of those nasty pernicious phrases, like “taxpayers’ money”, that has wormed its way into public discourse. Everyone nods along without thinking properly what it means. We must support “hard working families”. And we must be exceptionally careful with spending “taxpayers’ money”. Nod nod nod.
What about families where (for whatever reason – age, disability, lack of opportunity, whatever) there is no work, or not enough work, to reach a minimum standard of daily life. What about people who live alone and do not have a family to support or to fall back upon. What about people who enjoy their work: why must it be “hard”, as if the only value comes from people in families who are forced to work their fingers to the bone for poverty pay?
What “hard working families” really means is “the deserving poor”. The phrase is used as a polite stick to silently beat anyone else who happens to be destitute but does not deserve our sympathy or help.
Just as “taxpayers’ money” is used as a weapon to deny and limit the ability of the state to mobilise resources to make a difference to the lives of people.
When is the press / media going to notice that we are now paying more in tax than ever before and yet our public services are worse than they have ever been. Vast % of our money is being syphoned off into private for profit organisations in every sphere of public life that used to be publicly funded and pub locally provided.
Academy Trusts / children’s residential care/ running of courts/ ever growing elements of the “NHS” / outsourced back office functions of everything to CRAPITA / prisons etc etc
“When will people realise how badly they are being conned?”
Dickens pointed out the same thing in 1854 in his novel ‘Hard Times’, and we seem to be regressing back to that point of view (despite a few progressive experiments in the 60’s and 70′) so I suspect the con may not be realised by many for quite a while yet.
Sadly we lost one of the most outstanding progressive educationalists who fought for a paradigm shift with the death of Sir Ken Robinson in 2020. His RSA Animate on public education is well worth watching:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
It is quite amazing how often in modern, neoliberal Conseravtive Britian I see references to Dickens and ‘Hard Times’; three times in recent days, one a reference in a recent book (2019) by two of the genuinely most important economists working in the world today: Banerjee and Duflo.
It is a sign of the times ……
Another vote for Banerjee and Duflo. Their Poor Economics, and Good Economics For Hard Times are 2 of the very best. Plus Sens Development As Freedom.
Refreshing contrasts to most economics books as they are grounded in people’s real lives. Rather than imaginary homo economicus.
I am currently a school governor, at a school which saw no benefit in academisation. Indeed it would appear that a LA school gives much more autonomy for the head teacher and local governors than an academy school – where as far as I can tell the school has to tow the line set out by a distant “Executive Head Teacher” in the MAT who doesn’t have close knowledge of the individual school but pays themself several times the normal head teacher salary in reward for their bossiness. The opposite of what ministers claim as a benefit.
If today’s reports are what they seem, it may be a successful outcome after all the threats when Gove was Education Minister. The education function of a local authority may be able to label itself a MAT and allow schools to function much as before.
(With our school, I joined the governors because things were going badly and our daughter had just started there. The Council provided excellent support in identifying how to make improvements and providing an external mentor for the head teacher, and then stepped back to allow the school itself to follow through and achieve Good and then Outstanding status by continually adapting its approach to do the best possible for our students).
I enjoyed my time as a governor and especially in helping a school turn round
My wife is a school governor, at a small local primary school, where they rely on many of the services provided centrally by the local authority. They have explored academy status but the additional funding would not compensate for what they would lose. It just would not work.
True of a great many such schools
The education budget is one of the last great state budgets not to be completely plundered by the private sector (the road budget went a long time ago for example). This move will ensure that state help for profiteering is expanded whilst state help for the poor and hard working is retrenched.
Again, the profit motive is being used to increase performance but as we know it will only increase the wages of management. And again, it’s Neo-liberal because the answer is yet again more markets.
One academy in Nottinghamshire where one of my staff has her children was one of the earliest and the quality of teaching has gone down the pan. Teachers leave because of cost cutting and wage unfairness so the Tories have worked out that if all schools are academies then they’ve got no nicer more equitable schools to go to. Her kids haver seen more part-time and supply teachers as a result.
My children’s school, is going to be academy ( my son leaves next year). So they did really important stuff and made all the pupils buy blazers this year. Yeah ‘ that’s right!! My objections were portrayed as being against privatisation by the chair of Governers.
It hurts me that a lot of the really excellent teachers at my kids school could find themselves working in a really different environment in a couple of year’s time or be out of a job.
The headmaster has been marketing himself ever since he joined the school – writing to parents and showing how he gets around. He has definitely got pound signs in his eyes.
The money floods upwards in Academy schools
The money floods upwards in *capitalism*. It is as a great sucking machine, delivering more wealth to those that already have some from those who don’t. Unless some action is taken to stop that, of course.
Hence my weekend thread
What is interesting is that ‘The Victorians’ were quite good at identifying what was wrong with how the Nation was governed – fir example The Northcote Trevelyan report and did a lot to make things better, for example County Councils and Civil Service reform.
Sadly these days its going backwards
They also worked out how to fund infrastructure for social change
Looking at it from outside what Tom Lehrer called ‘The Ed Biz’ always seems rather odd.
Worth also pointing out that as all of us have been to school and had medical treatment everyone thinks they are an expert on running schools and hospitals, so my not comprehensive opener is
1. What to we want to teach?
2. How much of it can we actually teach? – what is the most effective arrangement of learning time from both pupil & teachers point of view
3. Why do we have each school having to reinvent the wheel? Its a bit like each branch of Tesco’s or Boots doing things their own way. Surely as much as possible in terms of procedures/structure/policy/best practice etc should be provided centrally
4. Why on earth do school management have to worry about things like premises and catering, surely that’s something that should be done for them (OK, they might have to kick off sometimes)
5. And of course at the moment the whole structure, accountability & planning is a nightmare
6. How can we best ‘manage’ Head Teachers. There are some high profile ‘challenging’ ones in particular in Secondary Schools.
7. How can we recruit, train, retain and develop quality teachers?
I can go on
Bizarrely, the national curriculum answered almost none of the education questions