On Delight For?

And
Responsibility:

The Education and Inspections Bill received Royal Assent on 8

November 2006. It marked the final act of the Blair era on a
subject that he had put central to his whole trajectory when taking
office eleven years ago.

The mantra of ‘education, education, education’ enabled Tony Blair

to be brazenly political whilst legislatively authoritarian and
technicist, a challenge which neither his party dissidents nor the
TUC ever rose to. By proclaiming hokum about education’s need to
march to the drum of a ‘knowledge economy’, real structural,
surveillance and funding changes have taken its provision far away
from public accountability. There is much more to take stock of
since his demise, but readers in England and Wales now have the
completion of Blair’s last education Act to assess his legacy by.

In its White Paper form during autumn 2005 David Chater MP,
described this Bill as a harbinger of “segregation, segregation,
segregation”, though he quickly shrank from critical sight as the
What Is Education year wore on. Was Chater right? How do we measure this crusade

1
alongside Blair’s other highly questionable policies? How does the
UK fit into a global perspective?
Fundamentally, what is education for?
On Delight and Responsibility
The English young people’s author Philip Pullman wrote about the
purpose and nature of education in an article for The Guardian of
January 22 2005. His poetic assertion was that:
“True education flowers at the point when delight falls in
love with responsibility.”
Pullman was concluding a lament on the false methods of
teaching literacy that have become common in UK schools, which
elevate the grammar of English above the motivations and impact
of language use, or why humans want to communicate with each
other, and what it is they desire to share observations about. After
all we don’t give a baby a dictionary or thesaurus then await its
first essay or lecture!
The social delight in what a person is trying to say to another, and
the dialogue it starts, should be the educationalist’s starting point.
The responsibility to analyse if and how this succeeds, so that we
can remember and advance our collective skill, comes next.
Learning will happen if we are responsible in this way about the
things that delight us.
This is a potent phrase to bear in mind when surveying the global
place of education today for students from all parts of the
economic spectrum. Much learning is far from delightful. It is often
mechanical, pointless and disenchanting. For some it is an
unattainable luxury. For millions it is often simply absent, non-
existent, unknown.
There is also great irresponsibility, exploitation even, in
education’s funding, administration and purpose where it does
exist. Like every other commodity education is provided at a price
paid often by fees. Increasingly, in the twenty-first century,
education takes the form of global edubusiness run by
edupreneurs as part of the investment by capital in service
economies.
Increasingly for all parts of the world pre-packaged learning
materials, imposed curricula and rigid, micro-managed schemes of
work characterise a learning process in both private and public
spheres which is passive, lacks dialogue, and intimidates
speculative learning and discovery. Progressive notions such as
creativity and internationalism are only sanctioned by government
in their bastard forms, as necessary elements of global capitalist
market competition, not universal hallmarks of humanity.
Teaching becomes mere “delivery” of externally pre-set activities
and “To be driven” is now sufficient to pass for inspiration amongst
both teachers and learners. In fact there’s so much ‘driving’ and
‘delivering’ going on that teaching could be taken over by each
nation’s Post Office soon!
The learning process becomes wholly instrumental, devoted to
jumping through forgettable hoops of certification.i In this sense
the delight is with a student’s mere accumulation of credits, not
learning for its own, or a socially useful, sake. The producer’s
delight can be in the profits realizable in a business with a higher
global turnover now than the automobile industry.
This global economy can be characterised as one of neoliberalism.
From north to south and east to west this system thinks and acts
with local and historical variants but core contemporary
similarities.
UK evangelists for a free market approach to education provision
such as James Tooley, whose ideas have certainly contributed to
Labour’s shared taste with their Tory predecessors for public-
private partnerships, would have us believe that not only can the
private sector cater for the world’s needs but it can also do so on
an equitable basis.
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Yet Tooley’s simplistic propaganda about a handful of companies
from mainly third-world contexts in The Global Education Industry
barely scratches the surface of world need. According to the Global
Campaign for Education (GCE) in 2005:
“… over 60 million girls and 40 million boys are still out of
school worldwide. The first Millennium Development Goal –
equal numbers of girls as boys attending school by 2005 –
has already been missed, and according to UNICEF, 9
million more girls than boys are left out of school every
year. To give every girl and boy a decent primary
education by 2015, recent rates of progress need to double
in South Asia and quadruple in Africa.” (GCE p3)
The significance of girls’ continuing non-education is that evidence
gathered over thirty years shows that educating women is the
single most powerful weapon against malnutrition; even more
effective than improving food supply. Without universal primary
education, the other goals – stopping AIDs, halving the poverty
figures, ending hunger and child death, even controlling climate
change – won’t happen.
“ For less than 5.5bn dollars more per year, we could
provide a quality, free education to every child, and unlock
the full power of education to beat poverty. This amounts
to less than two and a half days’ global military spending.
For the price of just one of the cruise missiles dropped on
Baghdad, 100 schools could be built in Africa.” (GCE p.4)
Whether or not first-world aid is quite the simple solution implied
by the GCE here, poorer countries and regions are undeniably in a
double bind, having to weather both their historic disadvantages
and the contemporary ubiquity of neoliberalism. Nearer home, 6
million UK adults still cannot read and as many as 17 million are
functionally innumerate.
The issue therefore which motivates this discussion has been put
succinctly as follows:
“Capitalism requires increasing numbers of workers,
citizens and consumers who willingly do what they are told
to do and think what they are told to think. The production
of such human capital is the most fundamental role schools
play in a capitalist society.
But while its strength is obvious and its overall aims are
clear, the on-the-ground nature of this assault is still hard
to pin down.” (Martell p 5)
Therefore this is a partisan stab at examining how neoliberalism
works in education so as best to oppose and replace it. (For
reasons of length and familiarity it will also largely concentrate on
school rather than post-16 educational provision.ii)
Defining Neoliberalism
North American geographer David Harvey’s Brief History of
Neoliberalism defines his subject as:
“… in the first instance a theory of political economic
practices that proposes that human well-being can best be
advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms
and skills within an institutional framework characterised
by strong private property rights, free markets, and free
trade.” (p.2)
Harvey is particularly explicit about the relationship between the
market and the state.
“The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and
integrity of money. It must also set up those military,
defence, police, and legal structures and functions required
to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by
force if need be, the proper functioning of markets.
Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as
land, water, education, health care, social security, or
environmental pollution) then they must be created, by
3
 state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state
must not interfere.” (p.2)
Not only have nations with differing political formations embraced
neoliberalism from China to New Zealand, South Africa to Sweden,
and Chile to the USA, but its apologists also occupy positions of
strategic policy influence in the university corridors, media studios,
banking halls and corporate boardrooms of every metropolis. Key
international finance institutions, such as the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) are dominated by its advocates. Indeed,
neoliberalism has become;
“the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in and
understand the world.” (p.3.)
This is similar but opposite to the sense in which Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci wrote about “common-sense”, the collective but
fragmentary and shifting “folklore of philosophy” which, on
historical analysis, is in fact the product of ideological struggle, a
war of attrition, a battle of ideas between vested interests of
business, church, state, workers’ movements and parties, and prey
to more systematic and coherent thought. (Gramsci p.323-43,
419-25)
In making this reference we need to differentiate ourselves from
the post-structuralist readings of Gramsci which adore the broken
narratives of a book compiled from snippets often written on
cigarette papers and smuggled out in prison visitors’ bodies!
Gramsci’s work was popularised amongst English-speaking
progressives following the first English translation of The Prison
Notebooks in the early 1970s, when such other key texts as
Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness and Volosinov’s Marxism
and the Philosophy of Language also made an impact in their first
translations. Gramsci was repeatedly but unjustifiably cited in
attempts to problematise working class politics not strengthen
them, and were frequent touchstones of what became the anti-
Leninism of the ‘Eurocommunist’ tendency typified by the now
defunct magazine Marxism Today. This gives us a small clue as to
neoliberalism’s appeal in certain quarters of contemporary Britain.
Many youthful British Communist Party members or fellow-
travellers of that period became UK Cabinet apologists for rampant
imperialism, including Jack Straw, John Reid, Kim Howells, Patricia
Hewitt, Hilary Benn and Charles Clarke, not to mention Peter
Hain’s even more radical pedigree leading the militant sorties of
the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and Alan Johnson’s trade union
background.
Thankfully not everyone has followed their career trajectories, and
most of these individuals’ careers have faded in the Brown era. But
a political problem for the remaining left, in the post-glasnost era,
has arisen because a rhetoric of liberation has been carried with
these rightward moving figures to sell a completely different kettle
of fish, usually passed off as a nebulous “third way” politics.
It’s not just that Iraq’s invasion and occupation are pitched to us in
terms of freedom and democracy, but the ideology of neoliberalism
in education policy is now being touted as the radical solution to
historic under-achievement of “deprived” UK communities. (Like
US Democrats they’re not allowed to say “working-class”). Harvey,
noting this language of classlessness in the service of ruling-class
power, questions its sell-by date.
“The widening gap between rhetoric (for the benefit of all)
and realization (the benefit of a small ruling class) is now
all too visible.” (p202/3).
This perversion of terminology has two effects. Firstly, it soothes
the bile within the body of the UK Labour Party for those few
remaining foot soldiers demanding some crumbs of domestic
comfort to sweeten the bitter fruits of disastrous foreign policies.
Secondly, and more importantly for this discussion, it confuses
attempts amongst wider forces to identify precisely what level of
neoliberalism we’re dealing with, leading to mistaken oppositional
strategies.
4
Dexter Whitfield’s invaluable handbook New Labour’s Attack on
Public Services highlights OECD 2005 data that shows the UK
enjoying pole position for the “outsourcing” of governmental
central services by a modern state; twice as much as France and
Italy, more than Germany and even more, incredibly, than the
United States. (Whitfield p.34)
UK public servants drown under incessant initiatives with
dissembling titles cascading and overlapping in all branches of our
public services. A new one is on top of us before previous ones
have hit the ground. It’s a bedazzling enough picture for those that
work daily inside these services; it must be utterly mystifying to
those that don’t!
Perhaps the most outrageously misleading notion adored by
government is the entity labelled a ‘Trust’. As the preferred
funding and administrative form in the National Health Service and
now the BBC it has produced obscene distortions of mismatch
between real needs and efficient services. Consequently there has
never been less popular trust in a governmental public sector
policy. The label is now being extended to schools, even though
the word itself is nowhere to be found in the enabling 2006
legislation.
Such inversions of truth and language are almost naturally
apparent from the southern hemisphere. Looking north to
neoliberalism’s strongholds Uruguyan Eduardo Galeano sees
clearly that:
“ “Developing countries” is the name that experts use to
designate countries trampled by someone else’s
development. According to the United Nations, developing
countries send developed countries ten times as much
money through unequal trade and financial relations as
they receive through foreign aid.
In international relations, “foreign aid” is what they call the
little tax that vice pays virtue. Foreign aid is generally
distributed in ways that confirm injustice, rarely in ways
that counter it. In 1995, black Africa suffered 75 percent of
the world’s AIDs cases but received 3 percent of the funds
spent by international organisations on AIDs prevention.”
(Galeano p.37)
This wonderful catalogue of neoliberal absurdities, Upside Down: A
Primer For A Looking Glass World, also asks:
“In the jungle, do they call the habit of devouring the
weakest, the “law of the city”?
From the point of view of sick people, what’s the meaning
of a “healthy economy”?
Weapons sales are good news for the economy. Are they
also good news for those who end up dead?” (p.115)
As the common-sense of the C21st neoliberalism hopes to shape
not only the means by which wealth is created and disbursed but
also the relations between those creating this wealth. As Harvey
notes;
“In so far as neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an
ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human
action, and substituting for all previously held ethical
beliefs’, it emphasises the significance of contractual
relations in the marketplace. It holds that the social good
will be maximised by maximising the reach and frequency
of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human
action into the domain of the market.” (p.3)
In a gruesome anecdote this was well illustrated in the week
beginning March 13 2006 at Northwick Park hospital in Harrow,
north-west London. Six young men who had volunteered to trial a
brand new drug for a payment of around £2000 each became
swiftly and critically ill with unpredicted major side effects
including massive swellings of bodily organs and features. Two
remained unconscious a week later, though the other four took five
days to regain consciousness. None died.
Fundamental questions were being asked about the safety and
methodology of such testing. Why, for example, were the six
5
inoculated simultaneously?
Thus the particular private firm conducting the trials and the
Medical Research Council were bracing themselves for a public
revolt against such tests and a shortage of future trialists. After all,
the scandalous mass trials of a fictional tuberculosis drug Dypraxa
on unknowing Africans had formed the dramatic core of John le
Carre’s popular 2001 novel The Constant Gardener and its prize-
winning film version in 2005.
But far from it. Applications to take part in such tests tripled during
the week, because it seems that the UK population hadn’t realised
the level of payment for so doing! More specifically the UK student
population, drowning in debt from fees and bank loans, woke up to
the possibility of fast bucks.
So, returning to our focus on education, something as innocent as
delight in learning, or the joy of play, can only confront the
neoliberalist as a challenge or threat, something to commodify, to
turn from an intrinsic good into a saleable good, giving it a price
before exchanging it for private gain.
This privatisation of value confronts the common wealth of
peoples, expressed in terms of their spaces and places, resources
and rituals, history and culture in all their signs and meanings, as
an alien modernity.
Neoliberalism’s Genesis
This debasement of language and the prevalence of dog-eat-dog
ethics are symptomatic of the neoliberal facts of life, but not their
genesis. Harvey does therefore trace for us when, where and how
its predominance was achieved, with a very broad but captivating
brush.
Financially key was the ‘Volcker shock’ of 1979, marking a
watershed between a period of post-Second World war Keynesian
orthodoxy (full employment but high inflation) and a period since
of monetarist then neoliberal orthodoxy. Paul Volcker was
chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank under President Jimmy
Carter. Volcker’s move to raise the nominal rate of interest
overnight in October triggered a long deep recession that would
put millions out of work, neuter trade unions, initiate the
dismantling of welfare states and put debtor nations on the brink
of insolvency.
Politically key were the twin ogres Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher who revelled in tax and budget cuts, deregulation and
confrontation. The PATCO air traffic controllers defeat by Reagan in
1981 and Thatcher’s more protracted defeat of the miners by 1986
became testaments to this hegemony. Energy, transport and
telecommunications industries were asset-stripped and sold-off,
media operations were deregulated to spawn many competing new
kids on the block up against a handful of world-wide corporate
giants. The US Federal minimum wage, equal to the poverty level
in 1980, was 30% below that level by 1990. US corporate taxes
were reduced dramatically and in 1985 top personal taxes were
slashed from 70 to 28%!
The UK had already been subject to the infamous IMF squeeze on
Chancellor Denis Healey in 1976 when the first retrenchment via
funding cuts hit UK public services. By 1980 Thatcher had given
banks and building societies new freedoms to lend, not just to
nations or regions but also to individuals, producing the politically
compromising 1.2 trillion pounds of personal credit card and
mortgage repayment debt amongst UK workers in 2006.
This has impacted politically on UK trade unionism, in the sense
that individual workers can, subject to increasingly slack credit
rating, make a phone call or visit a cash-machine rather than seek
collective action strategies to improve their pay, thereby
cementing Thatcher’s legal proscriptions on secondary action and
mandatory balloting procedures to the effect that between 1979
and 2006 the percentage of UK workers subject to collective
bargaining agreements fell from 78% to 33%. Tony Blair had
assured readers of The Times before his first election win on 31
March 1997 that those shackles would remain the most restrictive
6
in the western world.
Also significant to the neoliberal strategy was a new kind of
imperialism epitomised by the structural adjustment programmes
forced on most poor countries via the World Bank or the IMF.
These were a kind of arms-length, or, in a different sense, arms-
free imperialism. Control and subjugation was effected not by the
occupation and repression of aggressor armies but by financial
loans from banks, themselves awash with petro-dollars invested by
the oil-producing mega-rich states, on condition that any
indigenous state services or nationalised industries were opened
up to privatisation and control by western – usually North
American – businesses.
Whether it is Zambia’s copper industry, Tanzania’s water supply,
Ghana’s schools or the continental need for affordable drugs to
fight malaria, most of Africa seems to have been subject to this
process since the 1980s, reversing or smashing the political hopes
born of the flight by force or consent of traditional Euro-
imperialists since the 1960s.
The US had finessed this strategy in its dealings with Central
American nations such as Nicaragua and Cuba in earlier phases of
the C20th, using local strongmen like Somoza and Batista to run
US-friendly political operations whilst keeping the locals quiet. Its
fiscal stranglehold on Europe was enshrined with the post-war
Marshall Plan, insisting on an easy ride for US products in markets
whose infrastructures were systematically restored with dollars
and policed by military bases along the Iron Curtain. Any number
of client regimes is now in place around the world prepared to do
the US President’s bidding.
Yet, of course, the return of traditional methods of imperialist
power – such as the occupation and repression in Iraq – caused by
the relentless international competition for the accumulation of
capital first described by Bukharin ninety years ago - has spelt
such insecurity and crisis that, at the time of writing, we do not yet
know the full consequences for either the peoples of the region or
the leading aggressors.
But of direct relevance to this discussion is an aspect of the
neoliberal method that Harvey calls “accumulation by
dispossession” (p 160-5), a typically parasitic rather than
regenerative process. That is to say most fiscal energy within
neoliberalism has not actually produced what could be called fresh
wealth, rather a re-distribution or re-valorisation of existing
wealth.
For example, Harvey maintains that the average daily turnover of
financial transactions in international markets was worth 2.3 billion
dollars in 1983 and 130 billion by 2001. Of a total 40 trillion dollars
for the whole of 2001 Harvey insists that a mere 2% - 80 billion –
were used to support new trade or productive investment. This
‘churning’, the repetitive trade on accounts without adding any real
value, spawned phenomena such as hedge funds, which spread
bets on the volatility of future stock market commodity prices to
the personal accumulation of multi-million dollar riches by
financiers.
Personnel in London finance houses would enjoy a collective bonus
in the region of £8.8billion as 2006 ended with hundreds of
individuals pocketing a handy £1M – certainly a Xmas to
remember for those few wise men! Many fewer can expect such
largesse since the emergence of recession during 2008.
Governments and states have played their part in this by opening
up new fields for capital accumulation in their own public utilities
(water, telecoms, transport, housing, health, pensions, prisons)
asset-stripping public land, buildings and amenities whilst
deregulating labour rights and environmental protection. Much
urban open space is now privately owned and policed.
Such are the priorities that the education system in all areas of
economic development will want to justify, sustain and replicate,
even if the emphasis may be differently balanced or more
sophisticated per region.
In Massindi, northern Uganda, finding enough funds to build a
7
robust, hygienic latrine for six-hundred students and a dormitory
for the girls who have fled the outlying war-torn districts, so that
they can be taught in silence in classes of fifty by an occasional
teacher, is progress. In New Orleans, USA, reclaiming any form of
public-sector provision would be a triumph right now. In Cuba
stopping the encroachment of either the Catholic Church or free-
marketisation on to the state system will be a challenge for the
post-Castro era. In Nechells, Birmingham, England getting school
class sizes down to 24 with well-paid, well-qualified teachers in Inside The Mind Factory
schools offering good food, plenty of drinking water and a socially
engaging, test-free curriculum, would be progress. Canadian academic Alan Sears has produced a particular analysis
for that nation under a title that gives us a graphic idea of what
neoliberalism can mean for education.

Re-Tooling The Mind Factory: Education In A Lean State traces the

ways in which publicly funded Canadian institutions have seen
their staffing downgraded and over-worked. Their resource costs
are now subject to lowest-price tender and their intake of students
prioritised on ability-to-pay criteria. Academic industrial relations
have developed along traditional class lines.

“Lean production is based on three key principles: the

elimination of “waste” associated with older mass
production methods; the introduction of new forms of
workplace organisation and labour discipline; and the
polarisation of the workforce.” (Sears p.7)

UK education workers will certainly recognise the point about

polarised workforces. Whilst strike days are one lamentably low
reflection of conscious resistance presently, the incidence of
stress-related sickness levels in education, indeed sickness levels
generally, is symptomatic of workplace attrition. 1 in 5 UK workers
reported stress related ill health for a Health & Safety Executive
study in 2004-5, with education and health workers registering
higher than average incident rates.iii

Bullying is increasingly an orthodox management method, not a

deviant aberration. Incessant performance micro-management and
target setting are the stuff of persistent headaches if not waking

8
nightmares and mental breakdowns. It’s the same for kids in
respect of governmental Standard Assessment Tests. More and
more parents of primary age children report bed wetting, loss of
appetite, even clinical depression amongst kids. But is that just
anecdotal and accidental?
In Sears’ chapter on ‘Children of the Market’, he highlights this
simultaneous inter-relation of a “commercialised enterprise
orientation and hard-line disciplinary approach” in its impact on
students.
“The reorientation of education towards the market is often
couched in the language of choice, innovation and
relevance. Yet it is integrally connected to a new
disciplinary regime that emphasises compulsion, uniformity
and retrenchment.” (p.191)
This couldn’t be more true of the blazered, boot camp regimes in
the Blair’s brave new school world. Mossbourne Academy in
Hackney has a hair-length policy for boys which forbids both No.1
crops and pony-tails. Whilst the idea of education as a factory
process may seem alien to someone for whom a single classroom
or building is a sign of real hope in Jenin or Kigali this is
nevertheless an unpalatable truth of what has been outlined
above, whereby the state withdraws from many aspects of the
economy and slims down its sphere of operations, in favour of
local market relations permeated by trans-national capital.
And the idea of a mind factory, when factories are more associated
with the manufacturing process of goods transformed from raw
materials, than a means of life-dependent learning, gives us a clue
to the ruthlessness with which all aspects of life under capitalism
can be exploited.
“… modern childhood could be seen as inherently
subversive in an era of lean production, a current of radical
resistance to rationalisation. It is a barrier to intensification
in the workplace (particularly of women’s labour) and an
ideological obstacle to the generalisation of the lean ethos.
Education reform aims to constrain childhood and to
develop a more instrumental and rationalised approach to
young age.” (Sears p.194)
But his critique is accompanied by glimpses of alternative
strategies. Drawing on the pedagogic writings of German dramatist
Berthold Brecht Sears maintains an illuminating riff on the
theatrical nature of education in his chapter entitled ‘Learning
Freedom’.
“Most importantly, this requires that learners take an
active role. Students in a classroom resemble a traditional
theatre audience in that both are cast in the role of passive
recipients of knowledge emanating from the front of the
room. Brecht sought to create a new form of epic theatre
that would challenge the audience to analyse. (p248)
“The student arrives at the classroom door as a human
being who needs to know, play, explore and feel. Yet once
she or he crosses that threshold, her or his own need to
know is subordinated to someone else’s idea of what she
or he needs to know. The potential for joyful, self-active
education is radically reduced by the asceticism of the
classroom.”(p252)
“The most obvious spaces for Brechtian pedagogy are
those associated with movements for social change. This is
important as these spaces often use the classroom model
in the educational activities.”
Infuriatingly, “active learning” – which Sears goes on to promote -
has become incorporated in the UK as yet another stick with which
the besuited ranks of school improvement commissars beat
beleaguered teachers, important though it is to get away from a
‘charismatic authoritarian’ model of teaching. But there is great
value here in his re-assertion that the very ground of teaching is
such a vibrant ideological battlefield.
Sears does not go as far as Scottish writer Pat Kane in elaborating
9
a complete and somewhat anarchistic “Play Ethic”iv, in
contradistinction to a “Work Ethic”, but he probably shares some of
Kane’s conviction that:
“Play can only really flourish, whether at the level of the
body or the body politic, if an appropriate level of security
and sustainability can be guaranteed. A society where
small ads now appear in newspapers for chemical-proof
bunkers or anthrax-detection kits; where citizens walk the
streets in surgical masks to protect themselves from the
season’s lethal infection; where national leaders carefully
orchestrate war fever against disobedient client states in
order to tide them over to the next plebiscite…. No, this is
not a society that could readily support the vision of the
play ethic: a vision that presumes mutual reciprocation,
acceptance of difference and otherness, an open commons
of resources and information.” (Kane p.353)
Both authors echo the prescriptions Gramsci sought to grapple
with from his Fascist prison cell seventy years ago.
“ The common school…should aim to insert young men and
women into social activity after bringing them to a certain
level of maturity, of capacity for intellectual and practical
creativity, and an autonomy of orientation and initiative.”
(p30)
So how does our most ideal child-centred and social justice model
of education fare in the cold light of day?
UK educationalist Dave Hill does exemplary work plotting the
particular contours of neoliberalism in the sphere of education.
One particular essay is of absolute relevance here.v Though his
commissions and approach are often concerned with the economic
plight of education workers – their pay, conditions, forms of
exploitation – as opposed to the accessibility by students of
educational opportunities, his analyses are generic to both points
of view.
Hill notes that education is a key aspect of recent changes in the
way that a capitalist world economy produces profit for its
beneficiaries.
“ As the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC)
observes, ‘services are coming to dominate the economic
activities of countries at virtually every stage of
development’ (ICC, 1999, p. 1). The ICC then draws the
conclusion – a contested conclusion – that this makes
‘services trade liberalization a necessity for the integration
of the world economy’ (1999, p.1).
Another development, Hill charts, is the declining profitability of
capital – the crisis of capital accumulation. This crisis has resulted
in intensification of competition between capitals, between national
and between transnational capitals and corporations. He notes
general agreement among Marxists that this crisis of capital
accumulation has led to the intensification of the global
immiseration of workers, and the intensification of control of
populations by ideological and repressive forces.
The major aspects impacting on education policies identified by Hill
include:
1. the importation of ‘new public managerialism’
2. a fiscal regime of cuts in publicly funded education services at
all levels
3. commercialisation of and within schools
4. the charging of fees
5. outsourcing of services to privately owned companies
6. ownership of schools and colleges by private corporations.
All this is often done by legislation that, contradictorily, both
deregulates at the level of structure and governance but
centralises at the level of content and outcomes.
Thus, for example, the infamous ‘No Child Left Behind’ laws rushed
through in the wake of 9/11 by the Bush administration in the USA
in 2001 heralded the first time that there had been federal
10
directives of achievement targets and associated financial penalties
in respect of state or county level schooling. Staff in each school
have become terrified to fail on their AYP score – for Adequate
Yearly Progress. Five years later the New York Times of 20
November 2006 had the headline “Schools Slow In Closing Gaps
Between Races”, with comprehensive educational data to show
that both ethnic and class divisions have gone untouched by
Bush’s reforms.
In the UK a government ‘Green Paper’ entitled ‘Every Child
Matters’ in 2003 preceded a Children Act in 2004 which
amalgamated previously discrete local school, social and welfare
services, and subjected them to a centralised funding stream,
whilst claiming that each ‘extended school’ in every community will
represent a delegated packaging of those services - as well as
health, careers and consumer rights - to the benefit of all. The
contradiction here is that between a highly idealistic conception –
which has widespread progressive support – and a rigid
centralisation of control and financing. Frustration thereby breeds
cynicism.
But Hill reminds us that national and international legal
frameworks are developing to ensure international accessibility to
the privatised market in educational services. One salient area is
employment policy via attacks on workers’ rights and conditions,
their pensions and on trade union rights.
Capital’s Intent
Hill outlines three schemas to describe capitalist interest in
education.
The first plan of capital is to produce and reproduce a work force
and citizenry and set of consumers fit for capital. This has two
functions, an ideological function and a labour-training function.
These comprise socially producing labour-power for capitalist
enterprises. This is people’s capacity to labour – their skills and
attitudes, together with their ideological compliance and suitability
for capital – as workers, citizens and consumers.
The second plan is to smooth the way for direct profiteering from
education. It is about how capital wants to make direct profits
from education. So, in some countries, ‘core’ teaching services are
privatised – the school/college itself becomes privately owned. Or
its ‘peripheral services’ are privatised both within institutions
(services such as catering, security, reprographics) and nationally.
Examples are student fees or loans for staying on at school in
England, or for attending community colleges in the United States,
being run by private corporations rather than by the local or
national state.
Privatisation of schools, the growth of the private sector in
schooling and further education, and the setting up of nationally-
owned or foreign-owned or franchised chains of schools is
happening in a number of countries. The growth of this private
sector is occurring in developed states, but it is occurring on a
larger scale in those highly-indebted nations subject to harsh
structural adjustment.
Hill’s third plan of capital is a series of national capitalist plans for
domestically based national or multinational edubusinesses
operating globally. These are clearly of most significance and
threat to those poorer nations of the world lacking the tax-raising
powers and stable civil service required to fund and administer
education (and other) services publicly.
“ With a worldwide education industry valued at $2 trillion
annually (UNESCO, 2000, p.16), ‘it is not surprising that
many investors and “edupreneurs” are anxious to seize the
opportunities to access this untapped gold mine’
(Shugarensky & Davidson-Harden, 2003, p. 323).”
It is not just national edubusinesses that are involved – it
is large multi-activity national and global capitalist
companies (Mahoney et al, 2003; Rikowski, 2005).”
The interaction between and relative importance of Hill’s three
11
descriptions will vary around the world. Countries such as Ghana
are certainly reeling from the rape of its young families by private
education businesses promising to out-perform the minimal state
system, charging for every conceivable service item. Whether it is
most important to make direct profits or to secure an appropriate
workforce and body of consumers for capitalist goods, will depend
on local historical factors, not least the relationship of certain
nations to the trading, industrial and military power blocks, and
the degree of organised resistance.

Does this fit the UK experience?

Whitfield (p.10) summarises “New Labour’s neoliberal rationale” in

public service policy quite like Hill, as follows:

1. Competition drives down costs.

2. The private sector is more efficient than the public sector.
3. Competition helps to limit producer power (by which they mean
trade union power.)
4. Individual choice in public services will improve the quality of
services.
5. It is essential to provide choice for the middle class who will
otherwise opt out of public services, which will be reduced to
residual services.
6. Choice will reduce inequality because market forces are a more
equalising mechanism than political voice, which the middle
classes have traditionally used to benefit most from public
services.
7. Local authorities and public bodies should be restricted to
commissioning in order to create the space for the private sector
to develop more innovative ways of delivering services.

Readers employed in or reliant on UK public services will recognise

most if not all of these contentious maxims being passed off daily
as self-evident truths by the DCFS apparatchiks. Active union
members will have encountered the abusive, sometimes vitriolic,

12
denunciations of our demands as “abuses of producer power”. Yet
some of these points are undeniably factual.
We no longer, for example, have Local Education Authorities or
Social Services. We simply now have Local Authorities with
obligations to commission and monitor, but not provide, separate
Schools Services and Children’s-and-Families Services.
One incidental casualty of this change is that Special Schools tend
to end up classified as Childrens and Families NOT Schools
Services institutions, meaning that provision for the disabled and
delicate and most needy students begins to function on a medical
rather than educational model, and takes a step further away from
the possibility of their inclusion in mainstream schools.
The mantra about “choice and diversity” in local services has been
especially shrill during Parliamentary debate around school
admissions policies, and the variety of entry selection ruses that
schools have devised, during the passage of the 2006 Education
Bill, but is also recurrent in wider debates about multi-culturalism
in education, the role of faith schools and the under-achievement
of working class and Afro-Caribbean boys. Less prominent is
research published by the National Union of Teachers emanating
from its sister organisation in Sweden showing that the impact of
“choice and diversity” in schooling there has definitively led to
greater segregation by class and ethnicity.vi
But having itemised its rationale what is the actual result of
Labour’s grovelling to world neoliberalist dogma?
Richard Hatcher from the University of Central England comments
that as the export value of manufacturing, farming and some
service industries declines, the government’s policy is that Britain
should become a market leader in exporting a new international
business: privatised education services. Hatcher suggests that the
British government’s intention may be to foster and promote the
private education industry until it is strong enough to compete
internationally. He further suggests that the attempt to develop ‘a
world class education system’ is not for the benefit of our children
but to maintain global businesses in the future (Hatcher, 2001).
There is some evidence that this is happening. After all, in the
slipstream of its own and US imperialism, the English language is
increasingly the lingua franca of world business and
communications. Malaysia, for example, has deemed that all its
state educational services will work in English henceforth, and has
tendered a contract for consultancy on questions of pedagogy and
school curriculum design which has been won jointly by two UK
and one Australian university schools of education. However, whilst
this is a trend for income generation by some Higher Education
institutions it remains a minority aspect overall.
Schools have been transformed in a number of ways in the Blair
era in a seamless progression from his Tory predecessors.
For example, the UK government has matched every £50,000 that
any secondary school can get committed to their budget by a
private sponsor, to establish itself as a Specialist School. This is
meant to encourage a diversified provision of schools offering
greater choice to parents, but in reality most schools continue a
broad and balanced curriculum whilst grateful for the finance to
employ a few more staff. The ‘Excellence in Cities’ programme
encouraged federations of schools to come together around
particularly successful ones.
Local authority support services (such as maintenance and
building, architects and surveyors, health and safety, finance,
personnel services), are more and more ‘out-sourced’. The
Private Finance Initiative (PFI) has replaced direct public
investment with private investment in new building projects,
whereby the Local Authority sets itself up as an arms-length body
sharing the investment risk with developers, who retain ownership
of the resultant buildings and lease them back for school use. It is
now common for these private partners to sell on their assets for
substantial short-term rewards.
The UK Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme is a
nationally administered and funded programme of regeneration
13
and replacement of school buildings. But these Trojan Horse
projects are expected to be done on a PFI basis and to include City
Academy proposals. BSF actually represents the most thorough
strategic privatisation route for capitalist interests because
curricular control as well as material ownership of buildings and
land passes from the local authority to Local Education
Partnerships with built-in controlling majorities from the private
sector. This fattening up of the local herd prior to sending to
market is disappointingly being lapped up by the short-term glitz
of new glass palaces.
The City Academies are the most contentious and radical move
yet made by the UK government towards the liberalisation of
educational provision, mainly at secondary level. For a promise of
£2M – rarely actually paid – any business entrepreneur can attain
ownership of a school, its staff, land and equipment, run it outside
national pay and conditions regulations, and shape its own
curriculum. The government’s target is for 200 such CAs by 2010,
46 of which were up and running in September 2006.
Because City Academies are only answerable to the DCFS in
Whitehall, and not their respective Local Authorities, central
government will soon become the single biggest direct provider of
schools in the UK. (Remember this every time a politician talks
about giving powers back to local communities.) The salutary
example of Paddington Academy in central west London, which
opened in September 2006 in near-derelict buildings with an ad
hoc curriculum, primitive resources and a thoroughly demoralised
staff, should take the wind out of many of the spinmeisters’ sails.
Thus the unelected Labour Education Minister responsible, Lord
Adonis, refused to be interviewed by BBC 2’s Newsnight on 7
November 2006 when this scandal was exposed.
In fact funding agreements are currently being re-written under
pressure of such criticisms. Schemes in Manchester, Birmingham,
Nottingham and elsewhere involve a grubby compromise whereby
local authorities claim to be the main sponsoring force with a
power to insist on a shopping-list of vetoes which will make their
Academies virtual public comprehensives. The obvious question
then has to be asked, why bother? The only pathetic answer is
based on sheer spineless deference to party dogma.
Some Academies are scandalously ineffective. Some promote an
ethos of fundamentalist Christianity. Others have cheated their
way to apparent academic success by inventing courses which are
claimed to have parity with normative General Certificates of
Secondary Education. Others skew their admissions policy to
ensure they get the brightest sparks to guarantee fastly improving
exam success. Some are being imposed on existing good schools
though the stated aim is to save ‘failing’ schools. OFSTED’s new
regime meanwhile ensures, in a manner akin to insider trading in
the City, that there is a steady stream of schools ‘causing concern’
therefore ripe for an Academy makeover. One or two are actually
providing stable, effective learning where it was previously absent
because they have managed to retain their staff and had increased
funding.
But the fundamental political message of the government, that
private sponsors know best how to provide for historically deprived
communities’ educational needs, has just not been proven and has
to be opposed. It is also interesting to note that the model for City
Academies, the Charter Schools in the United States, has been
shown in the federal government’s own data to perform less well
than the public school system in terms of academic achievement.vii
This is being complemented by the new right of state-funded
schools to establish a ‘foundation with a foundation’ to govern
themselves, comprising private individuals drawn from the
business, charity, faith or other sectors such as higher education,
who would assume full control of that school or federated group of
schools. These will be the ‘Trusts’. These schools will be “Academy-
lite”, given private management without the suitor having to even
lay down the deposit asked of Academy sponsors.
The situation in UK further and higher education is similarly
modeled on increased private management of public funding.
But it becomes a debilitating tactical mistake by its opponents, in
14
the face of these developments, to accuse the government of
outright privatisation. That is just not true.
Profit is not made. Parents are not, for example, being charged
admission fees to attend any of these schools or charged for the
exams their kids are entered for. In one sense, this is more
outrageous than a full-blown form of privatisation because private
interests are not being required to risk any of their own equity;
simply being handed increasingly generous public funds to play
with.
We must also recognize here that ’not-for-profit’ private companies
are a well-established feature of public life, especially in the arts,
outside Europe and particularly in North America. Tooley lists why
this may be so for educational provision in varying countries:
• The moral reason: for-profit education is seen as an
oxymoron, or is, at least, less desirable than not-for-profit
• For-profit education is illegal
• Education companies or institutions wish to have the
benefits of being not-for-profit foundations, including not
paying taxes, and being able to receive donations which
companies can set against taxation
• Big companies wish to use their funds in a philanthropic
way and avoid taxes, so set up not-for-profit educational
institutions. (Tooley p 96)
As a whole these measures could be seen as means of ‘softening
up’ the education service to business control. Rikowski even
suggests that any degree of private involvement acts as a ‘profit
virus’ – that once it is infected by private company involvement,
then it will inevitably become liable to the regulations of the
General Agreement for Trade in Services (GATS), and opened up
to free trade in services by national and by multinational capital
(Rikowski, 2003, 2005; see also Hill, 2005b).
This is a misleading analysis simply because, whilst the intentions
may lie in that direction, the element of UK economic privatisation
is still minuscule. It is important to re-state that entities such as
Specialist Schools, City Academies and ‘Trust’ Schools remain
publicly funded, despite becoming privately managed or controlled.
They are not fee-charging, voucher receiving or able to generate
profits by the core provision of education, even if peripheral profits
may, nevertheless, be generated by the sale or development of
land or the extensive use of premises for non-educational
functions. Space does not permit a full exposition here but it is to
the general theory of state capitalism rather than one of unfettered
free-market dynamics that theoreticians should look for
explication.
So what do these UK sponsors gain if not profits?
Firstly, individual and corporate figures benefit in other ways from
their apparent altruism in putting money into these schools, in
much the same way as certain crazy people sink millions into
football clubs. They do it for prestige. The scandal currently
revealing that a number of City Academy sponsors have been
offered honours in return for large loans to the ruling Labour Party
prior to the last UK general election is part of the answer.viii
So it is best to see the small investment made by some private
sources in the government’s various education reforms, as akin to
the funds that any sizeable company would write off as marketing
and publicity costs, or even research and development. It’s more
about self-branding and profile building than raw and immediate
profit-accumulation.
Secondly, some companies will take up sponsorship of schools
close to their areas of manufacture as a long-term personnel
recruitment strategy. Honda has co-sponsored Swindon City
Academy. Astro-Zeneca is interested in sponsoring some Devon
High Schools as future ‘Trusts’. In such cases these local
companies would clearly have much more performance-related
data to access than normal for any student wishing to graduate to
employment in those companies.
Thirdly, the largest single prospective sponsor of UK City
Academies is the United Learning Trust, which is a charity front for
15
Church of England business interests. Whilst ULT has taken an
initial amicable approach to union recognition and participation in
the early stages, its cover has been blown by the aforementioned
scandal at Paddington. Many socialists in education are rightly
worried that a new network of exclusive, faith-based schools will
impact negatively on multiculturalism.
We should not presume that the free-marketeers are having it all
their own way. The Confederation of British Industry in the UK has
expressed frustration with the progress of privatisation of services
on a local authority level. By 2005 only 9 out of 104 had been
handed over to private groups such as Capita, Amey, Nord Anglia,
Serco and CEA. In its analysis entitled The Business of Education
Improvement of February 2005 it bemoans the fact that:
“The failure to develop the market beyond the initial
intervention process stemmed, in part, from the apparent
stigma associated with public-private partnerships. There
was also an underestimation of the cultural and political
resistance from local authorities to a change in their role
from providers to commissioners of services.” (CBI p.21)
But we shouldn’t get smug either about this evidence of a current
cul-de-sac for CBI companies, largely because many of the
spectacular failures such as Atkins in Southwark, south London,
were more of their own making than as a result of popular revolt.
Other failures have also been despite, not because of, local
political support from ruling councils. The CBI will now be looking
to BSF as the route in to profit-potential for its members. In
addition, the newly-empowered UK private inspection service
OFSTED is explicitly raising the bar on criteria for issuing
improvement notices and ‘serious measures’ status on schools,
and setting unfeasibly short periods to make changes, so as to
boost their susceptibility for acquisition by Trusts. I believe that
such rigging of the market is akin to ‘insider trading’ in the City.
However, it is also true that the policy of many more local
authorities beyond these nine has been sufficiently sceptical to go
down the CBI’s preferred road. Some laudable authorities such as
two London boroughs like Harrow and Barking/Dagenham have
until the last local government elections been defiantly pro-
comprehensive school and pro-public service.
The fightback against City Academies specifically has been more
vibrant even though too many Academies are still getting started
without local communities really knowing. The industrial response
from trade unions has been better. For example, the National
Union of Teacher’s anti-City Academies Campaigning website is
publicly accessible and very useful to anyone wishing to start a
campaign.ix UNISON has produced some devastating critiques of
PFI. Such opposition has become a major lever in the growing
fissures between the TUC and the Labour Party.
Yet moves to make school and college courses more vocationally
relevant are a con because you simply do not need many skills to
stack shelves in a superstore or warehouse, work in a call centre
or retail outlet, labour agriculturally or in transport – especially if
immigrant workers are encouraged to do the job at cut-price
wages anyway. What you do need is bottomless deference and an
ability to stay on your feet for long hours.
Teacher, trade unionist and writer Martin Allen contends that:
“ Firstly, there’s no evidence that the vocational education
courses that have become established in English schools at
16 plus (now 14 plus) which I’ve taught for the last 10
years contribute anything at all to ‘employability’ in a
technical sense or even that employers take them
seriously. I think they’ve been used for ‘control’ purposes.
Also in an era of mass participation at post-16, they’ve
been used to divide learners and reinstitute class divisions
within and between schools and colleges. I think that this
is essential because of the collapse of traditional
manual/non manual divisions in the occupational structure.
Also, I’d argue that a major problem for advanced
capitalist countries, is ‘over education’ rather than lack of
skills. In other words these societies are ‘credential’ or
‘certified’ societies. Because of the collapse of real
16
 employment opportunities for young people and because
the YTS schemes of the 1970s/80s produced ‘training
without jobs’ many kids have stayed in education, even
gone into HE, for purely instrumental reasons. Yet, as
employment opportunities become increasingly polarised,
more and more qualifications secure less and less. So
graduates downsize into routine work. Those aiming for
routine work get pushed into fast food, and so on. Some
post-colonial, ‘third world’ countries have also suffered
from this process as their education systems have
expanded faster than their economies (Zimbabwe in the
1980s for example) but it’s mostly a ‘first world’
contradiction.”x
None of the proposed new 14-19 Diplomas reach anything like the
quality of equivalent apprenticeships once provided for still sorely-
needed skills in, for example, plumbing, electrics, and building.
The UK’s major employers scrapped these at Margaret Thatcher
and Norman Tebbit’s behest during 1986 when the Conservatives
introduced the long-gone New Technical and Vocational
Educational Initiative (NTVEI) in schools. In that one fell swoop UK
capital passed on to the public purse the costs and responsibilities
of core trade skills provision. The continuity of generations of
working-class skills transmitted through apprenticeships was
aborted overnight.
Some UK Conclusions
The commercial education business sector is still a tiny part of the
British economy. The traditional capitalist interest remains as the
reproduction of human capital, not the profitability of the
edubusiness sector. True, the increasing emphasis on competition
and choice has also brought with it a ‘hidden curriculum’ of
marketisation with an especial place for entrepreneurial talent
amongst the so-called ‘gifted and talented’ minority of students.
(Whitty 2000) But it’s largely about students being made to know
their place, and their eventual market price.
Education retains as its prime function for UK PLC the ideological
and political preparation of (mainly) young people for the wider
neoliberal world. This needs saying repeatedly as many opponents
of Blair over-prioritise the economic threats as opposed to the
ideological tensions. Why else do issues about school uniform and
dress codes (vividly coalescing around the hoodie and hijab/niqaqb
debates), student behaviour generally, the nature of contemporary
childhoodxi, the role of faith groups in the management of schools,
even the quality of food and a perceived drive to dumb-down
curricula all remain such hot potatoes in discussion about
schooling’s purpose and provision from nursery to university? They
are highly ideological and political rather than economic matters
requiring a highly ideological and political response.
In sketching a broad picture of education’s place in the world of
1977 an essay by Quentin Hoare asserted an important argument
much missed today that:
“ Social democracy has always tended to consider
education as a social service similar in kind to housing or
medicine; in other words, as a ‘good’ which should be
shared more equally, and which can be increased in a
purely quantitative way. This view, however, overlooks the
very special ambiguity of education. For on the one hand,
it represents a vital human need – common to all societies
and all people in some form, and as basic as subsistence or
shelter. On the other hand, it is a fundamental component
of the power structure in any society – the means whereby
assent is secured to the values and privileges of the
dominant class. Education, in fact, is the point at which
vital needs and power structure immediately intersect. It is
thus never neutral or ‘innocent’, as the other social
services can sometimes be. Houses are houses, and the
more of them the better; but education is never just
‘education’ – it is the assimilation of a social order.” (ed.
Hoyles p.35)
In other words it has been the technicisation of educational
processes under Blair that has probably been his regime’s most
deadening impact, an illusion that if we concentrate on the how of
17
teaching and its monitoring, evaluation and quantification that we
are making progress, policing it with OFSTED and other
surveillance mechanisms but denying as far as possible debate on
the why of it all. This is exactly what Philip Pullman was getting at
when he floated the idea of delight and responsibility. Literacy per
se cannot be divorced from why humans use literacy skills.
Thus the most progressive of technicists such as Black and Wiliam
at Kings College see their projects of Assessment for Learning and
Learning To Learn recuperated from their radical potential towards
yet another diktat for school managers to berate staff with.
During his reign Blair’s own uncompromising rationale was quite
simply and repeatedly stated – that the UK needs to look to a
‘knowledge economy’ to replace an engineering and manufacturing
economy, and provide the unique selling point of commodities
made by our entrepreneurial whizz-kids.
Culture Minister Tessa Jowell regurgitated this mantra to a
conference entitled ‘Exciting Minds’ in Manchester on 27 November
2006, quoting, as if it were a miraculously correct prophecy,
Churchill’s 1944 speculation that;
“The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”
She went on to somewhat contradict herself by claiming that 1.8M
workers in creative industries earn only 4% of UK export income in
2006, even though she claimed that the value of (unitemised) UK
‘knowledge industries’ had grown from £27bn in 1995 to £76bn in
2006.
Therefore, the playground logic goes, we need some smart kids
working in ‘Creative Partnerships’ coming through to run Cool
Britannia plc. This simplistic thinking does not allow for awkward
questions such as why is most manufacturing trotting off to areas
of the world with poor records of educational achievement, and not
Finland, say, or Cuba?
And because Blair’s vision is essentially elitist and undemocratic it
is in daily contradiction with a global and social justice model of
education based on workers’ real lives, avowedly and practically
politically engaging, which we could be implementing.
To be more specific, Hoare goes on to challenge what he
categorises as four key prevailing theories of education before
positing a revolutionary version cast as an alternative to each.
”1. Contra conservatism, the development of critical
reason should develop students’ questioning attitude to all
existing reality.
2. Contra romanticism, the social character of humanity
should reject both pre-social and individualised notions of
identity and human nature.
3. Contra rationalism, it would insist on the active nature
of learning, and contest mechanistic ideas of the
transmission of fixed skills and ideas.
4. Contra the (social) democratic tradition, it would be
dialectical.”
“it would fuse analysis of the total system with a strategy
for transforming it – a socialist theory of education with a
programme for educating socialists.” (ed. Hoyles p.49)
Despite its author’s association with a political current over fond of
transitional programmes at the time, and also, seemingly,
conflating teaching with the building of a revolutionary party,
Hoare’s speculation nevertheless rewards scrutiny.
Today, social democratic tears over the plight of inner-city
deprivation are shed out of fear of class revolt, or mere anarchy
and chaos, not for anything like Hoare’s revolutionary mission
statement or any true egalitarianism.
The Department for Education and Skills’ own Five Year Strategy
document of July 2004 showed the issue as starkly as it could
possibly be drawn (DfES p16). Between five and sixteen years of
age the poor do increasingly worse at school whilst their economic
betters do increasingly better, such that the achievement gap
18
widens year-on-year. The graphic is unequivocally entitled, “The
influence of social class on early development”. So, ‘let’s keep that
other class in order’ seems to be the New Labour motto – with
Anti-Social Behaviour Orders or prison if the SATs don’t stun them
into acquiescence first. So, in yet another philosophical sleight of
hand spun by ministerial speechwriters, we have authoritarianism
masquerading as care.
As a flavour of this, some of the missionary zeal espoused by City
Academy leaders most wedded to their cause is almost colonial in
rhetoric. For example;
“… local government were happy for generations of
children of our predecessor schools to be taught in
buildings which were rotting, with the most limited
resources in the country and with no opportunity for the
development which children in more middle class areas
have taken for granted for years. It is only now with the
true social conscience which has founded the Academies
initiative and the staff across the country who have been
brave enough to take a stand against endemic social
injustice that we are able to start to give our children and
staff the quality of learning and teaching environment
which they rightly deserve.”xii
As parent activist and comprehensive school champion Melissa
Benn reminded a sympathetic audience on 25 March 2006,
referring to the then Minister for Education:
“Ruth Kelly talks about the urban poor more than Mother
Theresa”.xiii
You only have to ask why the government refuses to take
the one single simple step which could improve school education
for all, in every school, and which would have teachers, parents
and kids united in acclaim; guarantee a class size limit by law.
Cuban schools manage to educate kids in classes of 20,
often with two qualified teachers on hand, despite that nation’s
dire problems with trade, housing, transport, food, incomes,
democracy and security. Scottish schools are instigating a 20
maximum figure for lower secondary Maths and English by 2007 –
with a concomitant expansion in teaching training places since
September 2005.
But even in the national context of a declining number of
kids in the coming decade and Gordon Brown’s promises to fund
schools to the same levels as the private sector, Labour has not
tolerated the prospect of reducing the base unit number by, say,
20% from 30 to 24 per class.
Instead Labour spins its showroom City Academies,
delivering at best only to a minority, as if they constitute
excellence for all. Despite tons of egalitarian rhetoric Labour
refuses this one single reform that would spell undoubted progress
for all kids, especially as UK birth rates suggest a general (though
not uniform) reduction in children. One logical deduction is that
they actually relish the prospect of raising revenue by closing
those schools suffering from falling rolls; a process which might be
exacerbated if new faith schools open simultaneously.
They do allow themselves to talk about something woolly
like ‘Personalised Learning’. This is the catch-phrase the politicians
will robotically bounce back with if you push them on the question
of smaller class sizes. But few of them know what it means. Angela
Eagle MP admitted as much when put on the spot by a teacher
during a TUC education conference on 17 March 2006. The more
adept snakeoil peddlers will say that it is up to every school to use
its budget to set class sizes as it wishes. We will come to a more
acceptable interpretation later, to be found in Professor Stephen
Heppell’s work.
But a market fetish with ‘choice and diversity’ means that
Labour refuses to acknowledge that something so simple could
raise the quality of life for all kids and education workers. In fact
Lord Adonis visited Finland in September 2006 and dismissed what
he found, claiming that the country was too small a comparison to
make with the UK – not a problem for him when invoking the
19
minority Charter School provision in the USA. The truth is more
likely to be that Finland has the highest achieving school students
in the world because they are educated in a system Adonis
despises; it has no selection, privatisation or exams, starts formal
education at age seven, insists on highly-qualified staff and
provides nutritious free meals daily.
This elementally simple recipe for good public schools
would also make redundant the armies of self-appointed but well-
anointed School Improvement Professionals, experts who delight in
revealing the apparent complexities of good schooling which they
alone can decipher!
Indeed, in reflection of the topsy-turvey nature of party
politics presently, it is ironic that some of the more radical
curriculum reform proposals which challenge the government’s
proscriptions are to be found emanating from business sources.
The C21st Society, for example, employs ex-headteacher John
Abbott as one of its educational gurus and his book The Unfinished
Revolution celebrates the pedagogic strategies developed by a
largely left-wing movement for child-centred schooling in the
1960s.
The Royal Society for Arts has developed a core skills or
“competencies” course, entitled Opening Minds, which eschews
discrete subject areas at secondary school level, and fosters much
greater control of topic-focused content at local level whilst
validating all stages of progress by students towards their
achievement.xiv In delineating an aim for their proposals the RSA
asserts that:
“Education is not a business in the normal sense of
that word (although the principles of good business
management are relevant to it). Schooling must be
concerned with the broad development of young people
into well-adjusted, happy and contributing members of
civil society, and its functions go well beyond
instrumental…
“If young people are not persuaded that their schooling is
of value, then education’s essential function of transmitting
the common culture and values of society is at risk as well
as our chances of meeting the needs that young people
have themselves identified.” (RSA p7)
So whilst we may well want to contest quite what the RSA regards
as “common culture”, and bemoan their imminent sponsorship of a
City Academy, these proposals appear to make excellent
pedagogic sense, being student-centred, democratic and inclusive.
After all it was the anti-communist libertarian musician Frank
Zappa who insisted that:
“Your mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work when it’s
closed.”
Such contradictions are most graphically embodied by the
Department for Culture Media and Sport’s ‘Creative Partnerships’
initiative. Using £150m of funding to ‘deprived’ areas of the UK
managed by the Arts Council since 2002, professional groups and
individuals have been matched with willing schools to enhance all
areas of the curriculum at all levels. Proving that curricula centred
not on the quantitative model of micro-assessed outcomes of SATs
and exams, but on a collective, creative, student-centred response
to real lives in real places, a few lucky schools have undertaken
some breathtaking projects.
For example, the Cap-A-Pie theatre group have done amazing
work based on ‘Waiting For Godot’ with Clavering Primary School
in Hartlepool. On the otherhand, some excruciating Creative
Partnership projects, such as ‘Hotshots’ on Merseyside, fetishise
market forces and idolise entrepreneurial saints like Jamie Oliver,
Steve Jobs, Bob Geldof, Lance Armstrong and Richard Branson, to
con kids into thinking that their new ideas are the key to an
economic fortune if put out to market.
20

The Global Picture
The predominant focus above on the northern hemisphere serves
to highlight the sophisticated machinations that neoliberalism has
to resort to in justifying its project of marketising public services
where they have been developed by many previous generations.
For all the well-documented reasons to do with histories of
colonialism, culminating most notably in Africa’s case with Walter
Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa of 1972, southern
hemispheric aspects of this question are both more stark and more
urgent.
It would appear that the relative importance of direct profit taking
by capital is already more significant in many highly indebted and
poor nations.
“ Current worldwide spending in education is ‘estimated at
around 2,000 billion dollars ... more than global
automotive sales’ (Santos, 2004, p. 17). According to
Santos, ‘capital growth in education has been exponential,
showing one of the highest earning rates of the market:
£1000 invested in 1996 generated £3405 four years later’
(Santos, 2004, pp. 17-18, cited in Delgado-Ramos and
Saxe- Fernandez, 2005).
Santos continues:
‘that is an increased value of 240%, while the London
Stock Exchange valorization rate accounted on the same
period for 65%. Other 2004 data indicate that, current
commercialised education, incomplete as it is, already
generates around $365 billion in profits worldwide’ (Hill
2004, pp. 17-18).”
These are indeed remarkable prognostications which will no doubt
be common knowledge amongst traders on the world’s stock
exchanges. For those of us at the most elemental level of
defending or establishing universal access to a minimal level of
social provision as of right, this could be quite frightening news.
Yet in a number of states governments simply request private
companies to fill the gaps where public schooling does not really
exist. Hill notes that;
“ Private schools have mushroomed at all levels, from pre-
school to postgraduate studies. There are an estimated
56,000 private institutions currently operating in Pakistan,
providing education to about 6 million students
(Government of Pakistan, 2004). The government has
resolved to increase private-school enrolment from 15% to
40% by 2010 under the Education Sector Reforms project,
which is being funded by all major donors, including the
World Bank (Government of Pakistan, 2002,p. 34). In
other countries, such as Haiti, public provision is of such
poor quality that the effect is the same – effective
schooling is left to private companies – some not-for-profit
21
 (such as some religious schools), others very much ‘for
profit’. Increasingly, for example in Latin America, the
profits from ‘for-profit’ schools flow not only to ‘national’
corporations, but also to United States chains and brands
of schools.”
Alex Molnar’s Commercialisation in Education Research Unit
(CERU) in the Education Department of the University of Arizona
seems, quite literally, as if it is an oasis of North American critical
thinking. For example, his latest and sixth No Student Left Unsold
examines eight types of school commercialism, with most showing
a year-on-year increase (Molnar et al, 2004).
These include;
1. corporate sponsorship of school programmes of study
and whole schools; e.g. in universities the corporate
professorship
2. exclusive agreements – agreements giving marketers
exclusive rights to sell a product or a service on school or district
grounds; e.g. Channel One TV in a quarter of USA classrooms
3. incentives – the use of commercial products or services as
rewards for achieving an academic goal;
4. appropriation of space – the selling of naming rights or
advertising space on school premises or property;
5. corporately sponsored educational materials;
6. actual privatisation – the private ownership of publicly funded
schools and/or their services
7. semi-privatisation with private management of publicly
funded schools, often as public ‘charter’ schools
8. private for-profit school involvement in voucher programmes.
As for the impact of some of these developments in the USA, in
schools or the other environments frequented by kids, I wrote in
‘Hands Off Our Schools’ (Grant 2004) that;
“ The St. Louis Zoo houses the Monsanto Insectarium and
the Anheuser-Busch Hippo Harbor. In Boston’s Science
Museum, the exhibitions are giant structures built from
Lego and K’Nex toys. The children’s hospital at University
of California Los Angeles was renamed Mattel’s Children’s
Hospital, and Hasbro’s got an equivalent on the East Coast.
Indeed, almost anywhere one finds children, there are
attempts to market to them, whether it’s at doctor’s offices
or nature centers. The jewel in the marketers’ crown of
commercial infiltration has been the nation’s public
schools.
Channel One has an audience in schools second only to
that of the ratings topping annual Super Bowl. The ten-
minute daily news bulletin of typically tabloid values is
accompanied by two minutes of ads. Contracted to around
a quarter of US middle and secondary schools in return for
their use of video monitors and equipment, marketers
have as near as they will ever get to a captive audience.
Any other form of ads can be declined, but not if you are
sat at your desk watching a monitor with no sound control
to silence its messages, selling the usual junk food, soft
drinks, toys, video games.” (p.30)
As for vouchers, they are the ultimate free market mechanism for
organising publicly funded education. Schools receive no direct
state funding but are wholly dependent on parents who do. With
pseudo-cash in hand parents can kick-off a bidding war between
schools, whose strengths become as much to do with their
marketing expertise as pedagogic qualities. Schools are unable to
plan ahead never knowing whether the fee-replacement cheque
will actually arrive.
Though once a kite flown by Margaret Thatcher’s in-house guru Sir
Keith Joseph in the UK during the early 1980s, the practical chaos
which a full-blown voucher system would create has meant that it
has remained only in isolated examples in North and South. One
simple problem is that for feckless or desperately poor recipients of
a voucher, its potential as counterfeit collateral with creditors is
immense. Many very poor kids simply wouldn’t get to school
because the vouchers had disappeared into the hands of loan
sharks or regular thugs, even with the most rigorous of
safeguards!xv
22

Nevertheless, pressures mount to take education in this direction.
Hill notes that the General Agreement for Trade in Services (GATS)
coming out of the WTO is a major global lever towards this goal.
“Grieshaber-Otto & Sanger (2002) argue that the discourse
of the GATS serves as a major potential force in essentially
enshrining or entrenching neoliberal educational policies. It
sets out supranational and binding legal mechanisms and
serves to act as an enforcer for the ‘corporate rights’ of
private education providers. As Shugurensky & Davidson-
Harden (2003,p. 322) point out, ‘these agreements
represent an intensified stage of the neoliberal agenda for
education, as it plays out in the global arena in forms of
regional and local policy and practice’.
Also promoting the cause of ‘free trade’ are organisations such as
the International Chamber of Commerce and the Institute of
Directors in Britain, the European Round Table (ERT) and
multinational organisations such as the Partnership for Educational
Revitalisation in the Americas (PREAL), which, in its own words, ‘is
a partnership of public and private organizations’ (PREAL, 2004).
The World Bank, international monetary credit rating agencies and
the Organisation for Economic and Cultural Development (OECD)
are also significant bodies. In addition, there are regional free-
trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA), the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA),
the Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR) and the European
Union (EU).
James Tooley’s work has been sponsored by the Institute of
Economic Affairs, which has the stated mission “to improve
understanding of the fundamental institutions of a free society with
particular reference to the role of markets in solving economic and
social problems”. Perhaps we should remember the warning of ex-
agent Philip Agee in his 1977 exposure CIA Diary: Inside the
Company, that most political organisations containing the word
freedom, or concerned with a free society, can be presumed to be
a CIA front!
So Is Neoliberalism Working In Education?
In one sense the answer to this is “yes - daily”. The following
unedited press release from arms producer BAE Systems based in
Hampshire, southern England on 10 November 2006 just about
sums up the utter moral degradation of the Blair regime.
UK AND INDIAN SCHOOLS FORM ECONOMY
BOOSTING EDUCATION PARTNERSHIP
Teachers from primary and secondary schools in Brough have been to visit teachers
from schools in Bangalore, India to finalise arrangements for a new partnering
initiative, designed to give students in both countries a better understanding of science
and engineering. Improving education links between the two countries will encourage
greater economic collaboration and provide opportunities for the UK to benefit from
the huge expansion of the Indian economy.
The UK India Education & Research Initiative is being led by the British Council - the
Government department responsible for the UK’s international cultural links– and the
Department for Education & Skills.
BAE Systems, which operates a site in Brough, is championing the scheme. The
Company has close ties with the Indian economy and its growing defence sector,
mainly through provision of Hawk advanced jet trainers to the Indian Air Force.
Following the initiative’s launch earlier this year at a Downing Street reception
attended by Prime Minister Tony Blair, BAE Systems has pledged over £100,000 over
the next three years.
Dick Olver, Chairman of BAE Systems, said: "BAE Systems invests heavily in
educational initiatives which promote science and engineering to students of all ages,
from primary schools though to our universities. This UK-India initiative is an excellent
opportunity for us to share our experience in giving students a better understanding of
science and engineering, and in helping to strengthen education links between the two
countries."
Four schools local to the Company’s site at Brough will partner with schools in
Bangalore, where BAE Systems’ partner Hindustani Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) is based.
23
Isabel Peirson, head teacher of Brough Primary School, said: “Both primary and
secondary schools are participating and the initiative will be delivering curriculum
based activity around citizenship and linked to a better understanding of science and
engineering.“
At the Downing Street launch the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, said: “Increasingly
education is crossing national boundaries as it prepares our young people for careers
in the global economy. I am passionate about raising standards in education in our
country, but that means we must be willing to learn from the best in the world. It
means sharing experience and knowledge.”
BAE Systems is building on its established relationship with HAL around the Hawk
Contract where HAL technicians already spend periods at the Company’s site at
Brough, learning about how its engineers build and maintains the Hawk aircraft.
About BAE Systems
BAE Systems is the premier transatlantic defence and aerospace company delivering
a full range of products and services for air, land and naval forces, as well as
advanced electronics, information technology solutions and customer support
services. With 86,000 employees worldwide, BAE Systems’ sales exceeded GB£15.4
billion (US$28 billion) in 2005.
For more information please contact:
Scott Hailstone, BAE Systems
Tel: +44 (0)1252 384725 Mob: +44-(0)7793 423 068
scott.hailstone@baesystems.com
We are accustomed as public servants to ask questions about the
open cheque for imperialist warmongering in Afghanistan and Iraq,
compared to the incessant scrutiny of every penny spent in
schools, but when a “better understanding of science and
engineering” for the children of Brough, Hampshire, can only be
gained from witnessing corporate killers at work, with the Prime
Minister’s approval, we have ideological outrage to add to our
economic anger.
So neoliberalism is permanently hard at work, as incessantly as
any shark, but is it succeeding?
The World Bank, one of the main global ‘levers’ for privatisation,
has proclaimed in respect of education that:
“The virtues of the private sector, especially compared to
the public system, include: (a) internal efficiency and
management almost no waste, lean organizational chart,
better decision-making flow, less discontinuity of
administration, agility in crisis solution, better
students/teacher ratio; (b) flexibility to hire/fire teachers,
determine their salaries according to market values and
cost levels; and (c) flexibility to adapt quicker to labour
market needs and thus change curricula ... Private
institutions are often accused of getting excess profits and
paying inadequate attention to quality ... although there
has never been a systematic demonstration of their
existence.” (World Bank, 1991, p. 69)
In challenging the efficiency of neoliberalism in actually doing what
it claims to do, by way of reviving the rate of profit and thereby
improving the wealth of all through a “trickle-down” process,
Callinicos (p.22-4) draws on work from the Center for Economic
and Policy Research. Its comparison of the pre-and-post Volcker
decades, using several indicators such as growth of income per
person, life expectancy and infant mortality rates, suggests that
neoliberalism isn’t actually delivering the goods!
Callinicos borrows this table for illustration of annual economic
growth rates across key world regions.
Region 1961-80 1985-98
OECD 3.8 2.3
Latin America 5.1 3.2
Sub-Saharan Africa 4.2 2.1
East and South-East Asia 6.8 7.5
South Asia 3.6 5.6
24
Specifically on education and literacy the CEPR analysis claims that
since the advent of neoliberalism, “The rate of growth of primary,
secondary, and tertiary (post-secondary) school enrolment was
slower for most groups of countries… By almost every measure of
education, including literacy rates, the middle and poorer
performing groups saw less rapid progress in the period of
globalisation than in the prior two decades. The rate of growth of
public spending in education, as a share of GDP, also slowed
across all groups of countries.”
Yet, as Callinicos continues to explain, the IMF and others within
the so-called ‘Washington consensus’ claim that it will take
neoliberalism to go much further to achieve its lasting benefits, not
return to a more regulated and paternalistic form of capitalism
characteristic of the pre-Volcker era, or even, conversely, an
overthrow of capitalism itself. The danger for Washington is the
political and military over-reach that is currently being practiced in
the Middle East, even though they have plenty of ageing hardware
to trash in order to keep military order books ticking over.
Meanwhile, as an anti-war placard described it on a protest march
through Santa Barbara, California early in 2004 – “Ain’t shit
trickled down yet!”
Harvey confirms this with a table showing mean global per capita
growth rates from 1960-2003, by year and decade (p 155). The
starting aggregate growth rates are around 3.5%. Since 2000 it
hardly touches 1%, even though this is a mean for a range which
goes from the spectacular (China 10%) to the tragic (Russia –
3.5%). So whilst neoliberalism, in general, isn’t working, there’s
little chance of an honest admission of that!
So there is a case for insisting that neoliberalism has not
generated greater capital accumulation at all but simply rarified its
distribution, whilst exacerbating the social chasm between the
haves and have nots – or ‘have-mores’ to use Bush’s unfunny
joke. This would confirm what much of our own common sense
tells us - from our local streets to insurrectionary Nepal,
murderous Baghdad or impoverished Buenos Aires. Anecdotally, in
terms of the resultant quality of public services following
deregulation and diversification, UK citizens need look no further
than their rail and bus services for daily tales of outrage about
prices, reliability and comfort!
Harvey calls this what it simply is – class war. He insists that the
mass of the population has either to resign itself to overwhelming
and ever-increasing upper class power, or respond to it in class
terms.
And it is this stubborn refusal of neoliberalism’s casualties to die
quietly that is our main source of hope. Few of these neoliberal
sorties are going unopposed.
One plan was the so-called Bolkestein Directive, the EU’s draft
services directive seeking to open up trade in services. This
directive sought to expose almost all services to market-based
competition. Though public-education services were specifically
excluded, the draft directive would have applied to ‘peripheral’
services supplied to schools and, like the GATS, it was unclear
where the line between public and private services would be
drawn.
Under the ‘country of origin’ principle, a company providing
services would follow the rules and laws of the country in which it
was based or ‘established’, rather than the country in which the
service was provided. An education multinational from the United
States could, for example, ‘establish’ itself in Latvia, simply by
registering its presence there. It would then be able to trade in the
rest of the EU, such as Britain, whilst conforming only to Latvian
law on matters such as health and safety, employees’ rights or
environmental protection. Latvia, not the country where the
service was provided, would be expected to send inspectors to
ensure compliance with its laws.
Critics say the draft directive would encourage ‘social dumping’
since companies would have an incentive to opt for establishment
in the least regulated EU member requiring the lowest standards.
The directive ‘would have been quite a blow to national level
regulation, as it would tend to make services available in the least
25
regulated way, rather than bringing all services operators up to
best standards’ (Malins, 2005).
QuickTimeª and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
EU Internal Market Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, said he was
committed to re-introducing the directive in some form during his
five-year term, which ends in 2009. With 70% of economic activity
in Europe being in services, ‘you don’t have to have a degree in
economics to know that if you can open up the services market
you’re going to have an impact on economic activity and we need
increased economic activity in the EU’ (McCreevy, cited in
McLauchlin 2005). However, concerted pressures from
organisations affiliated to Education International, culminating in a
European-wide trade union protest in Strasbourg on 14 February
2006, did much to take the sting out of this plan. More
spectacularly the French government attempt to liberalise
employer rights over post-graduate employment opportunities was
completely rebuffed by a concerted and united student militancy
during March and April 2006. Starting with the occupation of
Rennes University, a majority of French universities followed suit.xvi
Greek primary school teachers were on national all-out strike
against their Tory government’s attempts to emulate Blair for two
months in a dispute which is still simmering into 2007. Mexican
teachers centred on Oaxaca have been at the forefront of fatal
confrontations with their state over pay and academic rights in
2006.
Inside the heart of the beast, it looks like the emblematic collapse
of Enron may have been as much a radical wake up call as the
devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina for those US citizens
previously content to export their nation’s democratic values to
foreign lands. Bush’s got a good hiding in 2006, but will reflection
on the systematic imperfections of the capitalist arrogance he
represents follow his mid-term pasting at the polls? Well not unless
we act!
In the wake of Katrina, for example, New Orleans has become a
neoliberal land grab, schools no less than real estate, housing,
infrastructure and health. In Orleans parish all 7,500 school
workers were put on compulsory unpaid leave in September 2005.
By October the Algiers Charter School District had been devised to
privately run thirteen high schools west of the Mississippi, and the
4.500 teachers were only offered their jobs back if they renounced
their union membership. In any case all the school workers were
sacked in February 2006. Almost every remaining school now has
Charter status.xvii
So, we see an established tendency for publicly-funded education
services on local, national, regional and international levels to be
asset-stripped with the assistance of their self-loathing state
governments in favour of privately-owned interests providing
either complete educational systems or at least many of the
supporting services and their management.
In the less-developed world where tax-poor states are rarely able
to muster a coherent public education system, the direct extortion
of profits from learning systems is more prevalent.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming provision is publicly-funded and
its prime function remains ideological and political, shaping the
hopes and fears of renewable generations of workers, skilling them
to no more than an adequate level for their exploitation on the
turbulent labour markets, but also reproducing within all sectors
class-relations of accessibility and accreditation.
26
 Pierre Bourdieu is probably most responsible for codifying in 1990
what Blair has been up to a decade later, namely that;

“… credentials contribute to ensuring reproduction of social

inequality by safeguarding the preservation of the
structure of the distribution of powers through a constant
re-distribution of people and titles characterized, behind
the impeccable appearance of equity and meritocracy, by
a systematic bias in favour of the possessors of inherited
cultural capital.” (Bourdieu p. xi of Preface)

What better description exists of a system characterized more than

ever by social immobility, motivated by Blair’s own private school
memories, the Machiavellian schemes of his unelected puppet Lord
Adonis and the aspirations of Chancellor Brown to do right by the
City before any other political constituency? The mere labeling of
our public sector schools with their pet names such as ‘Academies’
and ‘Trusts’ tells us so much about an aspiration to flatter and
mimic those that already possess significant “inherited cultural
capital”. Under a hypocritical directive to modernise, UK schools
will be more and more reliant on the Victorian philanthropy of
paternalistic business favours once the new regime flowers.

But we are not short of visionary alternatives in terms of what can

be done.

Writing in Another School Is Possible Terry Wrigley surveys the

many existing, truly enlightened and successful school systems
that it’s worth generalising from. Besides the Finnish national
system Terry draws upon examples from Norway, Germany, Spain,
Australia and California for a campaign of resistance and renewal.
Significantly, these exemplars sit within the public sphere of
provision. His book implies in its title both a debt and an obligation
to the wider global fights against war, poverty, racism and climate
change articulated by the European and World Social Forum
movements. Thus it is doubly infuriating to hear Blairite cronies in
the UK talk up their marketised reforms in the name of ‘social
Where Do We Go From Here? justice’.

27
Similarly, any progressive approach to pedagogy needs to consult
the pioneering materials published by the Rethinking Education
network based in the US. Their handbook Rethinking Globalisation
is just one indispensable mine of rich classroom and agitational
teaching materials.
Stephen Heppell has long been a UK education guru working from
an ICT-grounded vision of how school sizes and structures,
relations of power, modes of learning and purpose are all well
beyond their sell-by date. He has developed an online service for
kids excluded from UK mainstream schools, for example, and
provided inspirational solutions to those working with disaffected
Maori youth in Auckland, New Zealand or poverty-stricken
Jamaican kids.
His Learnometer project tracking global school policy and practice
shifts – just one of many accessible at his personal website
www.heppell.net - has produced the following model which goes
way beyond anything supported by any single government, despite
his frequent presentations for Downing Street and other nations’
policy wonks:
trends
From 20 th
century……… to 21st century
Conforming………………………………..ingenious
Stable…………………………………………….agile
Quality controlled…….…..………quality assured
Subject based………………….…..project based
Delivered wisdom…….user generated content
One size fits all………………….….personalization
Individualized………..community/collaborative
National………………………………………..global
One to many…………………………..peer to peer
Interactive……………………………..participative
Curriculum centred……….………learner centred
Retaining………………………….……….critiquing
Teaching……………………………………..learning
There are of course no end of institutional flies that might spoil
Heppell’s ointment. How do you pay people in systems organized
along these lines, for example? Can any notion of public
responsibility for education remain? But just as the supreme
techniques and vision of great footballers buy themselves time and
space on the field of play, such creative policy can lift the
despondency from the brows of the most liberal of the world’s
educators, who continually find their skies full of neoliberalism’s
storm clouds.
So if we know what’s wrong with the current situation, and have a
clear idea of what could replace it, the pressing questions involve
tactical measures to achieve those strategic changes.
Reclaiming Our Schools
A first key plank of campaigning has to be to take the democratic
high ground, for example, in disputing throughout England and
Wales the aggregate measures consolidated in the 2006 Bill. As
Tony Benn noted at an Anti-Academies Alliance conference on 25
November 2006, we all now suffer from PUMPS – politically
unaccountable management (of our) public services. In direct ratio
to the previously described accumulation of (seemingly new)
wealth by dispossession, has been the rate of political
disenfranchisement by the few of the many.
Therefore, in spite of propaganda about the value of their power
enshrined in parental consultative committees, fewer places will
actually be available on ‘Trust’ school governing bodies for parents.
Even Thatcher’s pet dodo, Grant Maintained Schools, required a
ballot of those parents with kids at particular schools at the time.
Labour’s ruse will not even require that. Existing governors can
transform themselves, through a sort of asexual reproduction, into
this new status. Campaigners should insist on ballots of a school’s
whole community, but not on the Tory partial model of parents
only, because schools belong to the past and future parents and
kids too!
Even within their own logic government plans are fraught with
insoluble contradictions. For example, Whitehall is encouraging
bunches of neighbourhood schools to work collaboratively as
federations, as a precursor to Trust status, whilst continuing the
28
pernicious market requirement of SATs-derived league tables
which set every school at each others’ throats to improve placings
in those tables! No wonder there’s an emerging crisis of school
leadership posts going unfilled when such irreconcilable demands
are expected to be resolved!
On a world scale the privatisers need to be repeatedly castigated
for their utter failure to make a dent on the needs identified by the
Global Campaign for Education, quoted earlier. Vital first world aid
to such public sector needs is frequently withheld amidst an often
racist denunciation of Third World corruption. Yet the most
powerful man in education in the UK, Lord Adonis, was never
elected by anybody. Adonis’ only qualification for his post is his
friendship with the Prime Minister. Despotism is by no means a
Third World monopoly!
Workplaces need to be democratized as well. Management by
diktat is now so commonplace as to go unsaid. Students and staff
as mutual education workers need a whole raft of changed
structures for consultation and implementation. For example, no
assessment criteria exist for collaborative learning or teaching
when it comes to grading either students or teachers in pay or
testing regimes. New UK government Performance Management
regulations coming into force from September 2007 presume that
there is a direct causal effect between one subject teacher and any
student’s achievement in that subject even if, say in history, the
student’s command of written English is probably their most
valuable asset.
But this also extends to democracy beyond the workplace.
Education is nothing but a form of politics and the democratic
deficit measured by the disenchantment with current governmental
processes, needs to consider the construction of new organizations
grounded in the lives and aspirations of the working class.
Fledgling RESPECT councillors in Tower Hamlets, east London,
have undergone a crash-course in this and are rapidly coming to
grips with nuances of housing, social care and public spending
policy. A manifesto written by union rep Sean Vernell at London’s
City and Islington College, articulating something like that for the
UK Further Education sector, is to be published in 2007 by the new
University and College Union (UCU).
There is similarly a need for what this essay has set out to provoke
in schooling – a widespread clarification amongst progressive
forces about what education is for and how it could be structured
in the form of a post-Blair schools manifesto. That’s because there
is still a lot of unaddressed detail that we merely muddle through.
For example, most of us object to selection based on ability or
faith or gender, though many assume that ‘banding’ or even
‘bussing’ can acceptably engineer equitable school alternatives. Yet
few of us accept that the only equitable criterion for school
admissions policy is a strict localized ‘nearest first’ policy (with a
favourable consideration to siblings within families who move
during a student’s lifetime). The differentiation to achieve some
sort of social compensation should come in the funding mechanism
not the admissions policy. Veteran comprehensive campaigner
Clyde Chitty chose to underscore this very point as his contribution
to the aforementioned Anti-Academies Alliance conference.
For readers in the USA this will go against the grain of historic and
contemporary liberal campaigning to integrate schools which are
otherwise ethnically separate. Paul Tough’s excellent survey for
the New York Times magazine on 26 November 2006xviii of the
contradictory successes of independent school reformers such as
the Knowledge Is Power Project (KIPP) - in that they are
championed by the political right - helps us understand that at the
end of the day, having achieved or exceeded normative student
achievement levels in poor neighbourhoods, the question of
education’s purpose, who it benefits, remains to be answered.
Another propaganda task we have to undertake is to contradict the
populist view amongst parents and teachers alike, which has been
exploited by the Westminster consensus, that increased provision
of ‘vocational’ courses is a good thing for thousands of ‘non-
academic’ kids. These courses will not give occupational insight,
match employment opportunities or satisfy the yearning of all
29
students for inspirational learning. They are a short-term fix
motivated by considerations of social control not educational
entitlement.
At the domestic industrial level in the UK we have some very
thorny fences to hurdle. We cannot go on losing fights because
trade unions in schools competitively recruit the same levels of
staff and their ancillaries. Not just the teachers but all workers
under the same employer need to unite in one school workers’
union. We could avoid the kind of scary though snappy label
mooted by the US authors of the ‘United Mind Workers’.xix This will
require the undoubtedly difficult feat of prizing a number of TUC
affiliates away from the doctrine of Social Partnership, the
relationship where workers give all and the government takes all.
This is, of course, a reflection of the TUC’s inability to break with
its historic child, the Labour Party. But it should not need the
quantitative and qualitative decline in earnings and standard of
living that has overcome further and higher education staff in the
neoliberalist era to unite staff at school level in the way that the
Association of University Teachers and the National Association of
Teachers in Further and Higher Education merged as UCU in 2006.
The legacy of Bush and Blair’s marketising mechanisms, gladly
inherited from Reagan and Thatcher, will need demolishing.
Inculcating children into the values upheld by war criminals is
surely not how we want to go on. Yet the week before his
accession to the Prime Ministerial throne in July 2007 Gordon
Brown was assuring a Mansion House audience of city financiers
that every UK school would soon have a private business partner.
‘Segregation, segregation, segregation’ is indeed an apt
summation of the direction of Blair’s ten years’ work in this area,
though the global picture is undoubtedly one of ‘alienation,
alienation, alienation’. Enhanced human rights in the forms of
health, welfare, housing and education have to be bought at
market rates the world over. Each will come a very poor second to
the geopolitical battles for primary energy and commodity raw
material resources. War may well be economics by extension in
times of crisis, but capitalism makes do with education as
economics in between.
But they’re our schools. Our students. Our work. Our lives. Let’s
take control of them. Kick out the tick-box teaching strategies, the
micro-managed lesson planning, the meaningless number
crunching. Engage with children’s naturally well-developed
concepts of justice and their experiences of life in many places and
cultures to unleash a renewal of democratic energies. Celebrate
multi-culturalism rather than striving for grey homogenisation and
market orthodoxy! Unite the world’s learners in a programme of
true social reform.
This will have to be a conscious and explicit part of opposing
neoliberalism globally. With a population expected to grow from 6
billion to 9 billion by 2050 our economic organization and relations
of production must change to even produce enough food, let alone
foster a quality of civilized life for all, that currently only a minority
are able to enjoy. Schools are a crucial, supremely ideological and
political part of building this better future.
The damning UNICEF Report on Childrens’ Well-Being in the 21
richest nations, showing the UK and USA as the bottom two, says
all we need to know about the cumulative impact of neoliberalism
for kids. Getting militant about a global social justice agenda for
education, in clear opposition to a nihilistic neoliberal consensus
racing to the bottom of all conceivable standards, is the kind of
responsibility that should be a delight for us all.
Nick GRANT July 2008
30
FOOTNOTES

31
i Exemplified by Jaeger, E. Silencing Teachers in an Era of Scripted Reading

In Rethinking Schools Vol.20 No. 3 Spring 2006. See at: www.rethinkingschools.org

ii Readers are encouraged to look at Alex Callinicos’ pamphlet Universities In A Neo Liberal World published by Bookmarks 2006 for a

similar exposition focussed on higher education.

iii Full UK H&SE Report at: HYPERLINK "http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causdis/stress.htm"

http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/causdis/stress.htm

iv see www.playethic.com

v Globalisation and Its Educational Discontents: neoliberalisation and its impacts on education workers’ rights, pay and conditions

International Studies in Sociology of

Education, Volume 15, Number 3, 2005

vi A Good Local School For Every Child (2006)

vii see: Exploding the Privatization Myth by Barbara Miner in RETHINKING SCHOOLS Vol.1, No. 1 Fall 2006 accessible at:

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/21_01/expl211.shtml

viii News sources for this story include:

HYPERLINK "http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article352586.ece" http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article352586.ece

HYPERLINK "http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4827250.stm" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4827250.stm

ix
see: http://www.teachers.org.uk/topichome.php?id=224#1

x
In conversation with this author about his forthcoming book with Patrick Ainley Education Make You Fick, Innit

xi For example, a little-noted civil liberty outrage emanating from the Bichard Enquiry into the Soham murders of two children
by their primary school’s caretaker in 2003, is that any school teacher who has since been investigated under Child
Protection legislation following any complaint from any party must have that referral for investigation recorded on their
personal file and it must be reported by the employer in any reference given to a prospective new employer, whatever the
outcome of the investigation has been. Ninety-five per cent of such investigations result in no criminal action. Less than one
per cent of investigations result in a conviction, which is not always of a Child Protection offence. An increasing number of
utterly innocent school staff are having their careers wrecked by often malicious but usually groundless accusations, which
are sometimes anonymously made via phone calls to the police or schools. This ridiculously bureaucratic moral panic ensues
from the simple fact that a couple of police forces failed to do their job in reporting Ian Huntley’s track record.

xii From memo to staff at West London Academy on 9 March 2006 written by new Principal and ex-NUT activist Hilary Macaulay in response

to press reports quoting an OFSTED Report that her institution provides an “unsatisfactory level of education.” After all it had excluded a
third of its students at some time the previous year.

xiii Speaking at an Education Alliance conference in London’s Institute of Education organised by the National Union of Teachers.

xiv See: http://www.thersa.org/newcurriculum/publications.asp

xv For an authoritative survey on the poor impact of vouchers in North America published by the Washington based Economic Policy Institute

see: http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_viewpoints_vouchers_transcript_20030612

xvi For one extended report go to: http://www.endangeredphoenix.com/FRANCE%20MAR%2006%20OpenOffice.org%201.1.htm

xvii For full account of post-Katrina schooling in New Orleans see rethinking Schools Vol. 21 No. 1 Fall 2006

xviii available at:

http://www.amhersttimes.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3455&Itemid=27
xix
see - United Mind Workers: Unions and Teaching in the Knowledge Society
Authors: Charles Taylor Kerchner, Julia Koppich, Joseph Weeres
Contact: charles.kerchner@cgu

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