The Bill is a disgrace and will tear up any concept of fairness in the education system. In more affluent areas there will be a temptation to go down this route to ‘free the school’ from the supposed strangle-hold of the LEA and the national curriculum, which in itself faces abolition. It is a convenient guise to bring back into our education system a blatant process of selection.
It is unlikely that schools in the most deprived areas will race to run their own schools but they will nevertheless be badly affected. As these new Academies or Free Schools opt out of the state sector, and with that opt out of any form of democratic accountability and control, they will also opt out of support from the LEA. This will lead to a loss of economies of scale and reduce ultimately the resources for those remaining schools in the deprived areas, pushing up disproportionately the cost of that support. Poorer schools will have fewer but more expensive resources to call on.
The LEA will become merely a safety net for those remaining in the state sector and undermine its principle role in supporting education.
So what should we do?
This is an issue for UNISON just as much as it is for the teaching unions. Whilst I am loathe to kiss and make-up with the teaching unions who in general did sweet FA to support our low paid members (whose jobs were privatised when catering, cleaning, building and grounds maintenance contracts were put out to tender) the prospect of replacing our current Education system, for all its warts, and entering into an era of what is de facto privatisation by stealth of our education system, has to be opposed on a universal basis by the movement.
We can’t sleep walk into this. We have the capacity to campaign. We need to put Liberal Democrat councillors on the spot at a local level. We need to bombard Liberal Democrat MPs. Without their votes this Bill will fall. We need to hold labour councils and councillors to account in how they respond to this issue. We need to tell our own members what these proposals really mean. Our members need to actively tell schools no to these proposals and make sure that they are consulted fully as parents across the board – not the usual suspects on the PTA or board of governors deigning to speak on behalf of all parents. Nor should we succour to the false ambitions of Head Teachers pretending to act in the best interests of the school.
This is not just about our members working in the LEA, but those working in schools as Assistants, Secretaries, Bursars, Cooks and Cleaners. More importantly this is the very future of our education system and fundamental socialist principles of a fair and free education are at risk. There will be little control to prevent these ‘Free Schools’ introducing charges in the future. It is a social experiment designed to benefit the middle classes at the expense of the poor.
And watch out for one element that Labour introduced in its last Education Bill which the Tories supported and which Ed Balls proudly trumpets. Private schools, many struggling for cash as businesses have collapsed, will still have the right to opt into the state or free school model. A burden imposed on the rest of us to benefit the privileged few. New labour‘s legacy because the middle-class labour twits who ran the show were too busy pandering to middle England to defend the principles of universal free state education. It is a good a reason as any for UNISON voters in the leadership election to oppose Ed Balls.
The time for talking has ended we need to a full blown missile launch on these flawed ideas and we need it now. Let’s not sleep walk into mass privatisation of our Education system.
Anna Rose