There has always been one asset the Conservative party has had over Labour since Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, and that is the sheer ruthlessness of their convictions.
James Elliott is a journalist who also writes for the Huffington Post
There has always been one asset the Conservative party has had over Labour since Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, and that is the sheer ruthlessness of their convictions.
While political determination is often an offshoot of ugly ideological zeal, it has served the Tories well in achieving their goals when in government.
The increasing evisceration of the British state under David Cameron may be halted in 2015, but should the Tories win another election the most fervent ideologue of them all knows exactly what trick to pull next.
A string of memos and leaks have revealed Michael Gove’s plan to convert all of Britain’s 30,000 state schools into academies, and then to allow ‘sponsors’ to operate them as for-profit commercial enterprises.
Hedge funds and venture capitalists would be able to invest into schools, supposedly to boost their performance. Schools would then compete for pupils, raising the educational standards in Gove’s libertarian panacea.
When you hear Michael Gove eventually come to defend these policies, as they are made public, he will cite Sweden as his model.
However the Institute for Public Policy Research concludes:
“In Sweden, the not-for-profit free schools performed better overall than the for-profit free schools.’ Outside of Sweden, the same IPPR report found, ‘Within many countries, schools that compete more for students tend to have higher performance, but this is often accounted for by the higher socioeconomic status of students in these schools.”
The evidence is against Gove.
Resting our copy of F.A.Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom aside for one moment, assuming we have not already graduated onto Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, Michael Gove is living in a fiction. Far from being a free-market utopia of outstanding education, Gove’s plan would see standards fall and ability to pay determining quality of education. It would take Britain another step on the path to being a scarred and divided society.
It does not matter to Gove that his policies are deeply unpopular, with three quarters of those polled believing academies should not make profits. Anyone who doubts the Tories wouldn’t privatise a vital public service in the face of public opposition only needs to be reminded of three words: National Health Service.
What Jeremy Hunt is doing for our health system, Michael Gove will do to schools, but with the caveat that running schools for profit will further entrench people into the class they were born into.
If education becomes something only money can buy, then only money will buy the best, and only the richest will have access to the top-performing schools and universities.
Gove is a product of the Thatcherite revolution. The free-market ideals he opines are a product of neo-liberal think tanks such as the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Adam Smith Institute, which the excellent site WhoFundsYou? has found to be the least transparent of such operations.
In other words, they do not want to concede they are bankrolled by big business and the City; much like the Conservative party are. Gove himself is a darling of the Tory donors, and receives more in donations than any other Tory cabinet member.
The rise of neo-liberal Toryism has relied on the intellectually shoddy arguments about free-markets that these think-tanks peddle. They and their wealthy backers have succeeded over the years in hollowing-out the Tories to the point where they are now mostly funded by the City.
It should come as no surprise that 21 academies are now under the control of the Harris Foundation, owned by Lord Harris, one of the Tories’ biggest donors, who will no doubt be able to donate more to the party if Gove lets him run the schools for profit.
Such are the results when political philosophy is replaced with electoral philanthropy, and evidence-based policy replaced with free-market ideology.
If Michael Gove wants to position himself as a future party leader, as some are suggesting, it is this sort of dogma that will impress.
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15 Responses to “Gove’s attack on public education is purely ideological”
Lady Luck
The 76% relates to 5 A*-C GCSE grades, not the number who got some grades and the rest who did not. Not perfect, but don’t expect results to shoot up any time soon. Anyway, the important point is that this WENT UP and it did so with the kind of govt. spending that would never have happened under a Tory administration.
Gove’s spending (and his OVERSPEND of a £1bn) has been on bribing schools to become academies or on free schools, not on improving provision. We need better training for teachers of special needs and FAR MORE of them. But Gove is not interested in special needs. They don’t exist, to him.
LEAs distribute money to schools based on per head numbers. Discretionary spending went to schools with more pupils on free school meals. In Gove’s world the market would determine spending on schools, not on the needs of pupils. Both schools have 1000 pupils but in different catchment areas? So what, the company decides that they both get the same. That’s the market.
Education isn’t some money-making scheme for LEAs. It is a core function of local government and what local government should be about. It’s like saying, IDS could get more money if state pensions weren’t creamed off by pensioners. For obvious reasons, state education was not designed to be controlled centrally. Local children, local schools, local solutions. Not the big boss man in London.
The tax-payer funded private model costs big bucks to maintain, not least because the ‘state’ becomes a (willing) captive of the market. Look at the water industry. The water companies are essentially owned by hedge funds or other private equity providers. The water company and your bill is their cash-cow funding, to be distributed God-alone knows around the world. This money disappears from the British economy, as do the taxes that they should be paying here.
This is almost the model being used in health now and will be the model for Gove’s new-look public/private model. I say almost, because it will be your taxes that will be redirected into the pockets and offshore tax havens of education companies. Big profits, big bonuses, big tax avoidance; smaller salaries for teachers, fewer training opportunities, less money on actual education for children. Any increases in spending will be at the behest of the companies and will be lauded as good for education, but will be about swelling their bank balances. OK, Britain is hardly democratic, but this is simply government by corporation.
The introduction of the market will bring instability and risk into the sector. Think of what happens in football. New head teachers every year,replacing management and teaching staff, kids get different teachers every term, are they trained, who knows?
The private system of education, especially the big ‘Public’ Schools, are the cradles of ideology! What else but ideology could explain the grip that these schools have on the strings of power, political, social and economic? Like, for ever! Was it not Wellington who said that Waterloo was won “on the playing fields of Eton?” Actually, it was won by men who had never been to school and could not read or write. But that’s British history for you. What school you go to determines your future, no matter how good or bad the education. ‘They’ (the elite) have their schools, which offer a fast-track to wealth and power. Changing Bogsworth High to the Lord Carpetright Free Enterprise Academy will not change this one iota.
Most state school teachers are interested (sadly) in IKEA furniture, football and cookery programmes on telly.
Ah, the evil teaching unions. Because it’s so easy to negotiate pay and conditions with corporate private sector bosses ON YOUR OWN, isn’t it? And ALL headteachers are kindly souls, who would never resort to bullying their own staff, would they? It’s not as if teachers have some of the highest rates of suicide amongst professionals, is it, or the highest death rates amongst newly retired professionals? Oh, they do. If the actions of a union stop at least one person from feeling that they have nowhere to go but suicide because of the actions of Offsted or a tyrannical head, then I say good.
OldLb
24% of all pupils have been failed by the state. Without those 5 GCSEs (and what a low target that is), after 80,000 pounds worth of spending, they are functionally illiterate to do much in a modern society.
Now, that’s an average. What that means for the statistically illiterate like Ofsted and Bush, is that there are schools who are well below that level.
So if you think money solves all, here are some suggestions.
1. 10% of school spending ends up in charges to the LAs. How about removing schools from LA control, which means they get 10% extra to spend on pupils?
Ah yes, can’t increase spending in that way because Gove’s doing that. Gove’s a tory and anything a tory does is evil. Plus we would lose our jobs. Can’t have that can we. Bugger the kids so long as we’re employed.
2. Vouchers. You get 50% of the states cost of educating your child, if you educate them privately. That leaves 50% of the money for the state to use on spending the remainder. The money spent per pupil goes up by 3,000 pounds for every kid that leaves.
So what are the objections to that one? Lets see the one’s I’ve heard.
Private education is evil.
The middle class will leave, and that means the state gets all the basket cases.
Profit is evil.
If the money leaves, how we will be paid a pension?
…
3. How about some equality?
Each and every school gets a per head amount to spend. If they want to spend it with the LA, 10% of spending, they can.
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What school you go to determines your future
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Agreed. If you end up at one of those average schools, where 76% scrape 5 GCSEs, run by the state, [Are you one of them?} you are pretty much screwed for life.
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Ah, the evil teaching unions. Because it’s so easy to negotiate pay and conditions with corporate private sector bosses ON YOUR OWN, isn’t it
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And where are the kids in that? Where are the people who have to pay for it all? Not on the radar.
You need to face up to the damage that schools do to the life chances of kids. These are state schools, and its state schools that are screwing their pupils over.
5 GCSEs for only 76% means 24% are condemned to low skilled low paid work. That’s the evil.
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Most state school teachers are interested (sadly) in IKEA furniture, football and cookery programmes on telly.
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That’s one of the causes.
blarg1987
Have you considered part of the problem is learning styles, if I give you a maths paper written in latin on a different base level of maths say 8 would that mean you are a failure if you do not complete it?
The answer is no, the touble is the system is to set up around final papers, when not every student is academically bright, but bright in other ways and skill sets suchh as hands on etc, these skills are something that are hard to measure and something we should try to include in the education system.
blarg1987
Yet you have not said what percentage of children fail under other systems?Acadamies exclude troubled kids (automatic failure) and decides which peoples they have reducing the chances of children with learning difficulties getting a good education (another failure).
OldLb
Ah that old chestnut.
Lets wait until the end, and then test. By which time, its too late. Kids have been failed, because they are functionally illiterate without getting passed the extremely low ‘aspiration’ of 5 GCSEs.
There needs to be annual testing at a minimum, in a way that excludes the teacher. It’s needs to be objective and not subjective. It needs to be standardized between one cohort, and between successive cohorts. Exams are the best system for this.
For technical subjects, art, music, technology, then clearly you have also to include project work. However, even music is exam based, so you can test those too.
Now I expect that to be heresy to teachers at the schools that are failing their pupils. However it does give kids the experience of exams, and it gives early warning as to the kids being failed.
What is needed is for the teaching profession to wake up. They have failed lots of kids awfully. Since they haven’t changed, change needs to be forced on them,
What I also suggest is that Gove changes the ranking of schools. In particular the triage system of teaching to exams where the good are ignored, the complete failures are ignored and all the effort expended in the marginal.
By changing to a points based, where an A scores more than a B, than a C, … and averaging the points per child, its in the schools interest to expend effort on all children, and its hard to fudge the numbers.