Monday, August 15, 2005
Hands Off Our Schools - Nottingham Kids are Not For Sale!
It seems that all those extra lessons have paid off for the slow-learners at Nottingham City Council. They’ve reassured us that the proposed sponsors for the City Academies are to be of a ‘respectable’ (the words of Councillor Chapman) nature. By ‘respectable’, the council implies that they’ve decided not to take the coin of any of the religious organisations currently running schools into the ground up and down the country. They’ve done this for one reason alone – the bad press and vigorous campaigns motivated by such sponsors and not because they’re opposed to these people running schools. However much teachers, parents and students want and need new schools, the thought of selling education to these dubious characters is abhorrent to all. The council can’t have its flagship education programme dragged through the mud by sponsors who wish to ‘teach’ creationism, intolerance and hokum. It can’t afford to lose votes.
Sadly they seem to have missed out a very important lesson - the one where they tell you that under no circumstances should private companies, business enterprises or undemocratic institutions be allowed to make a profit from education. By the time you read this, the three sponsors may well have been announced. They are likely to include a health organisation, a construction firm and some kind of retail outfit (could be Barrats Shoes, Tesco, McDonalds … pick one … just pretend you’re the council). One of the sponsors could even be an ‘independent’ education consortium of some kind. These are profit making organisations run by a board of directors. All ‘respectable’ institutions (though some would have preferred Clarkes, M&S or Café Nero) but whoever claims they’re willing to hand over £2 million pounds is immaterial. Those of us opposed to the City Academy scheme don’t just object to individual sponsors, we object to the idea as a whole.
The City Academy scheme rests upon two ideological choices made by Blair’s Government. The first of these is that the ‘market’ will do a better job at running education than teachers. What this means in practice is that Blair and his supporters on the City Council think that gaps in the labour market (in Nottingham there is an increasing need for health, construction and retail workers) and shortages in key skill areas (one year IT skills, the next year food preparation) can be better met by giving control of schools to the people who’ll end up offering employment. Seems logical doesn’t it? The second is that the ‘social and moral degradation’ evidenced by poorly performing schools and the sort of behaviour seen in them is best challenged by ‘traditional’ religious values. ‘All knowledge begins with fear of the Lord’, read the plaque unveiled by Blair at the opening of one Academy. This ‘Market and the Bible’ view of the world allows Blair to take steps that the Thatcher governments of the 80s never dared to consider – further steps toward programming kids for work rather than providing an education and indoctrination rather than equipping them with a critical facility. More broadly, it’s an agenda of privatisation and the surrender of society to backward ideas.
Although Nottingham City Council appears to have embraced just the ‘Market’, it’s not true that they reject the ‘Bible’. Over the past ten years they have handed over control of a number of comprehensive school to both the Catholic Church and the Church of England – schools that now select students on the basis of religion. Although not religious fundamentalists like some of the Academy sponsors, they represent a worrying trend that points to the preparedness of this council to put schools under religious control.
So for now we don’t have to worry about one side of the problem; but why should we oppose the seemingly logical plan of letting the market regulate the provision of education? Do we oppose young people being able to find jobs when they leave school? The objection rests on one fundamental idea about education and on one fact about the market.
The council proposes building three academies in Nottingham and they seem to have done some homework about the type of schools required for 21st Century Nottingham. One will specialise in ‘Construction’, another in ‘Retail/Enterprise’ and the last in ‘Health’. Anyone who walks around the City will realise that construction is booming, the shops are full of people and as long as there are humans on Earth, there’ll be birth, death and disease. So Nottingham has a pressing need for builders, shop-workers/entrepreneurs and health workers. It seems reasonable to try and meet the need. Reasonable, that is, until they start trying to do it with eleven year old children. The myth of ‘choice’ bandied about by Blair and his local allies is exposed by these plans. By ‘choice’ they mean choice for some – for those who can afford to choose. If you live in Bulwell you’ll have the choice to be a builder, in St Anns to work in a shop and in Aspley to be a care assistant: some choice! It’s a return to the days of consigning young people to a life down the pit – there will be no other expectations. The people we’re talking about aren’t those whose parents ‘choose’ the religious schools, the county schools or the ‘High School’, but those without a choice – those limited by economic and social constraints. It limits the expectations of the education system on achievement from the children of working families and limits opportunities of these young people when they finish school. Rather than schools giving children the opportunity to grow and develop as thinking human beings, Nottingham City Council plans to pick on the children of working families for disciplining into a particular, narrow field of work. A maths lesson becomes an exercise on how to use a till, history lessons are now a study of brick-work throughout the ages and an art lesson is transformed into practising paint-effects for that hospital waiting room. Does this sound like an education?
But what about the shortage of builders and health workers? Is it really wrong to equip young people with the skills they need to work? We need builders and health workers and young people need jobs – but they shouldn’t have the decision foisted upon them from an early age. Young people currently leaving education have a hard time finding training courses for their chosen field of expertise, have difficulty funding their way through an apprenticeship. Government should fund training at this point – when young people have made a positive choice of their own. These plans rip the heart out of the education system and will transform teachers even further into mere tools of the market.
‘Nonsense’ the council will cry – just look at our existing Academy. This school turns out students who go on to attend university and train in a whole range of areas. This is true but the school also churns out hundreds of kids every year with the equivalent of five GCSEs in Information Technology, flooding an already saturated IT skills market. The initial move towards training young people in this way was made during the ‘Dot Com’ boom of the mid-90s when there was a desperate need for these skills. Most schools adjusted by incorporating IT into the whole curriculum and by running a separate GCSE. Djanogly Academy appears to marginalize other subjects in favour of a narrow field of specialism – this is the reality of the ‘market’ responding to need. If all education is ‘regulated’ in the same way we’ll see privately run academies competing for a place on the league table, churning out students with five GCSEs in the same subject and will end up with huge numbers of highly (and expensively) trained young people who have no prospect of finding work they’re trained for – a crisis.
This is the potential future of education in Nottingham – it doesn’t have to be this way. There have been successful campaigns against academies up and down the country and there must be one in Nottingham.
Sadly they seem to have missed out a very important lesson - the one where they tell you that under no circumstances should private companies, business enterprises or undemocratic institutions be allowed to make a profit from education. By the time you read this, the three sponsors may well have been announced. They are likely to include a health organisation, a construction firm and some kind of retail outfit (could be Barrats Shoes, Tesco, McDonalds … pick one … just pretend you’re the council). One of the sponsors could even be an ‘independent’ education consortium of some kind. These are profit making organisations run by a board of directors. All ‘respectable’ institutions (though some would have preferred Clarkes, M&S or Café Nero) but whoever claims they’re willing to hand over £2 million pounds is immaterial. Those of us opposed to the City Academy scheme don’t just object to individual sponsors, we object to the idea as a whole.
The City Academy scheme rests upon two ideological choices made by Blair’s Government. The first of these is that the ‘market’ will do a better job at running education than teachers. What this means in practice is that Blair and his supporters on the City Council think that gaps in the labour market (in Nottingham there is an increasing need for health, construction and retail workers) and shortages in key skill areas (one year IT skills, the next year food preparation) can be better met by giving control of schools to the people who’ll end up offering employment. Seems logical doesn’t it? The second is that the ‘social and moral degradation’ evidenced by poorly performing schools and the sort of behaviour seen in them is best challenged by ‘traditional’ religious values. ‘All knowledge begins with fear of the Lord’, read the plaque unveiled by Blair at the opening of one Academy. This ‘Market and the Bible’ view of the world allows Blair to take steps that the Thatcher governments of the 80s never dared to consider – further steps toward programming kids for work rather than providing an education and indoctrination rather than equipping them with a critical facility. More broadly, it’s an agenda of privatisation and the surrender of society to backward ideas.
Although Nottingham City Council appears to have embraced just the ‘Market’, it’s not true that they reject the ‘Bible’. Over the past ten years they have handed over control of a number of comprehensive school to both the Catholic Church and the Church of England – schools that now select students on the basis of religion. Although not religious fundamentalists like some of the Academy sponsors, they represent a worrying trend that points to the preparedness of this council to put schools under religious control.
So for now we don’t have to worry about one side of the problem; but why should we oppose the seemingly logical plan of letting the market regulate the provision of education? Do we oppose young people being able to find jobs when they leave school? The objection rests on one fundamental idea about education and on one fact about the market.
The council proposes building three academies in Nottingham and they seem to have done some homework about the type of schools required for 21st Century Nottingham. One will specialise in ‘Construction’, another in ‘Retail/Enterprise’ and the last in ‘Health’. Anyone who walks around the City will realise that construction is booming, the shops are full of people and as long as there are humans on Earth, there’ll be birth, death and disease. So Nottingham has a pressing need for builders, shop-workers/entrepreneurs and health workers. It seems reasonable to try and meet the need. Reasonable, that is, until they start trying to do it with eleven year old children. The myth of ‘choice’ bandied about by Blair and his local allies is exposed by these plans. By ‘choice’ they mean choice for some – for those who can afford to choose. If you live in Bulwell you’ll have the choice to be a builder, in St Anns to work in a shop and in Aspley to be a care assistant: some choice! It’s a return to the days of consigning young people to a life down the pit – there will be no other expectations. The people we’re talking about aren’t those whose parents ‘choose’ the religious schools, the county schools or the ‘High School’, but those without a choice – those limited by economic and social constraints. It limits the expectations of the education system on achievement from the children of working families and limits opportunities of these young people when they finish school. Rather than schools giving children the opportunity to grow and develop as thinking human beings, Nottingham City Council plans to pick on the children of working families for disciplining into a particular, narrow field of work. A maths lesson becomes an exercise on how to use a till, history lessons are now a study of brick-work throughout the ages and an art lesson is transformed into practising paint-effects for that hospital waiting room. Does this sound like an education?
But what about the shortage of builders and health workers? Is it really wrong to equip young people with the skills they need to work? We need builders and health workers and young people need jobs – but they shouldn’t have the decision foisted upon them from an early age. Young people currently leaving education have a hard time finding training courses for their chosen field of expertise, have difficulty funding their way through an apprenticeship. Government should fund training at this point – when young people have made a positive choice of their own. These plans rip the heart out of the education system and will transform teachers even further into mere tools of the market.
‘Nonsense’ the council will cry – just look at our existing Academy. This school turns out students who go on to attend university and train in a whole range of areas. This is true but the school also churns out hundreds of kids every year with the equivalent of five GCSEs in Information Technology, flooding an already saturated IT skills market. The initial move towards training young people in this way was made during the ‘Dot Com’ boom of the mid-90s when there was a desperate need for these skills. Most schools adjusted by incorporating IT into the whole curriculum and by running a separate GCSE. Djanogly Academy appears to marginalize other subjects in favour of a narrow field of specialism – this is the reality of the ‘market’ responding to need. If all education is ‘regulated’ in the same way we’ll see privately run academies competing for a place on the league table, churning out students with five GCSEs in the same subject and will end up with huge numbers of highly (and expensively) trained young people who have no prospect of finding work they’re trained for – a crisis.
This is the potential future of education in Nottingham – it doesn’t have to be this way. There have been successful campaigns against academies up and down the country and there must be one in Nottingham.
