HUNDREDS of state-run schools in England are facing closure as a direct result of the Tory-led coalition’s war against free state education, it emerged on Wednesday night.
Changes to the marking system for GCSE’s – changes insisted upon by the right-wing Tory Education Minister Michael Gove – have meant that this year’s GCSE results saw a drop in the proportion of A grades for the first time in 20 years.
Behind all the bluster about preventing ‘grade inflation’– the belief much subscribed to by the Tories and right-wing press that exams have become too easy and that this, rather than the hard work of teachers and pupils, accounts for increases in the numbers of young people achieving good exam results – lies a much more sinister plan.
Along with demanding that examiners mark down exam papers, the government has introduced a further change this year – they are now demanding that all schools should achieve at least 40 per cent of their pupils obtaining good grades in at least five subjects including English and Mathematics.
This is an increase from the equally arbitrary figure of 35 per cent imposed on schools last year.
Any state school that fails to achieve this new figure will face closure or the prospect of being taken out of the control of the local authority and transformed into an Academy run by a ‘sponsor’.
Any Academy falling below this level will see its Headteacher sacked.
Gove’s previous efforts to force schools into Academy status has been met with stiff resistance from both parents and teachers who rightly see it as a mechanism for opening the door to the privatisation of state education.
By shifting the goalposts, as the leader of the NUT put it, Gove has provided an excuse to designate hundreds of schools across the country as ‘failing’ and therefore ripe for closure or for private business or religious groups to move in and take over.
Gove, of course, doesn’t give two hoots about educational standards or the future of hundreds of thousands of young people who will be devastated to learn this week that their grades have been arbitrarily reduced in order to fulfil the government’s desire to smash up state education.
What Gove and the government plans, is to remove all schools from local authority control and to launch a devastating attack on the teaching profession.
Free schools are already able to employ unqualified ‘teachers’ and to set their own pay rates for staff and this is precisely what Gove has openly admitted he wants to introduce across the entire education system.
Ultimately, he and the government want to completely privatise education and open it up to the for-profit companies.
In March this year, the country’s first-ever for-profit further education college was opened up in Luton under the auspices of the Barnfield Federation, paying dividends to private investors.
Peter Birkett, the head of Barnfield (which also runs a number of Academies in the area) made clear at the time that he fully expected the government to introduce legislation to allow Academy schools to follow suit.
This fiddling of the exam results by the government is clearly a step down this road of complete privatisation.
For the Tory-led coalition, education is just a drain on the state, draining money away from keeping the banks afloat and capitalism just about alive.
Having priced working class youth out of higher education through tripling university fees, they are now set on destroying the entire state-funded education system and turning schooling into another profit-making business.
The future of young people can only be assured by kicking this government out and by replacing it with a workers government that will guarantee free state education for all.
