TEACHERS at Copland School in Wembley, who took part in their fifth one day strike against being forced into academy status yesterday, must be congratulated and given overwhelmingly support by every parent and worker for their stand against the destruction of free state education.
The entire drive to force every local authority-run school into becoming an academy is nothing more than a blatant attempt to privatise the entire education system and facilitate the plundering of the education budget by private companies and individuals on the make.
Any doubt that this is the aim of the determined campaign to force every school to become an academy was dispelled this week with the revelation that millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money has been siphoned off into the pockets of the directors of private businesses who run the academies, trustees of academies and relatives of these trustees.
All of this is done entirely within the law, as academies exist as virtual fiefdoms of private companies that take control of the school and all its assets, including playing fields that can be sold off for housing development, and are not answerable to parents or local communities, for their actions.
Up until July 2010, the Charities Commission oversaw the governance of academies, but in August 2011 the coalition switched responsibility for this oversight to the Department for Education.
Just how closely the Tory-led coalition is up to its neck in the privatisation process can be judged from the fact that Tory education minister, Michael Gove, has recently appointed as schools commissioner Frank Green, who runs Leigh Academies Trust which, it is reported, has paid £111,469 since 2010 to Shoreline, a private company founded by him, in consultancy fees.
The picture emerging into the light of day is a very profitable merry-go-round of public money being dished out in consultancy and other fees to a close circle of fellow privateers and the whole shebang ‘overseen’ by the people involved in the entire process.
The education of students, and the wishes of parents are of no concern in this drive to extract every penny of profit from the education system.
In fact, the complete contempt for the wishes of parents has been hammered home by a new directive from the Department for Education, which orders school governors in those schools still within the state system to ‘divorce’ themselves from representing parents and concentrate instead on representing the interests of business and private companies.
These statutory diktats instruct school governors to ‘assist their school to build relationships with business and other employers’.
The new regulations concede that ‘engagement with parents, staff and the wider community is vital’, but goes on to warn: ‘It is not the role of the governing body to provide this through its membership.’
In other words, school governors, especially those who in the past have vociferously opposed academy status, have to be brought to heel and replaced with those who put the interest of the privateer’s profits above all else.
The stand taken by teachers at Copland school in taking strike action to oppose the academy/privatisation programme of the coalition government, must be supported and extended by every teaching union and, indeed, by the entire working class.
The right to a free state education system was a major victory by the trade unions and it must be defended by the whole of the trade union movement.
The demand must be for the abolition of all academies – this means calling out every school in the country on strike as part of a general strike by every union to bring down this government.
There must be no return to a Labour government, which started the privatisation process when it first introduced academies under Blair and which has steadfastly refused to support their abolition, but to advance to a workers’ government and a socialist system where a free state education is guaranteed for every young person.
