THE Tory education minister, Michael Gove, has unleashed yet another broadside against state education and the teaching profession in a speech on Monday where he called for state schools to become ‘indistinguishable from their fee-paying counterparts’.
Gove’s plans to achieve this includes the imposition of a ten hour working day on teachers and a return to ‘traditional methods’ of teaching.
The picture that Gove is trying to present is that of state schools in a constant state of turmoil with pupils running riot and teachers with no control.
In fact Gove is very much intent on making state schools indistinguishable from private schools not through raising academic standards but by making the entire education system private.
Central to Gove’s attack on the entire free state education system is the drive to force academy status on every secondary and primary school in the country and his championing of the creation of so-called ‘free schools’.
It is this campaign to force academy status, which involves handing schools over to private companies to run, that lay behind the recent spat between the head of the government’s school regulatory body, Ofsted, and Gove and the outcry over his removal of the chair of Ofsted – the Labour peer Sally Morgan – and her replacement with a prominent Tory donor.
Ofsted, and its inspection regime, has been used by Gove to declare schools to be ‘failing’ or even just to be satisfactory, a criteria that can now be used to force them to become academies.
The head of Ofsted, Sir Michael Wilshaw, was attacked by right-wing think tanks closely associated with Gove which urged the government to ditch Ofsted and create a new inspection body to inspect free schools and academies.
Wilshaw, who is an enthusiastic supporter of the Tory coalition’s push for academies, had earned the enmity of Gove by thinking that he should apply the same inspection criteria to academies and free schools as to state schools.
What worried Gove was that this display of independence had resulted in a number of free schools being closed down following inspections after being labelled ‘inadequate’.
Sally Morgan, a right-wing Labour party member who acted as an advisor to Tony Blair, was appointed three years ago by Gove to head up Ofsted inspections and is also a staunch supporter of academies and free schools, but clearly this is not enough for Gove.
What he wants is an Ofsted that knows its place and that place is to let free schools and academies carry on with no oversight, run by people and teachers whose only qualification is their total commitment to privatisation and turning schools into profitable businesses.
To this end Gove is clearing the decks of anyone in Ofsted who might still believe in fairness and equality in standards and fails to recognise that Ofsted’s real role is aiding the destruction of free state education, replacing them with Tory businessmen guaranteed to be on board.
The extent of Gove’s attack was revealed yesterday in a survey of sixth-form colleges which found that they had suffered savage cuts of more than £100 million in funding, resulting in half of them being forced to reduce staffing levels and close down core A-level courses.
This contrasts with the £62 million spent by the government in setting up just nine new free schools catering to a mere 1,557 A-level students which sixth-form college leaders have pointed out is less than the number enrolled in one sixth-form college.
What emerges from all this is that Gove and the government are determined at all costs to smash the whole free state education system in order to open it up to the privateers out to make vast profits from education.
They are prepared to go all the way and will not be deterred by appeals to reason or fairness, the only way to stop them is through a general strike to bring down this government and replace it with a workers government.
