THE Labour shadow education minister, Stephen Twigg, made a speech yesterday that was billed as ‘wresting’ the initiative on education from the Tories – in fact, it represented the wholesale acceptance of their policy to force academy status on every single primary and secondary school in the country.
Twigg not only embraced the wholesale ‘academisation’ of the education system but promised to hand it entirely over to the private sponsors who run academies and the ‘free schools’, saying: ‘We know that giving schools more freedom over how they teach and how they run and organise their schools can help to raise standards.
So why should we deny those freedoms to thousands of schools? All schools should have them – not just academies and free schools.’
Throwing schools open to the privateers who are out to make a profit was originally the brainchild of Tony Blair and the last Labour government.
Under Labour 203 schools were turned into academies. Under the coalition government that number has increased to nearly 3,000, with massive government resources being thrown into driving schools into academy status, frequently using dubious Ofsted reports to claim they are failing and must either close or become academies.
These academies are completely outside the control of the local authority and parents.
Instead, they are dominated by the ‘sponsor’ appointed by the education minister – the majority of these ‘sponsors’ are educational business consortiums.
Once a school becomes an academy all its buildings, grounds and physical assets pass into the ownership of the academy sponsor – they become private property which can be disposed of at will.
They also have the ‘freedom’ to determine the pay rates for teachers and other staff as well as employing untrained people to carry out teaching duties.
At a stroke, academies smash up collective pay bargaining and undermine the very existence of the teaching unions who have been in the forefront of opposition to this drive to privatise the education system.
The only ‘freedom’ which academy status conveys is the freedom of the sponsors to plunder the education budget, cut teachers’ pay and destroy the education of children while at the same time enriching themselves.
As private companies they are not responsible to any local control from councils or parents, only to the education minister.
This is the ‘freedom’ which Twigg and Miliband want to extend to the whole of the education system.
Of course, Twigg threw a few sops to parents and the unions by promising in his speech that a Labour government would not create any more ‘free schools’ only keep those in existence, and that un-trained teachers would be sacked and that academies would not be allowed to set their own pay rates.
These promises are just cynical attempts to cover up Labour’s treacherous betrayal of the principle of free state education.
Twigg knows full well that academies are private businesses and it would be illegal for a Labour education minister to sack any employee of a private company or to insist on the right to determine pay levels.
All Twigg and Miliband are concerned with is moving the Labour Party so far to the right that they make themselves acceptable as a responsible partner in any right-wing reactionary coalition with Tories and others – a coalition fit to smash up every vestige of the Welfare State in the name of saving this bankrupt capitalist system.
To this end, they have taken on every right-wing policy of the Tories, including capping benefits, and now by promising the complete privatisation of education.
This treachery must be answered by demanding the TUC call an immediate general strike to bring down the coalition and replace it with a workers government that will go forward to a socialist system that will guarantee the right to free education for every pupil and student.
