COMMENTING on the latest Education at a Glance report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Christine Blower, General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said: ‘The NUT supports its assertion that the social segregation within our schools should be a key concern of UK policy makers. Michael Gove needs to take heed of the warnings apparent from this report and start to evaluate his education policies on the basis of the extent to which they address or exacerbate educational inequalities.
‘The OECD rightly notes that Sweden had been one of the most equitable societies in the past but had seen big increases in social inequality in recent years. It is of continuing concern to the NUT, therefore, that despite these clear warnings the Education Secretary insists on pursuing policies such as the free school model developed in Sweden, which have been shown to have had such a disastrous effect in terms of exacerbating inequalities in education.
The OECD report also shows that whilst access to early childhood education has increased, funding for it is less than the OECD average and pupil teacher ratios are higher than the average. This is bound to compromise the quality of provision . . .
‘The international evidence shows that high performing school systems prioritise teacher quality. Yet instead of investing in the teaching profession through better access to continuous professional development, our own government is moving in the opposite direction by allowing people without a teaching qualification to teach in academies and free schools in England.’
The OECD, whose statistics date from 2010, is in fact highlighting the results of the 13 years of Labour rule under which the gap between rich and poor grew massively, while free state university education was replaced by fee paying of up to £3,000.
The Coalition, with its £9,000 a year university fees and its drive to introduce Free Schools and Academies, is actually making all of the inequalities that the OECD describes much worse.
Gove is bringing in university education that only the rich can afford, and Free Schools and Academies that need not employ qualified teachers, set their own curriculums and dictate the terms and conditions of service of staff, breaking up the national agreements made by the trade unions.
Free Schools are to be the modern private school – independent but subsidised to the hilt by the state – so that in a period of economic crisis the upper middle class, who can no longer afford fee paying, can still provide their children with an ‘exclusive’ privileged education at the complete expense of the taxpayer.
Schools in the UK even, in 2010, were among the most socially segregated in the developed world, according to the OECD report.
Its figures reveal that the UK has unusually high levels of ‘segregation’ in terms of poorer and migrant families being clustered in the same schools, rather than being spread across different schools.
Among the children of immigrant families in the UK, 80% were taught in schools with high concentrations of other immigrant or disadvantaged pupils – the highest proportion in the developed world.
The international statistics also showed that in some countries social mobility has gone into reverse.
In the US, almost one in five young adults faced ‘downward mobility’ – such as not going to university when their parents had.
In the UK, the report highlights this social mobility in reverse with the proportion of young people not in education, employment or training, which is well above the OECD average and is now over one million and being daily worsened by the Coalition.
The Tories are working hard to drive education for the working class back to the dark ages, so that only the rich and the chosen few will get an education.
To put this situation right the Coalition must be brought down with a general strike, and a workers government brought in that will restore free primary, secondary and university education.
