WHEN the Tory education minister, Michael Gove, dumped the Labour peer Sally Morgan from her post as Chair of Ofsted, last January, his action was denounced by even his LibDem partners in the coalition as an ‘attempt to politicise’ the schools inspectorate and was part and parcel of Gove’s plan to fill every position in the education system with Tory ‘placemen’.
This weekend, these warnings came true with a vengeance when stories leaked to the press indicated the two frontrunners for the job of running Ofsted and making certain that it was fully behind Gove’s campaign to completely privatise education.
The man named as most likely to take up the post is David Ross, the wealthy co-founder of Carphone Warehouse and a major donor to the Tory party.
A close friend of Cameron and London Mayor, Boris Johnson, this former tax exile and multi-millionaire became Johnson’s representative for the 2012 Olympics – a position he was forced to resign from over irregularities.
Apart from donating £230,000 to the Tories, Ross has set up the David Ross Education Trust that runs 25 academy schools. Ross also acts as an advisor to Gove on ‘education policies’.
There is a second name being put forward for the chief Ofsted role, that of Theodore Agnew. By a happy coincidence Agnew is also a major donor to the Tories (only £144,000), also comes from a wealthy background and, like Ross, benefited from a private school education.
Agnew used some of his money to set up the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange. He also acted as an advisor to Gove and was recently appointed chairman of the Department for Education’s academies board which is charged by Gove to drive through the policy of forcing academy status on every school in the country.
It was this Policy Exchange think tank that last month asked schools to provide them with evidence on whether or not Ofsted is still ‘fit for purpose’.
This was part of the campaign by Gove against the head of the Ofsted school inspection team, Sir Michael Wilshaw.
Wilshaw had incurred Gove’s wrath by insisting upon using the same Ofsted standards for free schools and academies as inspectors do with any other state-run schools.
By law, Ofsted are not allowed to inspect these private money-making Academy chains but Wilshaw, in an unwelcomed display of independence from Gove, has been campaigning for them to be treated the same as council-run education.
That Gove is completely hostile to this is scarcely surprising.
Started by the last Labour government, academies and now ‘free’ schools are at the forefront of the Tories’ privatisation campaign and anything that exposes the reality that their standards are worse than those schools still under local education authorities will not be tolerated.
Out of the 34 schools belonging to one of the country’s biggest chains, E-ACT, individual Ofsted reports found that an ‘overwhelming proportion’ of pupils fail to receive a good education.
This is not what Gove intended Ofsted to be – its remit is to fail all state schools and force them into becoming academies, a sector dominated by the private, profit-driven, education chains.
With the sacking of Sally Morgan and her replacement by Tory businessmen with their fingers well in the lucrative pie of private education, Gove clearly intends to clear the decks of all opposition to the Tory plans to complete the privatisation of the education system.
Just as in the health service – where privatisation of the NHS has been driven forward by the appointment of a senior executive from a private US health firm, Simon Stephens, as head of NHS England – so the new appointment as boss of Ofsted will mark an all-out war against free state education.
The only answer to this is for the trade unions to act decisively by calling a general strike to get rid of all these privatisation plots once and for all by bringing down the coalition government and going forward to a workers government and socialism.
