04.09.2014
Gove, but not forgotten
Though demoted within the cabinet, Michael Gove’s programme for education continues. Mikey Coulter assesses the ‘revolution’ in education
Michael Gove was, in his time as secretary of state, one of the most forceful and radical education ministers in history. In all the wrong ways, we may add, but nonetheless he was primarily responsible, against the opposition and passive resistance of even his own civil servants in the department for education, for a greater transformation of the system of education than all of his predecessors combined.
Rather than the drip-drip of post-Thatcher educational reform, Gove poured out a dizzying torrent of legislation and reorganisation throughout the school system - to the anger and despair of teachers and education staff, over whom he ran his wild cart and horses - until he was deposed by prime minister David Cameron himself in a cabinet reshuffle in July as part of his preparation for the 2015 general election. Cameron could oust the ever more unpopular Gove and install an obedient, less well known (and thus less despised) drone in his place to see Gove’s agenda through to completion.
This replacement is the privately educated Nicky Morgan, notable for voting against same-sex marriage and for announcing on August 8 that pre-school toddlers should be taught “fundamental British values” in order to tackle “extremism”.1 An uncharacteristically witty Labour spokesperson, providing the party’s media-friendly ‘instant response’, commented dryly: “There is no concrete intelligence about individual nurseries that demands immediate action.”2 This aside, though Gove is gone, both his successor and his party remain committed to the implementation of his programme - a programme of pure ideological neoliberalism, designed to weaken and fragment the labour force in education, centralise the control of schools under the education minister, and to open up the education budget as a subsidy for and source of profit.
After Thatcher
It is not an overstatement to say that Margaret Thatcher created the modern UK education system as we recognise it today in all its fundamentals. We need only list her ‘contributions’ for the point to be self-evident: the introduction of national vocational qualifications, the national curriculum, standard assessment tests (SATs) at ages 7, 11 and 14, and the general certificate of secondary education (GCSE) at16, league tables, ‘parental preference’ in school choice, ‘grant maintained schools’ funded by central government and ‘free’ from local education authority (LEA) control and able to introduce selection measures and tests - in many ways the forerunners of today’s academies.
This framework of increased control from the state, and of statistical tables and enforcement by the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted), was continued and built upon by the Labour government of 1997-2010, in a way that took the process a step further and filled out the new spaces with bureaucratic complexity. The teacher-student relationship was increasingly instrumentalised, ‘education’ became based not on rounded, developmental learning, but on narrow test results, while education workers were subjected to ever greater management control in the name of maintaining or improving their school’s place in the league tables, resulting in demoralisation and the loss of teaching staff that we see today. All of this was present in its basic form before 1997, but the process was intensified by the Labour government.
Labour’s main contribution in paving the way for Gove was in its creation of academy schools. These represented a qualitative development of grant-maintained schools, bringing in private firms. In keeping with the ideology of the period following the ‘end of history’, Labour justified this on the grounds that ‘business expertise’ and ‘dynamism’ (on an ostensibly ‘non-profit’ basis) would beneficially transform education, with each newly founded academy - usually distressed inner-city schools to begin with - having its costs for land, buildings, staff and equipment partly met from the pocket of some well-meaning private concern. In reality the sponsorship represented only a token amount - the private sponsor could determine elements of the curriculum (using their ‘business expertise’, of course), partial selection crept back in, and the school ran as part of a ‘contract’ with the state centre ‘free’ from LEA control, though still bound to the national curriculum. Gove took this a step further with mass academisation and the introduction of ‘free schools’.
Free schools can be set up by anyone who has the money and is considered fit and proper by the department for education. Almost without exception this has been private education companies and faith groups, although parents in some better-off areas have also been involved. This time the rhetoric, post-bust, was less of ‘business expertise’ - though this undercurrent remains - and more about ‘democracy’: freeing the school from local council control; freeing it from the national curriculum, so that private sponsors can drum their own ideology into the children, without having to employ qualified teaching staff. (After harassing school staff to death with managerialism on steroids, various versions of ‘performance-related’ pay, a vast increase in paperwork and so on, now there is more openly an attempt to break the historic position of education workers as such with measures such as these, plus the mooted moves to regional pay bargaining). These politically important pet schools of Gove received preferential treatment in terms of central government grants for ‘refurbishment’, ‘improvements’ and such, as well as the end of Ofsted inspections and those costly basic nutritional standards! Meanwhile, the remaining community (in the genuine sense) schools - run with LEA support - were starved of funding, and Ofsted was pushed to identify as many ‘failing’ schools as possible in order to allow the creation of further free schools and academies. At present there is no assessment of free schools, from Ofsted or otherwise, and the only ‘solution’ broached, by both main parties, is the creation of thousands of mini-educational Bonapartes, directly elected local ‘education commissioners’, who will be responsible for deciding whether the free schools under their watch are passing or failing.
You can already smell the money that these people could make for coming up with a favourable school review! And there is no reason why the private companies running the ‘free’ schools will not be able to afford it. Already their directors, school heads and executives are making huge amounts of money at the expense of the taxpayer. The real gravy, it seems, is not in the school dinners, but in the school budget.
Feeding time
What must be noted before we get into the grubby money side, is that the ideology used to sell the ‘benefits’ of free schools (and academies) to the public contains kernels of truth from the point of view of the private capital involved (or the faith group, etc). Freedom from having to employ trained staff ‘frees’ you by reducing your wages bill and helps break the power of organised education workers. Freedom from LEA control means freedom from even the semblance of local democracy - however gutted of content it may be (and however full of careerist termites the council may be). The other side of which - centralised control by the department for education - further dissipates any input from the grubby masses. The language of decentralisation, flexibility and freedom - noble and unopposable ideals as they are - is used to push the absolute opposite in practice from the point of view of the education worker, pupil, parent, etc, but that corresponds to the needs of central government and of business. And business does in fact get a great deal from the creation of academies and free schools, which is a form of pseudo-privatisation.
So how do they do it? How do the various business interests involved pocket fat wads of cash in what is superficially a non-profit set-up? In an excellent posting on his blog3 Thomas Clark lays out some of the methods used by the private education companies to milk the state budget for profits. He lists the main methods: ‘topslicing’, leeching, expenses, and transfer pricing.
‘Topslicing’ simply involves paying an awful lot of money to the various school directors and executives in the form of their salaries, often two or three times the size of the government-mandated limit for state-sector headteachers of around the £110K mark. It is not a profit when it is a ‘salary’, it seems.
‘Leeching’ is again very simple, and is “the age-old scam of making yourself (and your associates) the supplier and the buyer in a transaction involving someone else’s money” in the words of Clark. The school buys resources from a company also owned by its directors, for example.
‘Expenses’ is self-explanatory. Private executives chalk up various trips around the country, stay in luxurious hotels, eat in fine restaurants and meet in extravagant venues on the school’s account, providing an on-tap lifestyle boost.
Lastly, ‘transfer pricing’. A classic scam, most often used for the purposes of tax avoidance by large corporate retailers - of coffee, for example, or other consumer goods. Here the school buys in resources from the foreign low-tax front of its private backers at an inflated price, thus seamlessly transferring ‘profit’ abroad in the disguised form of an innocent - if oddly priced - purchase.
Unsurprisingly, the obvious became public, and minor scandals ensued. An article in The Guardian simply, began: “Taxpayer-funded academy chains have paid millions of pounds into the private businesses of directors, trustees and their relatives, documents obtained from freedom of information requests show.”4
Surprise, surprise! So, as we noted earlier, though Gove is gone, we have little cause of optimism. The weakness of the labour movement gives free rein to capitalist logic and we can expect no let-up in the continued pseudo-privatisation of education, the attacks on the education workforce, subsidies for private educational firms, managerialist tyranny, endless exams, and the whole litany.
But simply demanding a return to the past will not suffice. In an article in the Socialist Workers Party’s International Socialism journal, which otherwise neatly deconstructs the whole rotten ideological edifice of the Gove project, the logic of state control and capital behind the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ and so on, Nick Grant states that our response ought to be to “make major demands on Gove and his ilk. Any politician seriously concerned about improving schools could start by scrapping SATs, Ofsted and performance-related pay and other machinery of social control masquerading as quality control.”5
We want all of these things, of course, but his is hardly a positive strategy. The state is unlikely to reverse the measures introduced over the recent decades, and even so, would we really seek to place control back in the very hands which initiated the whole process in the first place? Surely the labour movement would be better off making lemonade with the lemons that Thatcher, and now Gove et al, have given us, with a campaign for the institutions of the labour movement to set up our own free schools (if they really are free, after all!). That would take what exists at present and point a way forward based on the agency of the working class for itself - rather than seeking to mobilise it for a return to a dead past.
Notes
1. The Guardian August 8 2014.
2. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/toddler-extremism-tackled-education-secretary-094631233.html#tQPwAnS.
3. http://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/michael-gove-ideological-vandalism.html.