Education for Tomorrow 123 by Communist Party

EDUCATION for TOMORROW FOR THE DEFENCE OF STATE EDUCATION

What next after the teacher conferences? Asbestos in schools Building resistance from below Professional unity What’s in a name? Review International

news

‘ The attack on education is part of a wider attack on the very nature of our society, involving a fundamental shift of power and resources from working people to those who dominate both the economy and the state.’ – page 10 SUMMER 2015

ISSUE 123 1

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Editorial Board Anne Brown, Martin Brown, Tony Farsky, Gawain Little, Diane Randall, Hank Roberts, Simon Watson, EDUCATION for TOMORROW is produced by people involved with education of like mind most of the time and certainly on all vital matters of education and politics. It does not claim to represent the views of any one political party of the working class. Nonetheless its aim is at all times to speak in the interests of all working people. Fully involved in the struggle for peace and socialism it aims to publicise workers’ achievements and to counter misinformation about past and existing struggles to build socialism. It is to promote the aims of the organised labour movement in Britain; with common schooling for ALL our children (i.e. a good local state school for every child - truly comprehensive and democratically accountable) together with everything necessary to make this possible, in terms of provision of buildings and equipment, and staff properly trained and properly paid. We therefore support the campaign for one union for all education workers as a step towards achieving this goal. Our columns are open to all who share these aims - even though they may at times disagree with particular articles and want to say so, and why!

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Contents Editorial – 3 Teacher conferences – 4 Anti Academies Alliance news – 5 Asbestos in schools –6

ISSN 2066-9145

Website: www.educationfortomorrow.org.uk

Building resistance from below – 8

Published and printed by the EDUCATION for TOMORROW Collective

Professional unity (part 2) – 10

Cover photo: Staff, parents and pupils from St Andrew and St Francis Primary School, Brent demand ‘Give us a vote’.

What’s in a name? – 9 ‘Getting By’ review –11 International - 14

‘Creaking under the weight of their own contradictions’ Even the Tories were surprised. Just a quarter of the electorate voted for them yet they’re back in office with a slim overall majority. So we face the grim prospect of another five years of Conservative rule. We know what to expect – massive cuts in public spending, attacks on human rights, new attacks on unions, further privatisation policies in every area and the exploitation of prejudice and xenophobia to scapegoat vulnerable communities – divide and rule tactics that bear all the hallmarks of fascism. The Trade Union bill announced in the Queen’s Speech threatens to wipe out hard won workers’ rights. They propose that strikes affecting essential public services will need the backing of 40 per cent of eligible union members. There will also need to be a minimum 50 per cent turnout in strike ballots and the government will also lift restrictions on employers on the use of agency staff to scab on striking workers. Michael Gove has been appointed as the new Justice Secretary to lead the assault on the Human Rights Act (HRA). This continues the assault on justice that was initiated under the previous administration. Fear is the new instrument to drive up standards in education with more testing, more free schools, more forced academisation and less money. Newly re-appointed Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, has announced that the government’s education priorities will be to speed up the process for tackling failing schools, extend the academies programme to tackle ‘coasting’ schools and deliver its commitment to open 500 new free schools. Mary Bousted, General Secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, has accused Morgan of being ‘naive, or ignorant or both’. Kevin Courtney the National Union of Teacher’s Deputy General Secretary has warned Morgan that she should be using her office to argue for the protection of the education budget as schools were facing 10 per cent cuts, while Chris Keates, speaking for the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers, argued that, ‘tough talk and threats to headteachers’ were ‘simply a smokescreen for the government’s intention to continue its programme of structural change for which there was no evidence of success.’ The Sunday Telegraph front page headline

‘Meanwhile, Tories take on unions over schools’ is a taste of what’s to come. This government is vulnerable, however, and they know it. On some issues their slim majority may disappear. Hence, for instance, their decision to delay the repeal of the HRA. In education, there is a growing schools places crisis, the result of central government curtailing the power of local authorities to open new schools, while free schools are being promoted in areas where there is no need. There is a growing teacher recruitment and retention crisis characterised as the ‘bring-in, burn-out, replace’ model of staffing. The guise of ‘parental choice’ is also coming under scrutiny as never before as schools are forced down the academy route in the face of parental opposition. The government’s proposal to abolish the parental ballot on academy conversion speaks volumes. As Professor Howard Stevenson, from the University of Nottingham points out, ‘Many policies are already creaking under the weight of their own contradictions. The academies programme is clearly flagging and any effort to drive the policy forward through more ‘forcing’ will likely meet with strong parental opposition. Meanwhile market solutions to school places and teacher supply are demonstrably failing. Add to the mix teachers’ untenable workloads and it is clear that the longer term sustainability of the system itself is in question. There has to be change’. The joint letter from ten teaching unions to the government calling on them to protect education funding is a start. Those who understand and care about education must speak with one voice.

Private Eye 1393

After the conferences and the election, what next? The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) and the National Union of Teachers (NUT) all held their conferences over Easter. If the trade unions in the other sectors of employment had had the strength, vision and organisation of the teacher unions, the election result would have been different. A Tory government would not have been returned. This does not deny or detract from the impact of a Labour Party that has long since ditched socialism and, as a pale reflection of the Tories, has disillusioned millions. The election manifestos, and the work of all three of the main teacher unions in spreading their message, was excellent. Our vision of education, and a society that values it, is superb. Our problem is that we are not achieving it. We are still moving backwards and the recent election has already speeded up the nature and depth of the attack. In the midst of utterly corrupt governance (read ‘How Corrupt is Britain?’ by David Whyte and published by Pluto Press), reflecting an increasingly corrupt and disintegrating educational system, is there anything to be hopeful about? Yes there is. This Government has massive weakness and a weakness that we can exploit. Their weakness includes; • The burgeoning crisis of a massive shortage of school places only compounded by the free market idiocy of having ‘free’ schools built in areas with no shortage of school places. • The growing crisis in teacher supply recruitment and retention. • Increasing parental opposition to unqualified teachers. • The terrible and unsustainable level of workload. • The serious and continuing decline in real pay and the breakup of a salary system aimed at individualising pay ‘bargaining’ based on performance (or should that be subservience). • An inspection system, Ofsted, that is now more discredited in both theory and practice than the theory of phlogiston. Testing – now extended to 4-year-olds! Creating winners and failures at four. What next three? Two? An exam system not fit for purpose. It changes every five minutes, it seems, and has massive cock-ups just as frequently.

It is a monumental house of cards, but one that can just about stand precariously – unless we hit it. Much action needs to be taken bottom up. It is at school level that workload has to be confronted and increasingly school union groups have started doing this. Long checklists of things that members shouldn’t be doing, and trying to get them to stop doing all of them at once, is not the way to succeed. It should be by picking on the main concern, or the most easily won, and winning it. Making progress step by step. Unions need to work together to achieve this. Equally, schoolbased action will be needed over threats of redundancies, academisation, class size etc. It would be good to think out what actions schools could take over Ofsted inspections. There are clearly prospects for united action over pay. All three main unions passed conference motions over the unacceptable present levels of pay. The NASUWT motion on pay was the most highly prioritised. It was strengthened by an amendment which pointed out that ‘there was, and is, absolutely no economic necessity or justification for these attacks’ and seeking ‘an approach be made jointly with any other teacher union that is ‘deemed by the Executive to be both possible and appropriate’. The last pension strikes that ATL, NASUWT and NUT organised together were supported by the National Association of Head Teachers and showed the potential to close virtually every school in the country. Baseline assessment is another area for interunion cooperation having the added strength that parents should, with work, be able to be brought on board. (Oh to be in Finland where they have no standardised national tests until the end of secondary education.) A boycott is the obvious way to stop this, but we need to build majority professional support. Finally, the Government’s real aim is to privatise state education and have it run for profit. They have a huge mountain to climb. State education, as with the NHS, is held dear in the hearts of our people. A highlight of the NUT conference was Peter Pendle, ATL Deputy General Secretary, addressing the NUT conference and receiving a standing ovation (see photo). Later at the NUT UNIFY fringe, he said, ‘With 4

Anti Academies Alliance news The Establishment, Zero Hours Contracts and a Failing Sixth Form Anyone who doubts that it is the ‘establishment’, rather than ‘ordinary teachers’, who are behind free schools and the global education reform movement (GERM), should take a look at the STEM 6 sixth form, in Islington. Founded in 2013, its chair of governors is Tony Sewell. Dr Sewell is an education adviser to Boris Johnson, Mayor of London. He is also CEO of ‘Generating Genius’ a charitable company contracted by the Mayor to carry out an investigation into London schools. Should we be surprised that ‘Generating Genius’ was then contracted to provide some of the services recommended by the resulting report? One of the trustees of ‘Generating Genius’ is Professor Anthony Finkelstein of University College London. There is no doubting Dr Finkelstein’s academic record but he has an interesting fraternal link too. He is the brother of Murdoch man, former Times editor and now Tory peer Lord Daniel Finkelstein. Now we have no idea of the closeness of the Finkelstein family, but the notion that free schools are founded by groups of parents or ‘ordinary teachers’ seems to have been blown open. STEM 6 has another claim to fame. It was the free school that tried last year to impose zero hour contracts on its teachers. This year STEM 6 received a damning Ofsted report. Joint Secretary of Islington NUT, Ken Muller, commented: ‘We take no pleasure in being vindicated by Ofsted’s conclusions ... the victims of any inadequacies correctly identified by Ofsted … will first of all be the students and then the school teaching and support staff.’ Mr Muller adds: ‘David Cameron, Michael Gove and, now, Nicky Morgan, have exerted usually irresistible pressure on ‘failing’ community schools to become academies run by private sponsors. Now that a flagship sponsored free school has been found to be failing, surely the right thing to do is to bring it into a very successful local authority family of schools or integrate it with a nearby mainstream sixth form college with a proven record of success.’ Wisely, Dr Sewell has said that he will no longer pursue his latest project – a STEM 6 in

Peter Pendle ATL Deputy General Secretary speaking at NUT Conference

one teachers’ union, we’d be so powerful we would rarely need to strike.’ Kevin Courtney, NUT Deputy General Secretary, also said that he believed passionately in professional unity and that it would help us greatly with the problems the teaching profession faces. They were joined on the platform by Gawain Little, Chair, NUT Professional Unity Committee, and Amanda Martin, NUT Executive member. At the well-attended ATL UNIFY fringe meeting, Peter Pendle supported their views, and Max Hyde, the then NUT President, also spoke and was warmly received. Following both unions participation in the professional unity meeting held in London last year, it is welcome that both unions are prepared to seek to engage in discussions regarding it. Unity between any would be a huge step. It is just a great pity and a weakness in our fight to save state education that, so far, NASUWT is still standing aside. In conclusion I would say we are down but not out. The enemy are ahead on points, but it’s a long way to the final bell. They are looking increasingly wobbly. Slowly but surely, their strategic position is weakening, and ours is getting stronger. I predict with confidence their ultimate defeat. We will have a state education system. The nation needs it. Our children deserve it.

Hank Roberts Organising Secretary UNIFY

Croydon, South London, because he says: ‘setting up a free school is a major undertaking and at this present time we feel that we are unable to commit the level of resource required to successfully launch a new academy’.

Standing

the

what? – at the national average. According to the tables – which judge both value added performance and the rate of improvement at GCSE - the best performing chains and local authorities are in London. The factors behind London’s success are the subject of much discussion and may include economic prosperity, aspiration, migration, the London Challenge, and, of course, better funding. And the highest performing chains – ARK and Harris – both deliberately focus their secondary provision in London. Oasis, near the bottom of the league, has a lamentable track record with Ofsted too: more than half of its academies have been judged inadequate or requiring improvement. This week another Oasis academy, Lister Park in Bradford, has been judged inadequate in every category and told it requires special measures.

GERM

Shareholders attending Pearsons’ annual general meeting were surprised to be greeted by protestors in anti-bacterial masks. Social justice and education campaigners from both sides of the Atlantic joined together to raise awareness of Pearsons’ global influence in education. As well as publishing the Financial Times, Pearsons is the mega-corporation behind SATS testing in the UK and the PARCC tests in the USA, where they have been accused of spying on children’s social media accounts. Social justice campaigners questioned the Pearsons board about their involvement in forprofit fee-paying schools in the world’s poorest countries.

www.antiacademies.org.uk

Health warning: your school may kill you The evidence is clear. The number of pupils and teachers dying from mesothelioma cancer because they were exposed to asbestos in their schools is increasing and the excellent evidence submitted by The Asbestos in Schools Group and The Joint Union Asbestos Committee to the Department for Education consultation shows that asbestos is still not being managed safely in schools. In 2012 alone 22 teachers and an estimated 200 to 300 pupils died from mesothelioma. If they had died soon after exposure to asbestos there would have been outrage. Most victims die many decades later and have difficulty tracing asbestos records and holding duty-holders to account. One of them was Sarah Jane Bowman - a former Brent school pupil who was exposed in the 1970s and 1980s. In 2009, aged just 40, she was diagnosed with mesothelioma and given less than one year to live. Traumatised and worried for her two boys she and her solicitors, Irwin Mitchell, contacted Brent Council. The Council said it had no asbestos records for her old secondary school and it was obviously not in their interest to find them! Fortunately Brent teacher unions were able to find the required evidence including copies of 1980s council records that Hank Roberts, Member of

Protestors at Pearsons’ AGM

Local Authorities Outperform Chains at GCSE The Department for Education is consulting on how it might measure academy chain performance. Unfortunately for them, the statistics show that local authorities outperform their beloved chains and that the vast majority of chains perform - guess

JUAC and AiS1 had fortunately kept. Evidence this. showed that Sarah was exposed when pupils and There is another problem with Risk contractors disturbed asbestos insulation board. Assessments. They are not fit for purpose. They She gained a substantial settlement in recognition were designed for adults working with asbestos. of this from Brent Council. They were not designed for children who are more It is vital that the unions campaign for the vulnerable to asbestos exposure nor for long term mandatory keeping of asbestos records and environmental exposure. They also do not take asbestos at risk registers into account disturbance for at least 50 years. of asbestos by building Parents need to be deterioration and many informed. Victims of our schools are long should not have to spend past their sell by date! precious time proving Clearly asbestos removal asbestos exposure. is the only sure way to Sarah defied the prevent asbestos odds against her and is exposure in schools. currently in remission. Asbestos management Her wish is that asbestos appears farcical when should be removed from Duty-holders do not even all schools. She now know how to calculate knows that her own son the Risk Assessments Sarah Jane Bowman was exposed to asbestos as a was taught in the same upon which their pupil and diagnosed with mesothelioma decades later Crocidolite asbestos Asbestos Management panelled classroom hut Plans are based. that she was taught in nearly 30 years earlier. The NUT recently passed a motion Crocidolite is up to 500 times more dangerous than instructing the Executive to urge mandatory chrysotile. training of Duty-holders in asbestos management The asbestos register described the asbestos and risk assessments BUT in the meantime teachers in her son’s classroom as ‘low risk, manage’. But and support staff can ask to be relocated from all members asked the NUT to check. The NUT found classrooms that contain accessible asbestos that there was actually a medium to high risk of the insulation board and asbestos that is being asbestos being disturbed and the deterioration in disturbed by building deterioration. We need to the structure of the hut meant that the asbestos keep parents informed about the asbestos in their could not be managed safely. child’s school. Trained health and safety The NUT advised that the class be relocated representatives and safety committees have a and Brent Council recommended demolition. crucial role to play in monitoring asbestos Pupils and teachers were exposed to asbestos in management in their schools. that hut because the risk assessment was underPrioritisation of market forces and funding estimated and funding was not made available for bankers’ life-styles have obviously produced the essential maintenance work. current situation where pupils and teachers die Duty-holders are responsible for doing these from mesothelioma because that is considered risk assessments and under-estimation of the preferable to funding the removal of asbestos from assessment is widespread. They underestimate all our schools. because they wrongly assume that pupils are not likely to disturb asbestos. However, the HSE advises that pupils are highly likely to disturb Member of AiS and long-time accessible asbestos and that should be no surprise campaigner for removal of all asbestos to any teacher. in schools The underestimation of asbestos risk assessments appears to be widespread in our schools and so the Department for Education plans to issue fresh guidance to Duty-holders because of

Gill Reed

JUAC – Joint Unions Asbestos Committee AiS – Asbestos in Schools 7

Five more years: building resistance from below There is no doubt that the election result represents a major setback – particularly for those hoping to turn the tide on the dark years of the Coalition government. Under that government there was little evidence that the Liberal Democrats acted as a meaningful brake on the worst elements of Govian education policy, but now even that modest influence has been removed. What is clear is that there will be more free schools, more academies, more testing and more pressure on teachers. The bigger picture is one of more power invested in central government and Ofsted, with markets and competition being used to fragment the system. This creates the conditions in which the long term goal of privatisation can be accomplished much more easily. Spaces for democratic debate and decision making are progressively closed down whilst aggressive efforts are made to silence voices of critique and dissent – whether in local government, the universities or the unions. Marginalising such voices, as far as possible, has always been central to the Right’s educational project. A system of private schools, funded by public money, producing the human capital needed by business whilst reproducing the inequalities expected by the elite has always been an ideological project. Winning the battle of ideas has therefore necessitated an attack on those organisations capable of speaking back to the Right’s neoliberal project. The threat to local government, and a democratic space for determining education provision, is most obvious in the renewed drive to academisation. Despite significant academisation in the secondary school sector during the period of the Coalition government what was clear by the end of that government was that the policy had run out of steam. Academy conversion rates had slowed substantially whilst the academies policy had never made serious inroads in the primary sector. The Conservative government now intends to reinvigorate this policy by forcing more conversions (the so-called ‘coasting schools’ agenda) and by further restricting the already very limited opportunities for local consultation about proposed changes. The challenge to education as a discipline in universities is presented by the continued attacks on

university based teacher education, and the privileging of school-based routes such as ‘School Direct’ and ‘Teach First’. These approaches are intended to create a self-reproducing school system in which new generations of teachers are trained to reproduce what Ofsted has decided is ‘good’. Deliberately denied access to exploring alternative models of education, and trained to fear, but not question, the power of Ofsted, a new and more compliant teaching profession is the goal. Without voices of critique it is easy to see how the dictatorship of ‘there is no alternative’ is sustained. The problems that confront the teacher unions are similarly substantial (and made very much worse by the proposed anti-strike laws covering all unions). Teachers have long been denied access to full collective bargaining but one of the objectives of academisation has been to further fragment the system by breaking up national pay and conditions arrangements and replacing these with school based pay systems. These developments were accelerated when Michael Gove directed the ‘independent’ School Teachers’ Review Body to end national pay scales and impose a system that significantly extended performance related pay. The intention has been to localise, and indeed individualise, teachers’ pay. In this way pay acts as a more overt form of managerial control whilst such fractured pay systems also undermine the commonality of experience that is the basis of worker solidarity. Managerial control is extended, and worker resistance is simultaneously made more difficult. Conservative education policy is now geared to driving this agenda further forward, embedding the cultural changes in the school system in which academy chains emerge as the key players. Teachers become reduced to technical functionaries in a system they are denied any real voice in shaping. Only those committed to this vision of education will be allowed to rise to the top and determine its future direction. This is undeniably a bleak analysis. But there is nothing to be gained by underestimating the challenges, and nothing can be achieved without understanding the neoliberal project in education and how the state is restructuring public education in order to privatise it. The real challenge is to use such an analysis to understand how voices of opposition

can be mobilised in conditions which are undoubtedly hostile, but which are not without opportunity – far from it.

can be developed. How do we make sure we learn from such campaigns?

Opportunities to challenge

In a world where fragmentation is a deliberate strategy then developing alliances becomes crucial. Local issues are increasingly likely to provide the spark for collective responses that disrupt the neoliberal restructuring project. The danger is that such campaigns are isolated and sporadic. It is essential therefore that much more thought is given to how alliances are formed, in multiple ways - across unions within a school, between unions and parents in a community, between campaigning groups across communities or between campaigning groups across different issues. The danger is that such alliances are too often assumed as natural. The reality is that alliances are far from easy to construct, let alone sustain, and again, the need is to eschew easy answers and rather be open to learning how campaigns that connect can develop. Finally, I want to argue that activists and organisers need to also see themselves as educators. Cracks in the system open up opportunities for collective acts of resistance. At this point those involved become open to different possibilities and seeing the world in different ways. However, there is nothing inevitable in this process. Again, as my own research demonstrated, whenever individuals organise collectively to challenge policy there is no shortage of often powerful voices crying ‘there is no alternative’. In these circumstances activists and organisers in workplaces and communities are uniquely placed to challenge these narratives. This is not achieved by providing ‘the answer’, but it is achieved by introducing those involved in struggle to other possibilities - there are different ways of seeing the world. There is much to learn from those struggling for democratic education elsewhere and activists and organisers perform a great service when they create the conditions in which those involved in struggle recognise that other worlds are possible. When we build from the base, and connect activism and ideas, new possibilities emerge. There are unlikely to be any short cuts, and there are certainly no easy answers. But once we accept this it becomes possible to build a movement from below that can genuinely challenge the revolution from above.

Developing alliances

There are opportunities in every Conservative policy where the inherent risks are developing into deepening problems. These are already apparent in relation to teacher supply and school places where market based solutions are demonstrably failing. They will become increasingly apparent when the government tries to bulldoze through its forced academisation policy because despite the rule changes to make opposition more difficult teachers, parents and communities will resist when they see the school they value being passed into the hands of an academy chain they do not trust. Similarly, despite all the divisiveness of performance related pay, teachers are unlikely to passively accept escalating workloads coupled with inadequate, unfair and increasingly unequal pay. Such systems are not sustainable and at some point what emerge as small cracks will develop into gaping holes. The challenge must be to turn the tide on an education system being pushed further and further towards privatisation. By its nature, and deliberately, it is fractured and divisive. It reproduces itself by setting worker against worker, and school against school. In these circumstances abstract calls for ‘unity’ and ‘resistance’ can often fall on stony ground. The converted will respond, but the converted are not enough to make the difference required. The imperative is to draw many more into activity, and in so doing, open up the possibility of winning hearts and minds for a more optimistic vision of democratic education. In reality this is likely to require long, hard and patient work in which activists and organisers build on the cracks and grievances in the system which are there and which provide opportunities for collective action. Such opportunities are everywhere – a forced academy conversion, a staff cracking under punitive management, a group of parents appalled at the testing of their 4 year old children. The challenge for activists and organisers will be to nurture the collective responses that emerge from these opportunities. I am not suggesting activists and organisers ‘unlearn’ the valuable skills they have, but my own research into anti-academies campaigns suggests that activists must be open to new ways of organising in which traditional models of ‘leadership’ are not always appropriate. Successful campaigns against academisation, such as those at Sullivan School and Hove Park, provide important lessons about how community campaigns

Howard Stevenson Director of Research, School of Education, University of Nottingham

Unite to beat GERM (part two) In the last issue of Education for Tomorrow I outlined the impact of the Global Education ‘Reform’ Movement (GERM), including the threat posed by TTIP and other EU initiatives, and the need for a single united response from teachers – and therefore a single union. In this article, I want to argue that, whilst one union for all teachers is a necessary condition for confronting the GERM, it is not sufficient: it also matters what such a union, fit for the 21st century, looks like. I want to outline five suggestions for what kind of union is necessary to respond to the attacks faced by education. They are not exhaustive but will hopefully open up some discussion about the future of our unions. First, we need to look seriously at the membership of our unions. Whilst the major classroom unions in England and Wales organise predominantly amongst teachers, a position which is most extreme in the NUT’s requirement of Qualified Teacher Status for membership, this is out of step with education unions in many other parts of the world. The American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association in the US, for example, organise wall-to-wall, admitting teachers, paraprofessionals and other workers such as cleaning and caretaking staff. This gives these unions enhanced industrial strength in that they are able to organise and empower all staff in the building. Whilst the immediate aim needs to be to end the madness that teachers within a single school are divided between up to six different unions, it makes no sense to ignore or to accept the division of teachers and other staff, such as support staff. This does not mean compromising on our position that all children should be taught by a qualified teacher. Teachers and support staff have different roles but both are essential to the education process and both are affected by the GERM, albeit in different ways. ATL already has a significant support staff section, which works alongside its core teacher membership, and is fully committed to a qualified teacher in every class. Secondly, we need to organise across sectors, from primary (and indeed nursery) education to higher and further education. The attacks on education by edubusiness see no distinction between sectors, except in approach e.g. attacking the weakest first. Our response must be based on the capacity similarly to plan strategically across

sectors. Whilst this can be attained through noncompetition and collaboration, and here the NUTUCU partnership approach is a successful model, this could be greatly strengthened through organisational unity. Whilst this will obviously take time and the immediate aim must be an approach based on trust and collaboration to reduce, not enhance, competition in each sector; our long term goal should be unity of teachers and lecturers in all phases and sectors. Thirdly, a united union must be built around an alternative vision for education, and indeed for society. The GERM assault on education is built on a coherent vision of education as a commodity, the purpose of which is nothing more than the process of production (and reproduction) of human capital. In this vision, market ‘efficiency’ and measurable outcomes dominate. Standardised testing drives a standardised curriculum and market competition reinforces both the explicit and the ‘hidden’ values of the system. This vision extends to the role of teachers, parents and students within the system and has driven the process of educational reform in England for almost forty years. We must counter this with an alternative vision of, and for, education. Starting from the point of education as a tool of liberation, as a process of developing critical thinkers who interact consciously with the social and natural world around them and are the subjects of their own history, we must begin a dialogue with parents, students and all those with a wider stake in education. The purpose of such a dialogue would be to challenge the very nature and purpose of education and to develop not just a counter to the hegemony of the GERM but a new understanding of what education is and can be. If this sounds a little ambitious for a trade union, we must remember two things. First, the enemy has a very clear vision of what education means in a neoliberal market economy. We are being naïve if we believe that we can counter their vision with anything less. Secondly, the education unions are unique in bringing together 97 per cent of teachers in the compulsory state sector. If this is not the body which should be developing a vision for the future purpose and operation of our education system, what is? Fourthly, if we want to build around an alternative vision of education, we need to look 10

beyond simply organising within the workplace and consider the wider communities in which we operate. Schools lie at the heart of their communities and decisions about schools and education affect everyone within those communities. This has the potential to give great strength to a union which organises actively within the wider community, which forges alliances with other unions and community-based campaigns, and which engages others with its wider vision for education. What has variously been termed community unionism, coalition unionism or social movement unionism offers real opportunities to the trade union movement to rediscover its role as a key component within a wider class alliance. This is of a more than simply tactical significance. Genuine union-community coalitions can be transformative, both in the sense that they have the power to renew unions, expand their campaigning repertoire and refresh their leadership, and also in the sense that they offer an opportunity to bring together different aspects of working class lives. Finally, the ability of a new education union to unite the profession and challenge the neoliberal project in education, will rest in part on the extent that it acknowledges that teachers are part of the wider working class. As neoliberalism makes the class basis of society ever clearer to those on the receiving end of its attacks, only a class-based unionism has the power to respond effectively. The attack on education is part of a wider attack on the very nature of our society, involving a fundamental shift of power and resources from working people to those who dominate both the economy and the state. A class-based response is necessary to inform and to direct our struggle. These are potentially challenging ideas but I believe that a discussion of them is necessary to plotting our future course. Professional unity, whilst absolutely necessary and massively strengthening, will not simply as and of itself achieve the tasks before us. Without a new union which is adequate to these tasks, we will find ourselves no further forward.

What’s in a name? As a boy, I attended an LEA maintained secondary school then termed a ‘community college.’ I currently teach at a former community college that is now an Academy. The city’s league tables have just been published and those colleagues in possession of long memories noted that there had been very little change over the decades; the same names are still at the top and the same schools still languish at the bottom. Or do they? The schools perennially at the top of the city’s league tables seem to have a strong feeling of permanence, resilience and a sense of solidity. Whether the schools have been rebuilt over the years is irrelevant; the name has stayed the same, the past of the school is celebrated and its place in the local community seems secure and assured. These are not public schools but two grammar schools and four or five ‘good’ local schools; they do not have a school song or founder’s days but there are long serving patterns for school ties, prominent honour rolls and lists of former head teachers proudly on display. Surely this sense of solidity helps to create a stoicism amongst its students, former students and staff and a reflected glory for the local community whenever ‘old boys’ and ‘old girls’ do well, appear in the local press and are invited back to speak with current students? I did not attend such a school, but imagine that seeing your alma mater, (and merely being able to use such a term), could provide a sense of pride and a reassuring anchor in difficult times. If this sense of tradition and permanence is so obviously a winning combination, why do we employ the polar opposite for schools in poorer areas of the city? A glance at the bottom of the league table reveals a clutch of schools with unfamiliar names; they have received at least two re-brandings since I was of school age. Despite the fact that they are still based on the same sites as their predecessor schools, these schools claim to be entirely new and separate from any previous establishment. This regular re-branding is more than a simple change of name; this systematic erasing of the past, a periodic return to ‘year zero’,

Gawain Little NUT National Executive and Professional Unity Committee Chair

creates a sense of impermanence and links the past with failure. How must this deliberate linking of a previous school with such a degree of negativity that even its very name must be erased affect former students, staff and the local community? What implicit (and often blatantly explicit) messages does this situation send to our children? This demolition and deletion of community heritage seems particularly strange at a time when there is a burgeoning interest in local history. Everywhere people seem to be keen to engage in unearthing and celebrating their community’s history but, (predominantly in poorer areas), this heritage is routinely destroyed as an integral part of the creation of a new Academy or Free school. Whilst attending a recent school concert I couldn’t fail to notice the sheer number of former students, (now in their early twenties), in the audience to support their younger brothers and sisters and the significant number of retired staff; there is clearly a strong desire within a community to remain a part of their local school, to keep in touch and to celebrate its successes. With all of this positive good will available, why do we feel the need to erase the past in this way? Personally, I feel that we have overlooked one of the most damaging aspects of the Academies programme; the systematic renaming and rebranding of schools and the consequent erasing of the previous school’s achievements and place in the community. After all, if Coca Cola fell into difficulties would a new management immediately change the name, logo and heritage? The fact that we are so keen to obliterate the past of those schools serving the needs of some of our poorest communities is an insult to those communities themselves and achieves nothing but to create a sense of dislocation, uncertainty and failure. But perhaps that is the purpose after all?

and dances over the previous six months, his natural talents that had been honed over that time and, most importantly, his ability to cope under pressure. I was sat in the front row when he started singing his first number and the microphone suddenly cut out. I could see a brief flash of panic in his eye as he realised that it wasn’t working, that he was alone on the stage and that no one was going to come to help him. A heart beat later he set the microphone aside, raised his head and sang more loudly and clearly to compensate; far more learning could be witnessed in those few seconds than in any number of formal assessments. Watching the performance, that young man showed us what he had worked to achieve over evenings and weekends for months, and invited the audience to affirm his talents and accomplishments. How sad to compare the warmth of the audience’s applause, the smiles of students standing together for their bow and the leading man’s almost Readybrek glow in the knowledge of a job well done with the grim, isolating nervousness of GCSE results day. Perhaps our examination system should be fundamentally restructured so that our children could show what they have learned and achieved and an official could affirm this? Surely that would be better than the current practice of teachers and students trying to second-guess examiners who themselves try to surprise us with unexpected questions. Surely this teacher was correct and that affirmation rather than examination would be a more joyous, genuine and accurate way of assessing and celebrating our students’ accomplishments?

M Edmonds

Affirmation rather than examination Last week was our school musical. As we cleared away chairs at the end of the evening, a teacher commented to me that it seemed ridiculous that this performance could not have been the lead student’s GCSE examination in Drama; the volume of work, effort and sheer talent on display clearly showed the boy’s aptitude and attainment. What more could a formal examination possibly reveal? Watching the show highlighted this student’s commitment to learning his lines, the movements

Review

Getting By: Estates, class and culture in austerity Britain by Lisa McKenzie, Policy Press, £14.99 paperback It’s complicated. It’s not like you see on the telly. Working class life, when you’re an outcast and cut off from almost any chance of success in wider society, doesn’t just stop. The incredible resourcefulness and drive to survive, and the basic social essence of human beings, forges communities and culture even when cast adrift by the mainstream. Getting By, by Lisa McKenzie, tells the story of one multi-cultural working class estate in central Nottingham, St. Ann’s, from the inside. The author is the exception. She comes from the estate but has ‘made it’ to academia, and has given a voice to those who don’t have the resources to express it themselves. The rich and the powerful are chronically insecure in their obscene and illegitimate wealth, and fear everyone else who might take it away from them. This especially comes out as a fear of the poor, expressed as hatred, ridicule, and disgust. “Benefits Street”, a host of other TV shows, and a deluge of stories in the mass media express this for them. They drive home the message of a feral underclass, idle and criminal. But who tells our story? In the 1960s – I’m told, I wasn’t alive then – there were documentaries and books which respected working class life and saw it as something worthy of understanding. These either don’t exist now, or are drowned out in the vast amount of other media. So we should treasure books like Getting By which tell the story of working class people’s lives, often in their own words. St. Ann’s is a multi-cultural estate, formed by the refugees from the enclosure of our countryside in the 19th century but strongly influenced by people from the Caribbean arriving in the 1960s,

and now by new arrivals. Postcode prejudice from outside often leaves people stigmatised by where they live – and they are well aware of it – but it also makes the estate a place of refuge from the outside world. Residents know how the system works and their allotted place in it, but they also know how to game the system which sets them up to fail. Women and men have their own social spaces – in the home, in the gym. For mixed-race people from outside St. Ann’s, it provides a refuge from prejudice. Caribbean culture is cool, and carries status, but this creates its own hierarchy as well. Yes, there’s pressure to fit in, but it’s fitting into a society where you have a chance of succeeding. The reality of working class life is complex, especially in conditions of adversity. We aren’t low-lifes, but neither are we one dimensional heroes fighting the good fight. People’s struggle for pride and survival takes different paths, but the point is that there are still values and culture which people aspire to, even if these are different from those of mainstream society and which may be ridiculed by that society. Giving your children the name Charmaine or Jordan, rather then Charlotte or George offends middle class good taste, but also marks out a culture as being different. This is one small example of a working class estate. But it tells the story of ordinary people as they see themselves, and in a corporate-dominated world that’s worth something. As the author says, ‘The contrast and complexity to this story of the British working class amazes me, and makes me proud.’

Pete Jones 13

International news approach to education, with the attendant standardisation and testing regime, can guarantee high-quality education, and that private companies are the only way to deliver it. This is the global education reform movement (GERM). It infects education systems globally and has changed the very nature of education, including restructuring teachers’ work and, crucially, children’s learning. It threatens to strip away the emancipatory process of education and replace it with a narrow economic process which simply seeks (in the words of its advocates) to add value to human capital. However, in spite of the overwhelming support of powerful vested interests from national governments to international institutions like the World Bank, IMF and EU, Germ faces resistance wherever it seeks to embed itself. Teachers and parents are at the forefront of that resistance. The Australian Education Union has waged decades of struggle against an unfair funding regime and, more recently, the introduction of highstakes testing and private sector-inspired managerialism into education. Through working with parent and community organisations and developing high-profile public campaigns, they have managed to wrest back the agenda and, in 2007, pushed the federal Labour government to establish an inquiry into school funding. The public report of this inquiry, popularly known as the Gonski Review after the chair of the committee David Gonski, was released in 2011 and has provided the basis for the union’s ‘I give a Gonski’ campaign to secure its full implementation. In Canada, the British Colombia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) worked alongside sister unions to create the Tri-national Coalition in Defence of Public Education. Formed in response to the North American Free Trade Agreement and the detrimental impact this and other free trade agreements have on public education, the Trinational brings together unions in Canada, Mexico and the US. This threat hasn’t gone away and, in 1999, the BCTF was involved in forming the IDEA Network (Initiative for a Democratic Education in the Americas) to fight proposals for a Free Trade Area of the Americas. As well as working with unions, the IDEA Network involves student and community groups and has a wide remit in campaigning in defence of public education.

Sweden OECD calls for urgent reform of school system A new OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) report has concluded that as Sweden has failed to improve its school system despite a series of reforms in recent years, a more ambitious national reform strategy is now urgently needed to improve quality and equity in education. Improving Schools in Sweden:An OECD Perspective says that the country’s performance in the OECD PISA survey has declined over the past decade from around average to significantly below average. No other country taking part in PISA has seen a steeper fall. In the most recent test in 2012, Sweden ranked 28 among the 34 OECD countries in mathematics, 27 in reading and 27 in science. At the launch of the report in Stockholm with Swedish Education Minister Gustav Fridolin, Andreas Schlier, OECD Director of Education and Skills, urged Sweden to take advantage of the broad consensus among teachers, schools and politicians of the urgent need for reform . . . The report will be an embarrassment for those in the Conservative Party who based some of their reform ideas on developments in Sweden, including free schools . . . The full report is available at: http:// www.oecd.org/edu/school/improving-Schools-inSweden.pdf.

Education Journal, 11/05/15

Teachers’ fightback against the destructive ideals of GERM has reached global proportions ‘THERE is no alternative’ This phrase, famously used by neoliberal British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and recently wheeled out by her successor David Cameron, sums up the nature of hegemony — the process by which the rich and powerful establish the social, political and economic norms of society. This is no more evident than in the construction of education policy. For almost 40 years a dominant narrative has gripped both policy-makers and populations across the world. It asserts that only a competitive, market

Today free trade agreements are again on the agenda, and not just in the Americas. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) are two such agreements currently being negotiated by the European Union with the US and Canada respectively. If agreed, these will dramatically increase the powers of corporate capital over education and prohibit any attempts to reverse privatisation. In Mexico teachers have fought decades of neoliberal attacks, most recently attempts to exclude teachers from the national labour relations framework established by the constitution. This would leave them vulnerable to casualisation and a punitive ‘teacher evaluation’ regime including giving powers for summary dismissal on a variety of grounds to local education authorities. In response to this, teachers have mobilised on an unprecedented scale and organised marches, demonstrations and regional congresses which have brought together teachers, students, parents and the wider community to develop an alternative vision of education. This has led to the rejection of standardised testing at school level, the development of education programmes built around pre-Hispanic languages and cultures, and in some states the creation of fully-fledged alternative schools. In the words of academic Hugo Aboites: Teachers escaped from pure trade unionism and moved into the discussion and practice of new alternatives for education’. The fight takes different forms in different countries, but there are common threads throughout. Not only are the attacks part of the same neoliberal agenda but, in each case, resistance relies on the ability of education unions to mobilise the mass of their membership, developing their political consciousness through struggle. Teachers and their unions emerge from this process changed — stronger, more democratic and with a wider vision for education. At the same time, successful resistance in each case is much broader than just teachers. Forming alliances with students, parents and the wider community is essential, not only to strengthen the unions’ cause but because of the transformative impact that genuine collaboration has on the organisations involved. In Power in Coalition: Strategies for Strong Unions and Social Change, Amanda Tattersall said: ‘Coalitions are a source of

power for unions, not simply because they supplement a union’s objectives with the resources of another organisation but because they help renew unions. This kind of strength requires a sometimes challenging kind of reciprocal coalition building. Yet this slower, stronger coalition practice can help unions rebuild their internal capacity, develop new leaders, and innovate how they campaign.’ But there is one more element that is essential to building the fightback — international solidarity. It is as a contribution to that international solidarity that the National Union of Teachers is today hosting a conference on the privatisation of education globally. This builds on a conference we held a year ago where trade unionists and researchers from all over the world shared their experiences of fighting Germ. This month, we are releasing a book, Global Education ‘Reform’: Building Resistance and Solidarity, which brings together a number of different contributions from that first conference. By sharing our understanding, our successes and our setbacks, we can strengthen the struggle against a system that would enslave our children to a neoliberal agenda. We are at the forefront of a battle for the future, not just of our education systems but of our societies. To quote Maurie Mulheron, leader of the New South Wales Teachers’ Federation: ‘A united teacher union movement, at home and across the globe, is now more important than at any time in our history.’

Gawain Little, Morning Star, 16/05/15

Coming shortly

Global Education ‘Reform’: building resistance and solidarity This collection of essays, based on the international conference organised by the National Union of Teachers and the Teacher Solidarity Research Collective in 2014, explores the neoliberal assault on education and the response of teacher trade unions. Contributors include: Professor Susan Robertson University of Bristol Professor Howard Stevenson University of Nottingham Dr Lois Weiner New Jersey City University Angelo Gavrielatos Education International Professor Hugo Aboites Autonomous Metropolitan University, City of Mexico Kristine Mayle Chicago Teachers Union Gawain Little National Union of Teachers Dr Francisco Dominguez Middlesex University Maurie Mulheron New South Wales Teachers Federation Lars Dahlström Umeå, Sweden Professor Brook Lemma Addis Ababa University Carol Caref Chicago Teachers Union Edgar Isch Larry Kuehn British Colombia Teachers Federation Ravi Kumar South Asian University Published by Manifesto Press in cooperation with the NUT and Teacher Solidarity Publication date: May 2015.

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