‘Reverse academisation to save education’

THE recruitment and retention crisis in schools means that our children are missing out. One in four teachers leave within three years of qualifying; a third within five years. The system is failing, harming the education that children and young people receive.

Since the 2022 NEU conference, the union has balloted members on strike action to win a fully funded, above-inflation pay award, continued the fight to replace Ofsted and launched a campaign to introduce free school meals for all primary school children. Now we need to move forward on the instructions to the executive made in two other 2022 motions to: n undertake a publicity campaign to educate the wider public on the need to reverse deregulation in education; n develop a strategy with the aim of reversing deregulation, enabling a return to national pay and conditions for all education workers; n continue to work with the Socialist Educational Association’s (SEA) Give Us Back Our Schools campaign.

The three campaigns that the NEU is prioritising – especially the strike to win a fully funded pay increase in line with inflation – are important, but if won will only temporarily alleviate some of the symptoms caused by the systematic marketisation and privatisation of our education services.

The NEU must also resist every academisation and multi-academy trust (MAT) expansion. We must also be clear that unless deregulation and privatisation is challenged and reversed, the NEU will not be able to improve the pay and conditions of many of its members or ensure that no child is left behind.

Academies do not have to honour nationally agreed pay increases – funded or not – and there is no way to ensure that private companies, which now mainly provide school meals, provide nutritious food. The NEU needs to start a joined-up campaign to bring education services back in house.

Give Us Back Our Schools

In 2020 the SEA launched the Give Us Back Our Schools (GUBOS) campaign. GUBOS is not just a response to academisation. It represents opposition to a raft of attacks on the education system that go back much further.

In the 1980s, Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher forced compulsory competitive tendering on local authorities (LAs), and over the last 40 years governments of all persuasions bought into the idea that private is good, public bad. Outsourcing has allowed employers to cut workers’ terms and conditions.

The 1988 Education Reform Act transferred many of the powers and responsibilities from local education authorities (LEAs) to head teachers. It also gave the option for head teachers to turn the schools they manage into grant-maintained (GM) schools. GM schools got their funding directly from central government, bypassing LAs completely. The funds given to GM schools were then deducted from LA budgets.

Once heads were given control of schools’ budgets, and the opportunity to opt out of using LA-provided services, the floodgates to outsourcing opened. The business model operated by these private companies offering cheaper services relied on cutting conditions and wages to boost profitability. https://teachvac.co.uk

This change to the way money was provided for central services had a devastating effect on LAs. Once a certain tipping point was reached it was no longer viable to provide many school services, as councils could no longer be sure of finances from year to year. Inevitably, over time central services diminished and staff were made redundant, teachers’ centres closed, and years of capacity, experience and expertise were lost. This, in turn, made it much easier to convince schools to opt out entirely, become academies and join unaccountable MATs, run by chief executives paid six-figure sums.

The academy system is merely the tip of the iceberg. All schools compete for pupils and funding with other local schools.

The NEU’s pay and Ofsted campaigns are ideal opportunities to show the public (and education staff) why delegation of money away from LAs, principally on the basis of pupil numbers – as well as the false accountability system sustained by SATs, league tables, Ofsted and so-called parental choice – is financially negligent. It is destroying teachers’ national pay and conditions and ruining the educational experience of the children in our schools.

We need to co-ordinate with other public sector unions and start a fight back to end privatisation.

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Cartoon by Tim Sanders