EDUCATION HEAD: CLARKE Andrew Wiard
NOT FE - NOW IT'S SURVIVAL OF THE FATTEST! GRANTS the war. for the poor. sity education. cation. gap.
OT FEES TONY BLAIR'S Tory-style government has sent British troops into Iraq, murdering thousands of innocent men, women and children. They have found no weapons of mass destruction and the world is now a more dangerous place than before
More than £6 billion has been spent on the bombing and occupation so far. All this took place while the education system sunk further into economic ruin, to the point where now, the crisis is so desperate that New Labour have managed to bully and beat their backbenchers into voting for topup fees. This is a tax on students which allows the creation of a two-tier system, one for the rich, another, sub-standard one
A EI0 billion funding gap is now to be plugged by bringing in the market to univerStudents will no longer be students, but 'customers' if the Higher Education Bill, which passed through its third reading in the House of Commons at the end of April, goes on to be passed in the House of Lords.
New Labour's top-up fees legislation, which they promised in their manifesto they would never implement, is a continuation of Thatcher and Major's restructuring of eduOver the last 10 years public funding per student has been cut by more than 30 per cent in real terms. In 1995, the Tory Government announced a further overall cut in funds of around 5 per cent and continued cuts thereafter. This included a massive 30 per cent cut in capital budgets (for buildings) in 1996-97, followed by further cuts, in the expectation that the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) would bridge the
New Labour has chosen not to let higher education keep pace with student demand by putting const on public funding, through the introdu of controls on full-time undergraduate dent numbers since | 994/95
Many new universities, such as University of Central Lancashire, University of Middlesex and the Unive of Bournemouth, say that they will be vantaged by variable fees because the be forced to charge less for courses Oxford or Cambridge and could bec 'sinks' for poorer students. The Unive of East London has suggested they charge the full 3000, in order to being labelled a sink university.
Top-up fees would drive many univ ties even deeper into debt. The intro tion of €1000 tuition fees in 1999 incre the amount of debt universities had to c They are now owed more than doubl amount they were in 1998, as stuc struggle to pay their tuition fees. The mountain owed to universities increased from £l.7bn in 1998 to £28 2002, an increase of 65 percent
New Labour's project for educat under-pinned by the involvement o business. It wants to open up all are the public sector to the market Johnson, Minister for Lifelong Lea recently highlighted how this would place, saying; More and more emplo will follow KLM, BMW and BASE, by in ing themselves in the development of v tional degrees. Graduates will be lea university with the appropriate skills fo 2010 workplace.'
The fight for decent, property fur education depends on students in university creating centres of opposit this neoliberal agenda. This is part o same fight as that against war and racis