Education agenda Name your own school Are you gullible enough to believe in supernatural beings and rich enough to have a million pounds or two to spend? If so, you could soon be able to open up a school of your own. You can even name it after your favourite aunt or dead cat.
Blair's proposals to set schools free" is a bold step backward to the days of Victorian philanthropism. Even more rich business people will be sought to sponsor schools and city academies. In return they will be allowed to have a strong influence on the school's ethos, governors and curriculum. So if they feel that creation myths and the theory of evolution should be given equal weight in Science lessons this will happen.
An Important element of the plans is a shift away trom nationally agreed pay scales for staff. The salaries budget will be distributed at the head's or the governors' discretion. The teaching unions have been silent on this.
Every school will be obliged to "specialise". In working class areas this will be in fields such as sport and technology. in more affluent areas it will be in subjects like languages.
Even the Liberal Democrats have worked out what the agenda is. Their education spokesperson Phil Willis said, " Labour is presiding over the break-up of the state education system. They are creating a free-for-all which will ultimately offer those with the greatest choice more choice, and those with the greatest need less choice."
As the new academic year starts trade unlonists in education will have to start work on a new project. It will be graded by continual assessment over the next two years and it is the defence of the comprehensive education system from new Labour. Jim Jepps and Harry Sloan In mid-August UNISON hailed what it described as a major breakthrough in the long-running saga of the restructuring of NHS pay, known as Agenda for Change.
After more than a year of stalemate on three key contentious issues, Department of climbed down on one - by agreeing all uplift for the lowest of the nine pay bands -and agreed to defer the other two.
The controversial changes to payments for unsocial hours, which threatened tens of thousands of staff, especially those working regular unsocial hours and weekends, with a reduction in pay - and thus raised the need for "protection" for asperiod of up to five years - have been shelved for a year, and will be subject to a review in the autumn of 2005.
And new rates of payment for staff working "on-call" have also been postponed -for at least four years, after it became clear that no agreed solution is in sight.
Despite the fact that they resolve nothing, and leave the new system in chaos, these changes, together with additional fudges to avoid some staff losing out under the new percentage-based London Weighting payments, seem to have knocked the stuffing out of some of the UNISON activists who had previousiy argued that the package was fatally flawed and should be rejected.
The government still hopes to introduce Agenda for Change (AfC) into the NHS by Ist December. They have said that it will result in NHS workers being considerably better off. By this they mean 12.5% over three years (which in anyone's money is not that great anyway).
The new concessions on the lowest pay Band 1 creates a new WaLC of £11,135 per year in the NHS:.
Taken together with reduction in the working week, and an additional END LOW PAYL scheme that favours managers