DURING the past year attention has been tocused on Academies and Trust schools in terms of New Labour's attacks on education, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath, a policy to transform the whole school system is being put into practice, under the name of "Building Schools for the Future" (BSF).
BSF is a massive secondary school rebuilding and refurbishing project which is being rolled out in waves across groups of local authorities between now and 2015. Of course extra funding for school buildings is very welcome, as are innovative designs and new information technology if they are harnessed to the Ilgal caucallollai alllls.
But BSF is about much more than building and refurbishing schools, it is a Trojan horse for transforming the whole school system in England, and especially secondary education, by opening it up even further to business interests - both to companies wanting to make a profit from the privatisation of education services and to employers wanting to use schools to train the future workforce. BSF and privatisation
BSF puts in place in every Local Authority (LA) a powerful private consortium as a long-term partner. Local BSF projects have to be run by a Local Education Partnership, a joint venture company controlled by the private contractor. The composition of a LEP is: private contractor(s) 80 per cent, Partnership for Schools (the DFES agency) 10 per cent, the LA 10 per cent.
Labour policy is that LAs should commission services from external providers, not provide them themselves. The private sector sees the LEP as a beachhead from which it can take over other profitable LA services, beginning with hard and soft facilities management (ranging from ICT to cleaning) and extending to non-BSF schools.
Local Councils have a choice. They can restrict the LEP to building new and improving existing secondary schools or they can make it a vehicle for widespread privatisation of services. Local campaigns are urgently needed to stop any proposed outsourcing of services under BSF. BSF and vocationalism
The second prong of the BSF offensive is the final destruction of compreensive education. BSF money is tied to LAs implementing a work-vasco sonoo cu curum nom the age of 14.
At 14 any pretence of a common 'national curriculum' stops and the pathway divides into two. While roughly half of the age group will follow the 'traditional' academic
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against New Labour's market-style education system Violly Cooper they will lead to commensurate employment. Many entry-level jobs carry no specific qualifications requirement. Employers may simply use them as filters for applicants Talier than tor any use-value Furthermore, schools cannot create jobs, and higher qualifications may lead at best to moving up the job queue at the expense of others.
However, even if the government's 'employability' claims for the vocational curriculum from age 14 were correct it should still be vigorously opposed. Why has the vision of comprehensive education been oi a broadly common education for all till Ior
Because it is necessary in order for every young person to enter the world of culture and knowledge and to be able to understand the social world, question it, and act in it. It is