UNISON chief Dave Prentis joins protestors on March 2 KEEP
WORK Richard Hatcher Business interests are steadily tightening their grip over the school system and they will continue to do so under a Brown government unless there is a powerful national campaign of action, led by the unions, to turn the tide.
The business grip is twohanded. With one hand they are seizing control of schools through sponsorship of Academies and Trust schools, and grabbing Council services through the Building Schools for the Future programme.
With the other they are tying schools ever more tightly to local labour market needs through the government's vocational 14-19 agenda. These are the key issues facing teachers at their Easter conferences and during the coming year. Academies and Trust schools
The number of Academies is growing, and so is the number of local campaigns against them, including at least 20 legal challenges. But local campaigns, while they may score some important victories, cannot halt the Academies programme.
That needs national action. The re-launch of the national Anti-Academies Alliance, bringing together local activists, MPs, union leaders and academics, and the Committee of Enquiry it plans to set up in the summer, are important steps forward'.
But there is a danger that some supporters will be sidetracked by the fool's gold of thinking they can influence Gordon Brown to change his mind provided they don't appear too militant.
Meanwhile, the new Trust schools - 'foundation' schools but with external sponsors who can, if they choose, appoint a majority of the school's governing body - are starting to emerge.
The latest news is that Wakefield Council has decided to hand over all its schools to Trusts?. The first Trust will run three secondary schools, with Wakefield Housing, Leeds Met University, Hi Tec (an information technology company) and BearingPoint as the sponsors.
BearingPoint is a US company, donor the Republican Party, which operates in Iraq. Now it wants
"partner' schools in England. That's a horrific prospect, but in fact the bigger danger on the national scale to schools as publiclyrun services is from mainstream companies and Bearing Point is a US company, a donor to the Republican Party, which operates in Iraq. Now it wants to 'partner" schools in England. organisations, because they appear less threatening. Building Schools for the Future - a Trojan horse for privatisation
BSF money is for rebuilding and refurbishing all the secondary schools in England. It opens the door to the wholesale privatisation of council services. Take for example the Birmingham invitation to tender, just published.
It includes not just building the schools but providing hard and soft facilities management, information technology services, and even educational support, programme development and strategy services.
Furthermore, education is just a springboard for wider privatisation of other community facilities which may include, for example, facilities for health, social care, leisure and facilities to support educational and lifelong learning outcomes. And this contract is for up to 20 years.
In short, BSF is a vehicle for the government's policy of outsourcing all local authority services.
It will tie every local authority to a permanent business partner, which once in place will dictate council policy in line with commercial logic - unless, that is, local labour movement campaigns rapidly get organised to demand that councils restrict BF contracts to building schools, with no outsourcing of services. COMPREMENSIU EDUCATION
2006 The new 14-plus -how working class kids get working class jobs
In addition to privatising services employers have another way, indirectly, of making profits out of the school system - by ensuring that it produces the future workforce it needs.
The Labour government has provided it with two tools to do this. One is business sponsorship of schools.
The other is the new employer-led vocational diplomas, providing an alternative route to GCSEs and A levels from age 14. Just how narrowly work-related these turn out to be, how schools and students will take them up, and what currency they will have on the labour market, is still unclear.
But what is clear is that they represent a death-blow to the vision of a broad common core curriculum for all till 16, depriving mainly working class students of an education of the whole person, not just the future worker.
This is a vital issue for the whole working class movement which the left needs to take up much more vigorously, challenging it with an alternative vision for the secondary school curriculum. Notes 1. The Anti-Academies Alliance website is at www.antiacademies.org.uk 2. See Garner in the Independent 28 March and also the los 7 January.