Britain is not waiting for GATS to B liberalise les education system.
Labour government has already gone much further than its GATS negotiating position in opening up the British state education system to British education-for-profit companies.
Why is Labour doing this? There are three main reasons.
First, the Blair government wants to create a powerful British education-for-profit industry as a global player in the expanding education marketplace.
Second, New Labour believes that the private sector is the necessary lever to break the public service ethos and 'modernise' the system.
In addition, one form of privatisation, the take-over of the building, maintenance and operation of school premises and facilities by PFI companies, is a way of postponing public spending. Since 1997 48 PFI contracts have been awarded for a total of 550 schools, with a capital value of £l.3 billion. David Miliband, the Schools Minister, recently announced that all of England's 3780 secondary schools were to be refurbished or rebuilt under PFI over the next 10 years.
Britain is further down the road than any other country in Europe both in re-engineering its education institutions for the market, and in opening them up to the private sector.
Universities are dominated by labour market imperatives. They form a pyramid which is increasingly coming to resemble the old school system.
At the top, the handful of elite universities mirror the public schools which supply half or more of their intake. Their role is to produce a transnational class of senior managers, technical experts and intellectuals.
One such global player' in the world education market is Universitas21, a coalition of 18 universities, including 4 in the UK, together with the Thomson Corporation, the giant Canadian electronic learning media company. U2I's aim is to 'offer high brand value' to a 'global professional workforce.
Below them are the middle group of midde class 'er school universities,
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Increasingly the universities themselves behave like private companies. The reduction in public funds increases reliance on the market for income, leading not only to charging fees to their customers but also to partnerships with companies which tie universities even closer to private sector agenAt school level privatisation takes numerous forms, ranging through commercial sponsorship, the outsourcing of national government services, PFI contracts, the franchising and in some cases wholesale take-over of LEA services, the beginnings of ... •••• private company management of schools, and the encouragement of entrepreneurial activities by schools themselves.
The aim of government is not the wholesale privatisation of the school system - one reason being that there isn't enough profit to be made -but its transformation into a 'public-private partnership', obedient to the demands of capital.
Private companies have taken over failing' LEAs. Now, through the £1.8 million 'New Ways of Working' project, the govemment is funding experiments in new forms of partnership between 12 'successful' LEAs and private companies.
The project includes Edison, which runs 150 schools in the US, working with Essex LEA to adapt its curriculum, assessment and
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The sponsor, David Garrard, has donated €2 million, and the government £20 million. Garrard is a property market millionaire who has created a school in his image. Business TV programmes from Bloomberg and CNN are shown, and there is a mini stock exchange and guest lectures from business leaders.
Another example is the Kings Academy,