Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Most of the big companies now moving into education are in defence and construction

Socialist Resistance no7  |  page 4

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

UNISON schools are not for sale

Jarvis, which has dozens of PFI-funded school contracts, has now moved into the business of "improving schools'. What ry. A National Audit Office survey in January expertise do they bring to this? They have no professional expertise in education, so they import it from the public sector:

Their new government contract is led by four ex-LEA directors of education. Thousands of ex-LEA and ex-school staff are now employed by education-for-profit companies. In effect they are buying the professional knowledge created within the school system and then selling it back at a ... ... ing and close personal links with politicians and top officials is the name of the game

Jarvis is a case in point - Paris Moayedi, the multimillionaire chief executive, was named last year as a Labour party donor, and Steven Norris, Tory candidate for mayor of London, is a director.

Of course they claim that they have risen to the top because they are the most efficient firms. Not true, for two reasons

First, education is a very closed market, both because of high costs of entry and the careful management of competition by government through a short list of approved contractors.

Second, education-for-profit companies have frequently been shown to be notoriously inefficient. Ofsted recently inspected 10 privatised LEAs. 5 were rated poor, 3 unsatisfactory, and only 1 (Leeds) satisfacto examined 17 of the first PFI-funded schools and found them 'significantly worse' than other new schools in England - classrooms too small, poor layout, and inadequate heating. Where next for privatisation?

In the latest issue of "Progressive Politics Tony Blair calls for a regeneration of the Third Way through radical new forms of marketisation of public services (www.progressive-governance.net):

"We should be far more radical about the role of the state as regulator rather than provider... We should...stimulate new entrants to the schools market, and be willing to experiment with new forms of copayment in the public sector.

Blair also speaks of 'radically rethinking the school curriculum, vocational and work. based training. It is difficult to predict what forms this will take, but the following seem likely candidates: City Academies will be allowed to run as profitmaking enterprises.

Future PFI contracts will include the provision of the teaching itself, and therefore