later business will be invited to run city academies for profit. becoming businesses
Surrey is just the latest LEA to contract out its core business of supporting education to a private company. And LEAs have long been run as businesses, selling their services to schools (£400 plus per day is the going rate for an adviser).
Surrey has now taken the logical step of turning itself into a business, a joint venture company with a school-for-profit company, in order to bid for business in other LEAs. Welcome to Surrey plc. The privatisation of professional knowledge
When Marx asked 'who will educate the educators' I don't suppose he had in mind the company at the centre of the Potter's Bar rail crash enquiry. profit. They've even discovered ways of converting the professional expertise of serving headteachers into a commodity -the government has announced that private companies can use them as consultants. Meanwhile the professional creativity of teachers in schools is straitjacketed by targets, tests, league tables and underfunding. Lobbying is the name of the game
The real expertise of the education-forprofit companies isn't in education, it's in lobbying to win contracts. It is no accident that most of the big companies now moving into education (and swallowing up the small education businesses) are in defence (Serco, Vosper Thorneycroft) and construction (Amey, Atkins, Jarvis), where skills of lobbycalist resistance June 2003 5
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