Ben Chacko

BRITAIN FACES a crossroads at the coming General Election. For the first time in a generation, we have an opportunity to turn away from decades of neoliberalism and choose a different path.

In education that neoliberal approach has developed since Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 Education Reform Act into the movement known as the “Germ” – the global education ‘reform’ movement. The principles behind the Germ are essentially that competition between schools will improve schooling, that competition between teachers will improve teaching, and that in order to measure who’s winning and losing in this constant game of beggar-my-neighbour we need to harvest vast amounts of data through an endless succession of tests.

In short, it’s the extension of the neoliberal approach to all public services into education – competition breeds excellence, “failures” are weeded out, “consumers” of services select which service they want and to do so they are aided by a standardised testing regime that allows schools to be simplistically judged against each other. Innovation, creativity and tailoring classes to pupils’ needs are out and teachers fit into the picture as workers on a production line judged and rewarded on the exam results they can produce for their school or academy chain, enabling it to attract more “consumers” (parents).

In this vision there’s no such thing as a society, as someone once said. The concept of a school serving a community disappears and of course the free schools and academies programmes take away accountability to local communities, by removing schools from the supervision of a local authority, and we know the various negative consequences that follow.

The approach taken to education since Thatcher’s Act is, then, not unique. In order to fight the Germ we need to fight that whole conception of how society works and how our economy should be run. From the Morning Star’s perspective, that’s a key reason why we welcomed the election of Jeremy Corbyn to lead the Labour Party. A real challenge to the deeply problematic experiment being inflicted on our country will not come from politicians who have largely supported the marketising trends of the past few decades, but only from a total rejection of this and a different collectivist vision.

Labour is articulating that vision. Just as the paradigm-shifting Labour government of 1945 fundamentally and permanently changed the face of healthcare provision in this country by establishing the NHS, the Corbyn government hopes to do the same for education with the creation of a National Education Service.

Currently our education system crystallises and reproduces class differences, with the 7 per cent of children who attend private schools dominating the top echelons of politics, law and the media.

Campaigns such as Abolish Eton have won significant support, both from leading Labour figures, such shadow chancellor John McDonnell and party chairman Ian Lavery, and from Labour Party Conference. Support for an education system that gives all children the same foundation in life is growing.

The precise shape of the National Education Service is a work in progress: a vision of “cradle to grave education free at the point of use.” But Labour’s leadership contrasts to its predecessors and to a succession of Conservative education secretaries in being keen to involve educators’ voices in driving education policy. This is why Labour are ready to abolish SATs in primary schools — an important step away from the counterproductive testing obsession which is spoiling a generation’s childhood and leading to increased stress, depression and mental health issues among pupils and teachers alike. It is also why they have announced their intention to abolish OFSTED and replace it with an accountability system that has the confidence and support of both parents and educators.

And one of its core commitments is to restore local accountability to schools, ensuring they “serve the public interest and their local communities.” Local authorities will Education is part of a broader Movement once again be both responsible and able to ensure school provision for all children in their area, while proper investment will reverse the damaging cuts which are starving schools across the country of the resources they need, with horror stories such as teachers having to pay for equipment out of their own pockets or schools even cutting down on lighting and heating becoming a thing of the past.

The National Education Service is about more than schools — it involves plans to allow all parents to access childcare and early years learning, as well as for adults to train and study for free in a rapidly changing world of work. It dovetails with Labour’s plans to abolish tuition fees and restore fully funded university education for all — important for shifting our society’s attitude to education. A degree should not be a financial investment made in the hope (often now dashed) that it will increase your earning potential later on: society needs scientists and engineers, historians and artists, musicians and mathematicians and we should all contribute to providing the opportunity for people to develop these skills. Labour’s plans represent an ambitious attempt to set Britain’s education system on a new footing.

But that can only be done in the context of a reset of our whole economy. Teachers don’t need telling that there are limits to what even an excellent and properly resourced school can achieve. An NEU survey published in April found that more than half of teachers reported teaching children whose performance was affected by hunger. Ill health, bullying, fatigue and an inability to concentrate were all reported as increasingly frequent problems among children brought up in poverty as child poverty rates have continued to grow under the Conservative government. More than half the children in poverty in Britain now come from working households: the party that took an axe to the welfare state in order to “make work pay” has also presided over an explosion in insecure work and poverty wages, meaning all too often it does no such thing. And ensuring our children are given the opportunity to flourish presupposes a world they can flourish in. The “bargain-basement” Britain of dead-end jobs, long hours and low productivity is a result of a government that refuses to invest in our regions or our people. As many graduates are finding, expectations that even a university education will result in a rewarding professional career are now proving misplaced. A generation has been told that it cannot expect the kind of life that its parents or grandparents expected: a home, a secure job and a pension they could live in dignity on. Four decades of neoliberalism have drained our society of hope: the idea that the future can be better than the past.

Unless our political system undergoes a profound shock and change of direction, our lives are set to become harder and poorer with each successive year. That’s before we even consider the existential elephant in the room: the climate crisis that schoolchildren have played such an important role in highlighting with the school strikes for action on climate change. It is becoming clearer and clearer that the only alternative to catastrophic climate change is system change: that an economy based on the relentless pursuit of profit by private corporations is incapable of reining in its unsustainable overexploitation of our planet’s huge but finite resources, or limiting the constant expansion of polluting economic activity. By contrast, Labour’s plans for renationalising the National Grid and tasking it with meeting climate targets, extending public ownership over the whole energy and utilities sectors so we can plan them sustainably and building a publicly owned, integrated public transport system represent the most detailed project proposed so far in British politics to get working on the changes our future depends on.

In short, it’s a package. The education revolution we need is an integral part of a bigger revolution, one that will reshape our whole society. It’s why electing a Labour government led by Jeremy Corbyn is essential. But it will not be enough.

The effort required to transform communities must come from the bottom up. The TUC’s New Deal for Workers campaign marks a step change in the audacity of trade union organisation: a recognition that we have been on the defensive for too long and need a new balance of power between workers and employers, so that technological changes such as the advance of robotics and computing do not cost jobs but improve them. We have the opportunity to reduce the working week and lower the retirement age.

Labour has a host of legislative proposals to empower workers in the workplace: from revoking the anti-trade union laws to establishing a Ministry of Employment Rights, imposing sectoral collective bargaining on employers and putting workers on company boards. But as Jeremy Corbyn has said, change does not come from Members of Parliament putting down motions or even governments proposing Bills.

It is driven by ordinary people whose victories are, once won, sometimes ratified by law. And the forces ranged against change are powerful: the masters of the world economy whose profits depend on endlessly perpetuating the rapacious capitalist economic setup will deploy markets, media, lawsuits and worse against the revolution. They can only be overcome by a mass movement: one in which the Establishment is not just fighting against a transformative Labour government in Parliament, but is under siege, with workers demanding higher wages, better conditions and a real voice at work, community organisations fighting for change at a local level on the high streets and in the town halls and people power holding politicians to account, mounting a countering pressure to that wielded by corporate lobbyists.

Educators can play a decisive role in building such a movement, because schools are at the heart of our communities. Already, in the 2017 election, the School Cuts campaign launched by the NUT and other unions was able to change the way 800,000 people cast their votes: because everybody wants their children to go to a properly resourced school. Boris Johnson is said to be planning a spending splurge this autumn, a response in part to the success of teaching unions in forcing the issue up the political agenda, resulting in scores of Tory MPs reporting to Downing Street that school cuts are their Achilles heel. But the time for tinkering at the edges of our system is over. Our schools, like our society, need a wholly fresh approach. The amazing mobilisations we are seeing in protest at our rulers’ refusal to act on climate change show the will to take action is present. The action itself is only getting more urgent.

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