Education for the People reviewed in EFT

The Communist Party's pamphlet 'Education for the People' has been reviewed in Education for Tomorrow (EFT) a journal which will be familiar to many in the teaching unions. You can read EFTs review in the latest edition here.

You can download and share the pamphlet on this site here

M26: What happened and what happens next?

NUT activist Gawain Little looks back at the strike and stresses the importance of the strategy of building alliances between unions, parents and communities…

In spite of attempts by the government to say otherwise, yesterday’s national strike by the NUT was a huge display of strength.  Not only was there a fantastic response from teachers across the country but the NUT clearly won over a huge proportion of parents and the public.

Part of this is to do with the fact that we won the arguments with government in the media.  Interview after interview showed the NUT come out positively in the face of government intransigence.

But this itself, is due in large part to the fact that we picked the right ground from which to fight.  For possibly the first time in this long-running dispute, we managed to successfully broaden our message from pay, pensions and conditions and to link it with the quality of education.  This is not to say we haven’t tried to do so before.  We have always made the link between pay and pensions and the recruitment and retention of teachers.  More specifically, on pensions, we have argued that forcing teachers to work to 68 will have a real impact on children’s education.  But previously, there has been a large section of the population who have dismissed this as simply ‘dressing up’ teachers’ demands in ‘educational clothing’.  No-one could have made this accusation yesterday.

So what were the defining differences in approach?  Well, the focus on workload helped.  The NUT ran a successful campaign to force the government to publish its 2013 workload survey.  The results were impossible to ignore.  When the government’s own figures show secondary teachers working an average of 56 hours a week, and primary teachers an average of 60 hours, the ground on which they can attack us is significantly narrowed.  Especially since both figures are up from an average of 50 hours when this government took power.

This was a great tactical move by the NUT but it cannot wholly account for the shift in attitudes.

The key difference is of course the Stand Up for Education campaign, launched by the Union in the weeks running up to the strike.  Obviously, the campaign is separate from our industrial action.  We could not legally take action over questions such as a child’s right to be taught by a qualified teacher due to Britain’s restrictive anti-Trade Union legislation.  But we know that the threat this government poses to children’s education motivates many more teachers, parents and others than concerns over pay and pensions.  And when it comes to pay and pensions, it is the damage that a deregulated education system will do that is forefront in teachers’ minds, not narrow financial concerns.

The power of these issues to bring people together is easy to understand when you apply the framework of Mobilisation Theory to them.  Central to encouraging collective action is an attributable injustice and an organisation to challenge that injustice with a reasonable prospect of having an impact.  This is clearly all there.

But it is not just the mobilising power of this campaign which makes a difference.  It is the fact that it addresses the core of the government’s programme in a way that a campaign on one aspect, such as pay or pensions, does not.

The dominant trend in education – which has been referred to as the Global Education Reform Movement or GERM – is towards a deregulated, privatised, for-profit, state-funded education system.  Schools operating as businesses, accountable to no-one but their shareholders, would hire whoever they want, regardless of experience or qualification, to provide a commercial service paid for by the state.  The only regulator would be the market and consumer choice.  The purpose of education would be to attract consumers so as to draw in income, cut costs in order to maximise profits and to meet the narrow needs of the labour market by providing “human capital” for the economy.

This is not simply a British phenomenon.  On 24^th May, the NUT will be hosting an international conference with academics and activists from five different continents to discuss developing resistance to GERM.  This will be a hugely important conference in sharing international experience of the drive to privatisation and building an understanding of GERM amongst our activist base.

Neither is it a recent phenomenon.  The DfE referred to schooling as being the creation of human capital as early as 1996, under John Major’s government.  The academies programme was created by New Labour.  The key moves towards marketization were made in the 1988 Education Reform Act under the Thatcher government.

This is why a focus on the quality of education, and its purpose in the 21^st Century, is such a powerful argument – because it is the core of the question.  If we are able to build our campaigns against pension cuts, pay deregulation and excessive workload in this context, with an understanding of what the end product of these processes looks like, we are much better equipped to win.

It will also mean expanding the campaign on other fronts.  Firstly, building on the five key demands of the Stand Up for Education campaign, but then also looking at key issue like accountability which are used by the Right to force change.  We have a potential opening on the question of accountability with the recent criticism of OFSTED and the scrapping of levels.  But we also know, given where those moves come from, that the intention is not to replace the current accountability system with something more conducive to the development of a broad and balanced education.  We must ensure that we have a clear approach to accountability, drawn from our broader approach to education, around which we can begin to build wide support both amongst teacher unions and teachers, and amongst parents and policy-makers.

There is the potential for many of these ideas to be drawn together into a national education conference on Education in the Next Parliament to be held before the 2015 General Election.  This would be an opportunity to build further support for our vision of education and to pressure political parties to adopt, or respond to, our proposals.

However, there is one important aspect of mobilisation theory I left out earlier and that is the existence of local leaders who can give cohesion to a group and begin to build a movement.  We have a great opportunity, building on the success of this strike, and of the Stand Up for Education campaign so far, to start to recruit these local leaders, amongst our members and in the wider community.  There is real enthusiasm and engagement around this campaign, we now need to make that sustainable.

I hope that local activists will continue to build the Stand Up for Education campaign with the same energy we did in the run up to the strike and that the national Union will support them to do this.  Over the coming weeks and months, this campaign needs to develop a coherence and deeper roots in local communities and we can all play a part in that.

Introducing 'Education for the People'

Education, we are told, is the most important thing shaping people’s futures and determining their life-chances. If you want to get a job, if you want a future at all, you have to get a good education, get into a good school, get a degree. In an era when unemployment and under-employment in low skilled jobs is becoming once again a major social reality, these messages of course wield a huge power. Policy-makers in the political mainstream argue about whether education is the key to economic success in the knowledge economy or whether it is vital in preserving the social order and preventing the kind of riots seen returning to Britain’s inner cities in 2011.

  

Yet for all the noise made about education, the reality of what is happening to our economy and our society and the reality of what is happening in our schools, colleges and universities tells a different, more complex story.

Just as the British economy is being further wrecked by austerity policies that reinforce its already deep structural weaknesses, so the education system appears increasingly incapable of delivering on either of its supposed purposes, let alone fulfilling any progressive vision. The Coalition government has returned to the policies of the Tory governments of the 1980s with a vengeance, further fragmenting the education system, fostering damaging competition, promoting the private sector and continuing the state centralisation of control over the content of education. Yet for all its aspirations to make education fulfil a dual role of rendering profits for its City friends and maintaining the social order, it cannot fully stifle the frustrations caused by its attempts to rein in democratic access to education. These aspirations and frustrations are finding expression, whether in the form of student protests or alienated urban riots.

Similarly, the idea that education can substitute for the role that redistribution and industrial policy used to perform for social democrats has been fully exploded. The financial crisis and the austerity assault, and the chronic weakness of the UK economy, coupled with the rise of high-skilled economic competitors in China and India has revealed Britain’s focus on skills at the expense of creating jobs and new industries to be an empty delusion. ‘Education, Education, Education’ was always an empty slogan, not just because it issued from the mouth of Tony Blair, but also because the fundamental idea behind it was rotten.

In this pamphlet, the Communist Party argues that it is time for the labour movement to go back to first principles about what education is, what role it plays in society and what it can be made to do to serve the working class and its allies.

We argue that the left and the labour movement needs to base its analysis on a sound understanding of the role that education plays in capitalist societies. This will enable a better  understanding of how it can be made to fulfil its potential in assisting the forces pushing toward an alternative path to socialist development.

This also means basing our immediate demands and our immediate objectives on a sound understanding of where we are now. We have to understand not just the immediate balance of class forces but also how the current conjuncture is rooted in the historical development of our education systems in the context of the development of British capitalism.

The task then is to articulate a progressive vision of what education is and should be for. This must be based on an understanding of what benefits the working class and its allies and the emancipatory role that education can play, but it must have its eye firmly on the current balance of class forces and the prevailing ‘common sense’. To repeat the old adage, we need to start from where people are, not where we would like them to be.

The Communist Party offers some proposals as to what should be at the core of a progressive education programme for the labour movement, as a contribution to an emerging debate on the broader left and in the labour movement. Our proposal is that a future progressive vision of education needs to be organically rooted to an Alternative Economic and Political Strategy. We are not in the business of dealing in utopias, but of developing an education programme that forms part of part of and reinforces the struggle for national economic and political renewal and which advances the political and economic interests of the working class in the process.

The pamphlet then goes on to make some suggestions about the form and content of an education system that could give expression to the kind of programme we set out. Too often, debate about education on the left starts from the wrong position. Too often debate is shaped by an understandably reactive response to government attacks: the need to defend this kind of school or that kind of funding pot. Instead, we are urging that the left and labour movement start from what we want education to do and begin to debate and discuss the kind of education system that could achieve this.

Finally, we argue that if the left and the labour movement are to begin to achieve any of this, then there must be a period of sustained movement building around a common programme based on the immediate needs of the hour, but which can also be seen to open up the way for further advances of a more socialist character. We offer some suggestions about the way in which a movement for education might be built.

Download the full document 'Education for the People' here