What does the passing of Gove and Willetts mean for the left?

The departure of Michael Gove and David Willetts in the recent reshuffle was a fairly obvious attempt by David Cameron to cleanse his government of some unwanted political toxicity ahead of the election. For the left and the trade union movement, it’s an opportunity to enjoy a short moment before redoubling our efforts to tackle the deeper forces at work.  

Michael Gove’s exit was, of course, particularly enjoyable. Rarely has someone united so many people against him so successfully. As Nick Wright wrote in his recent piece for the Morning Star, Gove was singularly successful in uniting almost the entire education profession against him. The government might have lived with that. But the fact is that the Blob just kept growing. By the time he went, polling evidence was showing that Gove was the most disliked politician in Britain. Quite an achievement at a time when the politician’s stock is arguably lower than at any point since the era of mass democratic politics began. Gove’s real gift was tabloid journalistic bear-baiting and he used it to try to sow division between teachers and their communities, but as anyone who knows how community state schools actually worked could have told Gove, it was going to take more than a clever turn of phrase and an acquired talent for public school-style bullying to get between parents and their daily experience of teachers. Gove’s rhetoric did not resonate with lived reality and his dictatorial centralisation of power as he tried to drive de-regulation ruthlessly from the DfE started to jar badly against basic democratic common sense.

Then of course there was the unravelling of the policies themselves. Forced academisation created broad-based coalitions based on revulsion at rank dictatorship. The huge diversion of resources to pet Free Schools, the back-of-a-fag-packet process for approving them and the drive to set them up wherever and whenever someone felt moved to run a school stank of insane dogma. And then there is the growing suspicion that academisation has been a vast folly, academically meaningless and successful only in handing schools into the control of people unfit for one reason or another to run them. It was increasingly obvious that the real enemies of promise were practising in Whitehall, not the classrooms.

Nicky Morgan’s appointment is clearly designed to take some of the personalised heat out of education policy but there will be no radical break. Indeed, as this recent article in US publication People’s World showed Gove’s particularly offensive offensive was rooted in a far longer counter-revolution that serves powerful transatlantic finance capital interests. Even while the academy chain heads and other assorted apostles of privatisation are publicly mourning Gove, they will be looking to the post-election world and working to make sure that a Tory victory will further their aims.

David Willetts’s departure had a similar motivation. Willetts was the architect of the shock therapy approach to the marketization and privatisation of higher education. Willetts attempted to resettle the financing of higher education on a publicly subsidised voucher system that would be progressively sold off to the financial sector while simultaneously feeding the growth of new private for-profit uiniversities. His policies produced student riots, occupations and Parliamentary splits in the Coalition before they began unravelling, publicly, in a very embarrassing way. As Andrew McGettigan has argued here, judged by his two stated aims, Willetts has been a failure. He leaves the higher education system more unstable, more privatised, more de-regulated and more chaotic than at any point in the post-war period. 

Yet for all the relief at the passing of the headbangers, the job at hand for the left and the education labour movement has not changed. Now is the time to take advantage of the unpopularity of the policies, as well as the people, and start to push for an alternative, democratised vision of a future education system. Most importantly, now is the time to build on the broad coalitions of interest that have emerged on campuses and in local communities all over the country. Our urgent need now is build the mass forces that can put pressure on Labour to start to develop once more a progressive vision of education. Our own suggestions for starting this process are in our pamphlet, Education for People. But this is just the start.

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.

Everything To Win - Or Lose - In Education

GAWAIN LITTLE says next week's professional unity conference is vital for education's future. First featured in the Morning Star on 22 February

On February 13 the drive to privatise and deregulate our education system suffered a significant setback. This was the day the School Teachers' Review Body (STRB), the "independent" body which makes recommendations to government on teachers' pay and conditions, released its 23rd report.

Michael Gove had asked the STRB to remove significant elements of the school teachers' pay and conditions document, including the overall limit on hours a teacher can be directed to work, the length of the school year, entitlement to planning, preparation and assessment time and the protection which says teachers should not routinely be asked to cover for colleagues.

These changes would have further damaged a profession which has been hit with public-sector pension cuts, pay deregulation and mass privatisation since 2010. Not only did the review body turn him down on 90 per cent of what he was asking for - a move unprecedented for a secretary of state - but he has also chosen to accept the recommendations.

This is a major sign of weakness on the part of the Education Secretary and a real victory for the joint campaign mounted by the two largest teacher unions NUT and NASUWT. It reflects not only the threat of further joint action by these unions but also the growing unpopularity of Gove's "reforms" with parents and others. A recent YouGov poll for the Sunday Times shows that 54 per cent of voters believe he is doing badly as secretary of state.

Another poll last year showed only 8 per cent of parents think this government has had a positive impact on the education system. The results on teachers' voting intentions are even more stark. In the run-up to the 2010 general election the Tories had a narrow lead among teachers with 33 per cent intending to vote Conservative and 32 per cent to vote Labour. This has shifted significantly with just 16 per cent now planning to vote Tory and 57 per cent to vote Labour. Most worryingly for Gove 40 per cent of those who voted Tory in 2010 believe he is doing a bad job, compared to 42 per cent who believe he is doing well.

However in spite of these positive signs, nothing has improved for teachers or for education. While the report refused the majority of Gove's proposals, it did remove guidance on administrative tasks and work-life balance. More importantly, its publication does nothing to address teachers' ongoing concerns over pay, pensions and workload, or to halt the race to privatise our schools.

The government's vision of state-funded, privately-run academies and "free" schools, employing teachers who may or may not be qualified and are paid according to "market" rates is still very much on track. And if the Tories win the next election we can expect the rules on profit-making to be "relaxed" as well.

As all the international evidence shows - from Sweden's "free" school disaster to the low performance of Chile's for-profit state sector - it is students and society who lose out. Introduce marketisation, privatisation and deregulation and - surprise, surprise - schools hire fewer, less well-qualified teachers in order to keep costs down and profits up. So right now there is everything to win in education and, if we fail, everything to lose.

Where does that leave our teacher unions? Well, unfortunately, not all on the same page. It will not have escaped the attention of Morning Star readers that, of the three main classroom teacher unions, one is not in dispute with government over pay, pensions and workload and two are. Of the two that are, one is taking national strike action on March 26 and one isn't.

While the NUT is developing a comprehensive campaign based on engaging parents, pressuring politicians and national strike action, NASUWT has decided to wait on possible talks with government before deciding its next move.
This seeming division masks an underlying unity of purpose. Members of all three unions, and of the headteachers' unions, are opposed to Gove's agenda and his disregard for the teaching profession. Members of all three unions are opposed to pay deregulation, pensions cuts and spiralling workloads. Members of all three unions are opposed to school privatisation and excessive testing and all three unions are affiliated to the Anti-Academies Alliance.

On February 14, when the NASUWT executive voted not to call national strike action on March 26, there were outpourings of anger across social media from both NUT and NASUWT activists, but we must not fall into believing that NASUWT is now somehow the enemy, or that it doesn't oppose Gove's attacks on education. They have simply taken a different tactical position to ours.

For the NUT, strike action is on - but if there is progress in talks we will call it off. The NASUWT says it will assess talks, then strike if there is no progress. To present this as an underlying division between NUT and NASUWT members would only make Gove's work that much easier. The same applies to the ATL. The fact that it is not in formal dispute over pay deregulation and workload does not mean that it accepts them. It is significant that in 2011 ATL took the first strike in its 127-year history, alongside PCS and NUT, and thereby began the public-sector pensions strikes which mobilised two million public-sector workers in the largest strike since 1926 and the largest strike of women ever.

However, tactical differences between teacher unions do weaken us. And, unfortunately, they are a natural consequence of having more than one union organising teachers. If there is a lesson we should draw from this, it is that we are stronger united and that the untenable situation where teachers are divided between competing unions must be ended. It is now essential for all teacher union members to come together and work in a concerted way towards the formation of a single union for all teachers.

Next Saturday, a Professional Unity conference will be held in Hotel Pullman London St Pancras on Euston Road, with speakers from ATL, NUT, the National Association of Headteachers, Welsh teacher union UCAC and others. The conference will discuss the formation of a single union for all teachers. This is a hugely significant development and should be supported by anyone who cares about education.

Teachers can register for the conference at www.teachers.org.uk/campaigns/unity. Gawain Little is NUT Oxfordshire secretary and a member of the union's executive. He blogs at www.uniting4education@blogspot.com.

For Democracy in Further and Higher Education

By Martin Levy.

This article was published as part of the CP's Unity Bulletin at the TUC in September 2013

 

Just a month ago Amazon boss Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post newspaper for $250 million.  Apart from the fact that all that money has come from the superexploitation of Amazon employees, does that matter to us?  It’s what he didn’t buy that is arguably more important.

The Washington Post company is still in existence, although its name will change.  But it has sold its flagship brand because it is making a lot more money from other subsidiaries, and principally from Kaplan Inc, its for-profit education company.  From relative modest origins, Kaplan has grown by aggressive marketing into a transnational corporation principally in higher education, and including some subsidiaries in Britain.  In the USA, it has faced charges of defrauding the government of hundreds of millions of dollars, by paying incentives to recruiters of students, and by lying to achieve accreditation.  Many Kaplan students have been left with no qualifications and with massive tuition fee debts that they will never pay off.

It is this market in further and higher education that the ConDem government in Britain wants to open up.  Already some of the larger FE colleges are becoming corporate groups, taking over smaller colleges and private training organisations – a prelude to full privatisation.  The government has also eased the entry of private, private equity and for-profit companies into higher education.  Just last month, BPP University College of Professional Studies, in London, became the second for-profit institution in Britain to be granted the title of university with degree-awarding powers.

If this sounds a bit analogous to the way that private companies are muscling into academy schools, then it’s not surprising.  The government is intent on privatising the whole public education system.  The process is tantamount to a massive transfer of funds to the private sector, from the public purse and from students in both FE and HE.  These private companies pay their workers less and offer worse terms and conditions than in public sector institutions, which in turn are putting pressure on their own staff as a result of the increased competition.

Education, throughout all sectors, is about the empowerment of individuals.  What is coming, if we don’t act to prevent it, is disempowerment – a narrow vocationalism with the ethos of the market, and with students as consumers who will pay throughout their lives.  We need to resist the changes, but we also need a Charter for Democratic Education, uniting the sectors, and recognising education both as a democratic equal right and as a basis for informed participation in society, as well as providing the skills needed for productive employment.  But it also needs to be democratically run and accountable to its communities, staff, students and the public who fund it.

Such an education system could only be realised within the context of an expanding, productive economy, and one not based on putting private profit first.  It therefore has to be fought for as part of the struggle for an Alternative Economic and Political Strategy (AEPS), something like the People’s Charter for Change.  By defending the current public provision, while projecting the need for a Charter for Democratic Education, we fight for the empowerment of individuals which will help to make the People’s Charter or the AEPS a reality.

Martin Levy teaches at Northumbria University,and is a branch officer and NEC member of UCU, but writes here in his capacity as a member of the Communist Party.  Further details about the proposed Charter for Democratic Education can be found in the Communist Party pamphlet, Education for the People.

Gawain Little: Who stands to benefit from the for-profit schools frenzy

Last week (July 2013) reports that the Department for Education was exploring the full privatisation of our schools hit the headlines.

The "cash for classrooms" scandal as the Independent called it was based on a proposed redesign of academy regulations, leaked to the paper by concerned civil servants.

Under the alleged proposals academies and "free" schools would become profit-making businesses using hedge funds and venture capitalists to raise money.

They also included recommendations that schools should be able to sell off land leased to them by the local authority.

The entire story has been strenuously denied by Education Secretary Michael Gove and Deputy PM Nick Clegg.
Possibly the most interesting denial, however, came from "free" school owner and cheerleader Toby Young.

Young wrote on his blog: "Free schools and academies are all, without exception, owned by charitable trusts ... Gove has no plans to allow for-profit companies to set up, own or operate free schools or academies. There is one case of the Education Secretary allowing a profit-making company to manage a free school - IES UK Buckland ... however, the school in question is owned by a charitable trust and IES is employed by that trust on a fixed 10-year contract."

The language of this denial is eerily similar to a call Young made over a year ago in favour of allowing profit-making companies a role in British education. Young told the TES in February 2012: "The Secretary of State should either allow for-profit education management organisations to set up, own and operate free schools or at the very least put a procurement framework in place that enables free school charitable trusts to outsource the management of their schools for such organisations. "I'm sure plenty of management companies would be prepared to bear some of the capital cost of setting up a free school in return for a 10-year contract."

You're left wondering if Young is actually denying the reports about Gove's plans or just complaining that the minister has only taken the first step towards full privatisation.

It's not the first time such ideas have been leaked from the DfE. Similar stories were reported in September 2011, January 2012 and February this year.

So, what would stated-funded for-profit education look like? There are precious few examples to examine because most developed countries have wisely steered clear of introducing the profit motive into compulsory education. However, Chile has a significant for-profit schools sector, introduced as part of a wider privatisation drive under the Pinochet dictatorship. According to a synthesis of research by Rick Muir of the Institute for Public Policy Research, for-profit schools in Chile increased segregation, have failed to raise educational standards and do not perform as well as their not-for-profit equivalents. One study found that "the commercial schools operated at lower cost, which they attribute to their ability to pay lower salaries and hire less-qualified teachers. They conclude that this may be why these schools are underperforming."

And then there's Sweden. There for-profit schools were introduced under a voucher scheme from 1992 onwards. Gove praised this system in 2008, saying: "We have seen the future in Sweden and it works. Standards have been driven up. If it can work there it can work here."

But these claims were dealt a blow two years later. Sweden's National Agency for Education director Per Thurlberg said: "The competition between schools that was one of the reasons for introducing the new schools has not led to better results. The students in the new schools have, in general, better standards, but it has to do with their parents and backgrounds. They come from well-educated families."

Sweden's results in international rankings such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study have declined considerably since the mid-1990s and the system is now seen as a classic example of privatisation gone wrong. Recent studies show that on average Sweden's for-profit schools employ fewer staff and have a higher percentage of unqualified teachers.

A further warning of the dangers of for-profit schooling were provided in May, when JB Education collapsed after owner Axcel, a private equity firm, decided it had to put shareholder returns before students' education. JB Education ran schools that catered for 10,000 children and young people. Chief executive Anders Hultin said: "It's extremely regrettable it will affect the students."

With all this damning evidence against them you could be forgiven for wondering why Gove and the current government are so keen on introducing for-profit schools. There are those who stand to gain - it's just students are not among them. One potential beneficiary is Edmund Lazarus, a close personal friend of Gove and a significant donor to the Tory Party. Lazarus is a founding partner of private equity firm Bregal Capital, which set up private schools company Cognita in 2004. It's headed by former chief inspector of schools Chris Woodhead. In 2012 Cognita and Lazarus were in the news over allegations of improper pension claims. They were mentioned as major potential beneficiaries of the introduction of for-profit schooling and lobbied heavily in 2011 for Gove to widen the involvement of for-profit schools in the system.

The basis for for-profit schools is already being prepared through a series of measures introduced by the current government and the Blair government before it. We have academies and "free" schools totally separated from any form of local accountability. The precedent exists for "free" school charitable trusts to outsource the management of their schools to for-profit organisations. The pension liabilities such private providers would have to take on have been substantially reduced through the gutting of the Teachers Pension Scheme alongside other public-sector schemes. Lib Dem Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander said while the pensions "reforms" were being pushed through that "the new pensions will be substantially more affordable to alternative providers ... we are no longer requiring private, voluntary and social enterprise providers to take on the risks of defined benefit that deter many from bidding for contracts in the first place."

But of course the key way these "alternative providers" have secured profits in those countries that allow a public-funded for-profit sector to operate in education is through employing less qualified staff and paying teachers less. The government has already removed the requirement for children in academies and "free schools" to be taught by qualified teachers and is in the process of deregulating teachers' pay so every school sets its own pay levels.

Those who don't want to see our education system go the way of Chile and Sweden, with falling standards and increasing inequality, should be standing shoulder to shoulder with teachers in their fight against pay deregulation and to protect fair pensions.

Labour's shadow education secretary Stephen Twigg says the Labour Party is fully opposed to for-profit schooling. If that is so it must not only promise our children a qualified teacher in every classroom but must commit to reverse changes to teachers' pay and pensions, and to bring academies and "free" schools back within the local authority schools family. Only then will our children's education be free of the dangers posed by marketisation and schools for profit.

Gawain Little is Oxfordshire secretary of the National Union of Teachers and on the union's national executive. This article appeared in the Morning Star on 8 July 2013.

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