A Market in Children

This will be a short blog (by my standards), and it’s a simple cry of rage. It was prompted by a conversation with an ex-colleague I once worked with at the DFE about how the introduction of “the market” in education has produced awful consequences for our children.

 

“Some schools will fail as the market takes over”

That’s a quote from Gove. I’ll come back to it after I’ve dumped some bile on the page.

We need to be very clear here. Gove’s reforms were never about children. They were about privatising education. If I wanted to be generous, I’d say that Gove, as a one-eyed ideological simpleton, genuinely believed that privatising education would help children, because in the economically illiterate world of half-baked, self-serving, neo-liberal theories which he inhabits, the market is automatically better at anything than the state, and so privatising the schools system must, in Gove’s tiny, sociopathic brain, result in better outcomes. This generous interpretation would see Gove not as a malevolent grasping figure, but as merely a thoughtless idiot, too moronic to see through the obvious flaws in his preferred economic theory. It’s a tempting view, as he’s in the Conservative party, and that political party didn’t get the historical nickname of “The Stupid Party” for nothing.

However, I’m not generous. Gove wanted to privatise education because, like the rest of his greedy accomplices, he sees a huge multi-billion pound budget and he thinks it should be directed to himself and his friends. They call it shrinking the state, but of course it’s not shrinking the state, because the money still has to be spent on schools. It’s just that, if the state spends the money directly, then you have to deal with all those tedious requirements of probity, oversight, executive pay restraint and giving your staff decent terms and conditions. If, on the other hand, you create a market, with edubusinesses being funded at arm’s length, then you can dispense with all that “treating human beings decently” business, and get on with the serious business of pocketing large amounts of cash for party donors and rich men much like himself.

Taking his main policies in turn :

Academy chains and Multi-Academy Trusts are private education companies. They are not “sponsors” because they take money out, rather than putting money in (academy executives must be really surprised when a child approaches them to support a sponsored swim and then expects to receive cash from the executive after it’s completed). They are not “charities” unless you think it’s normal for charities to pay their executives six-figure salaries and funnel increasing amounts of cash given for good causes into payments for unspecified “services” from companies which also happen to be owned by the same executives. There is a whole load of chaff being kicked out to obscure what they are, but they are, in fact, edubusinesses. We’re already starting to see schools being transferred from one chain to another, as if they’re supermarket sites being moved from Tesco to Sainsbury’s. We have branding and marketing. We have a growing parasitical “executive” class who are pocketing salaries far higher than anything which the old LEAs used to see. These are the firms making up the future educational cartel. Private sector “business practices” have produced the usual dismal litany of corruption which accompanies any market, from MAT “directors” directing the school budget into their own companies, to the sort of petty theft of the self-important-but-small-minded variety : designer coffee pots, expenses accounts, and an inability to distinguish between the school’s budget and the head’s own bank account.

Mass Academization was designed to push schools not into independent existence, but into these edubusinesses. Originally, Gove thought academies would willingly join the chains, presumably in the same way that turkeys routinely cote for Christmas. When they proved rationally reluctant to do so, force was applied. Schools are not now allowed to convert into stand-alone academies, but are required to join chains – whether they like it or not. Ofsted have long been used as a club to beat schools into chains, in the face of often ferocious opposition from parents. Gove’s model is that every school in the country will become part of a chain. Then they can be treated the way he thinks they should be treated : as educational business franchises.

Schools-based training expansion is a clear part of this picture. If the edubusinesses are going to be able to either force staff to do inhuman levels of work, or reduce their pay, or simply sack the more expensive/bolshie ones, then they need cheap, malleable replacements. There’s nothing cheaper and more malleable than a fresh graduate trainee who can work 24/7, doesn’t ask too many questions if they want to secure a job, and is paid at the bottom of the pay scale.

Performance Related Pay was entirely about reducing the wage bill. Staff costs are a fairly constant 75-85% of the budget in most schools. Which makes sense, as they’re very human-intensive institutions. Again, the chaff was about “rewarding great teachers”. Bollocks. It was about enabling the aforementioned edubusinesses to reduce the staff costs so that they can skim off more cash for themselves. Put bluntly, the kleptocrats who sit on both academy chain boards and can also be found in the DFE rather too frequently to avoid the dank stench of corruption, made it clear to Gove that private businessmen didn’t see enough profit in schools until they could pay those pesky teachers less. Hello PRP !

You don’t need to be Hercule Poirot to see the pattern here.

“Some schools will fail as the market takes over”

I occasionally write about Gove’s “vandalism”, but I’m wrong to do so. It wasn’t just mindless destruction. Everything he did had a purpose, and that purpose was to privatise education. When I wrote the blog a couple of days ago about the recruitment crisis, I had the largest response I’ve ever had. I described worsening terms and conditions; cuts in real pay; huge increases in workload; a growing distance between a self-enriching “executive” class and a hammered classroom workforce; the unjustified destruction of HE-based teacher training; and the endless praise for great private edubusiness “leaders”, coupled with the repeated inaccurate portrayal of a failing schools system somehow caused by public sector institutions like LEAs, universities or experienced teachers (“the Blob”). My description clearly struck a chord with many. But I think it’s important to understand that this is not random. The policies which have created this perfect storm in our schools are deliberate, and they are designed to create a private “market” in schools, which is funded by the state but controlled by private companies. It is a system in which the focus is not the child, but the profit. The children are merely commodities : raw materials which the business has to deal in.

You can see this attitude already when the Harris chain makes children disappear from their rolls if they are likely to impact negatively on their marketing statistics. You see it when ordinary schools start kicking out their own students after GCSE if they don’t look likely to boost the school’s A*-B A-level figures. You see it when schools in academy chains employ 70% NQTs and trainee teachers, with astounding turnover, because the profit they can pay themselves in the form of stratospheric director salaries is more important to them than stability or experienced teachers might be to the students. You see it when shadowy “academy brokers” employed by the DFE force unwilling schools into chains run by the same rich men who also sit on the DFE Board.

All the misery, all the problems which are now coming to a head with the recruitment crisis, are a direct result of policies designed to introduce “the market”. The hundreds of thousands of teachers whose lives have been made less bearable, and the millions of children who are now at risk of having no teacher, or being taught each year by a different inadequately trained, overworked NQT who is barely out of school themselves, result from this central aim : introducing the market.

The UK needs more political cartoonists so I can stop nicking US stuff

So back to that quote.

When he was pushing his “reforms” through in the DFE, clever DFE officials warned him that the chaos which would ensue would risk serious negative consequences in schools. I know for a fact that he was warned that he was creating a recruitment crisis. At one meeting, presumably irritated by these damn civil servants who kept throwing ugly reality at the beautiful ideological purity of his market goals, and perhaps egged on by Dominic “Mad as a Box of Frogs” Cummings, he said the following :

“Some schools will fail as the market takes over”

And there you have it. Collateral damage was acceptable. In Gove’s view, the market produces winners and losers, and that’s how it should be. Let competition decide, let some schools rise and some schools fall, and let rich men get richer. Wonderful.

Except schools are not franchises of Costa Coffee, and they don’t have customers who can simply shop elsewhere. That school is the only chance those kids are getting this year, and if you’ve forced out all their teachers, or handed it over to one of your party-donating friends for them to suck profits out of the budget while kids go without books, then you’ve screwed them. Those are our children in those schools. Those are our mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers who teach those children. Those are real people trying to do a very difficult but very important job. The children are not products. The teachers are not units of capital. They’re people. They’re us.

But hey, Michael: we may have your recruitment crisis and all the negative consequences that will bring to our children, but at least you have your market, eh ? And your friends are getting VERY rich. Good job.