Editor's note: In this column we encourage our readers to have their say. This week occasional contributor John Howlett expresses his own very personal view of the malady affecting not just Rye Academy but our education system as a whole. It is an important subject and we welcome other readers views and comments
I respond to the report on Rye Academy (Kenneth Bird, Rye News, October 12) with a broader question asking what is happening to the failed neo-liberal free market capitalism of the last forty years.
I echo Kenneth’s appreciation of what has been done to rescue Rye Academy and congratulate Tim Hulme on his seemingly successful mission; though I would question why the article concerns itself almost entirely with finance and governance and not with students or teaching; and I would insist (as does Nigel Jennings in his Comment) that our unfortunate schools should never have been faced with these choices in the first place.
At the very moment when the neo-liberal conceit and deceit so blatantly progressed by Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown has been finally exposed (not just by Corbyn and McDonnell but also by the IMF), education has already slipped after health, social care, utilities and housing down the slide into that black hole of deregulation and private initiative – otherwise known to its many and various victims as the world of private wealth and public squalor. Where, for example, the water industry (it used to be called a public service) is mostly owned by private equity or foreign sovereign funds. Our 19th century infrastructure of water mains and sewage crumbles while the companies pay dividends to shareholders and large executive salaries to themselves – companies mostly outside the UK who pay no tax within the British Isles. Are you really surprised the British public, finally becoming aware of such iniquity in most public services, are in in favour of taking the right of fresh water and efficient waste disposal back into public ownership? Along with gas & electricity, the post office and our ragged railway network.
In the meantime we arrive at the absurdity of a school or group of schools being administered and judged as though they were commercial organisations. And this week we read that schools have lost £2.8 billion in budget and service cuts since 2015. We are talking about the education of our children and grandchildren, education that was for us, fifty, sixty years ago, well-administered, free even into college and university, where it was only, rightly, subject to a means test.
The UK has ended up with the most chaotic education infrastructure in the whole of the western world. We encourage divisive religious schools; we encourage parents to start up their own establishments under various titles and fund them irresponsibly from a budget whose criteria are understood by no one, especially those unfortunate DFE civil servants who are meant to run it. We wave a magic wand turning schools into academies, ‘liberating’ them from LEA audit and control – but failing to create any other credible licensing agency or support in their place, and creating instead a wholly unnecessary level of expensive ‘executive administration’ for every individual academy trust, sometimes for every individual school – administration and financial control formerly carried out by a school manager working cooperatively with the LEA.
The old LEAs (Local Education Authorities – usually City Boroughs or County Councils) clearly differed in their efficiency and their philosophies (I remember as a school governor in Kent during the early 1980s realizing that East Sussex pupils just one mile across the border had £180 more spent on their secondary education each year than our Kent children – a mighty sum in those days when multiplied by the numbers of a large comprehensive).
But even so those LEAs, good and not so good, still supplied mostly excellent advisory services (subject specialists, teacher training, child psychologists, music tuition and orchestras, finance and legal staff to name but a few). Now, in these free market days, most of these services have to be purchased by individual schools from private companies whose only statutory interest in the transaction is profit (whatever their professional experience and expertise – many of these companies turn out be based in the USA and thus do not even pay tax in the UK).
Making untaxed profit out of my grandchildren’s education? Take me to the barricades!
The buck apparently stops now at the Department For Education. And of course with Ofsted. And equally with the Corbyn shadow-government who have to figure out how to unravel this mess and restore structure and stability.
The DFE (the old Ministry of Education) was never intended, staffed or trained to have direct detailed control over schools. They are not fit for purpose because this is not their purpose.
Nor are Ofsted, for all their scurrying clipboard-box-ticking work. They are in no way a match for the old HMIs (Her Majesty’s Inspectors) whose careful assessments of schools avoided ridiculous labels and often meaningless but damaging punitive measures. The worst elements of managerialism now triumph in the name but never the spirit or achievement of efficiency. The net result is systemic anarchy and organisations that only hang together through the dedication of underpaid and overworked school staff who are quite literally having to make it up as they go along.
Our Rye Academy will flourish not with convoluted first-aid loans, but when sufficient funds, together with a unified and egalitarian infrastructure are restored to all of Education, to all our young, and all the gallant staff who dedicate their lives to them.
