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Title: Schools for sale
Author: Solidarity Federation
Date: Spring 1998
Language: en
Topics: education, privatisation, Direct Action Magazine, United Kingdom, the Labour Party
Source: Retrieved on November 30, 2004 from https://web.archive.org/web/20041130181935/http://www.directa.force9.co.uk/archive/da6-features.htm
Notes: Published in Direct Action #6 — Spring 1998.

Solidarity Federation

Schools for sale

New Labour’s determination to think the unthinkable goes on unchecked.

Having eagerly embraced the Tory education reform they so bitterly

opposed in opposition, it now seems the Government are prepared to go

much further than the Tories ever dared. It is now emerging that Labour

is toying with the idea of introducing the privatising of state run

schools.

The Labour government plans to set up 25 “education action zones”, each

with about 20 schools, in areas where pupils do “badly”. A committee

made up of parents, teachers, councillors and businesses will control

each zone. Schools in the action zones may be allowed to drop the

national curriculum and teachers’ unions national agreed pay and

conditions.

If these proposals were not bad enough, it was announced at this year’s

North of England Education Conference in Bradford, that Labour is

considering allowing private firms to take over the complete running of

schools in action zones. It was later disclosed that Labour has been

holding behind-the-scenes discussions with a number of private

companies. Those firms expressing an interest in taking over the running

of schools include Nord Anglia, a stockmarket listed education

conglomerate, which owns a chain of private schools; CfBT, a firm that

runs careers advice services and carries out school inspections; and

Capita, a management service firm.

Like much of Labour’s thinking, the idea of privatising schools was

developed in the USA. The private company, Education Alternative,

recently won contracts to operate 12 schools in Arizona. At the same

time, an increasing number of the new “charter schools”, which are

publicly funded but are run independently of local school boards, have

been handed over to the private sector — two of which were a firm making

soap and a management services firm. Given that the Democrats’ aim is to

create 3,000 charter schools, the scope for school privatisation is

massive.

The growing threat of privatisation in the USA has resulted in the

merger of the two biggest teaching unions, the moderate National

Education Association, with 2.3m members and the more militant American

Federation of Teachers, with a membership of 950,000. The result is the

largest trade union by far in the USA. However, as we have found in

Britain, creating bigger unions does not in itself lead to greater

power. Let us hope that in this case it does, and that the new teachers’

union is able to prevent the handing over the minds of children to big

business.