Michael Meacher MP

The Academies Bill today in the Commons is a particularly brash example of Govian arrogance – the unprecedentedly telescoped parliamentary proceedings for scrutiny of the Bill, the bypassing of constitutional and democratic processes (which on Radio 4 he dismissed as over-concern for processology), the lack of consultation, and the rolling-out nationwide of an inadequately tested and highly contentious system.

Not only that, serious unaswered questions remain about the funding of Academies, their expansion to primary and special and grammar schools, admissions policy (will banding arrangements introduce selection by the back door?), and the lack of due governance and adequate accountability.   To push ahead so precipitately with such an untried system where the limited results so far are at best highly ambivalent is a real abuse of power.   What results can be expected? (more…)

Vince Cable is to be credited with coming up with new and more radical solutions for resolving the two key dilemmas in higher education – the growing elitism in Britain’s top universities and the unfairness of tuition fees especially if they were to be significantly raised (as the top universities are clamouring for).   But his proposals don’t go far enough to break through the class barrier and also contain some notable downsides. (more…)

The botched chopping of 706 BSF school-building schemes will have much more serious results than the 25 deplorable errors in informing schools that their projects were going ahead, only to be quickly told by a red-faced Secretary of State that actually they were not.   We now know what a senior Departmental source meant when he leaked his view that it had been ‘bloody chaos’ inside DE.   It shows when an inexperienced and administratively incompetent ideologue takes charge.    But that’s the least of it. (more…)

So the Tory flagship policy of so-called ‘free schools’ has just been launched down the slipway.    It has been sold as increasing choice, breaking free from the oppressive control of local authorities, and allowing parents and the local community to set up and run schools in the way they wish.   The real motive is perhaps rather less elevated or honourable.   It is to escape disorderly inner city schools with poor teaching and worse discipline, full of disruptive working class kids and too many immigrants.

Of course Michael Gove will argue that it allows opting out in the spirit of the distinctive and superior grant-maintained schoolds and city technology schools of the 1980s or even a throwback to the prized pre-1944 grammar schools.   Opting out has always been the preferred way both of Tories and New Labour, backed by higher pay or knighthoods to bribe their backers.   But where is the evidence that such experiments have ever succeeded?   Independent assessment of academies’ performance have presented a very mixded picture, their sponsors rarely contribute even the £2 million subscription, whilst often acting as purveyors of intellectual eccentricities. (more…)

The Government plan just released entitled ‘The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy’, despite its euphemistic title, crosses an important line. Its basic goal is to make universities work more closely with industry, thereby inducing industry not only to fund them but also to design their courses. This is the latest stage of the Rothschild revolution initiated by Thatcher which was designed to inculcate the market and market values into every part of British life, and particularly the education system. Higher education was no longer to be an academe of learning, it was a preparation for a job, a necessary early appendage of a well-functioning capitalist system. This process, like so many others, now continues as smoothly under New Labour as it did under the Tories. Government funding has already switched substantially away from the arts and humanities in favour of science, technology and engineering,. The intense focus on economic competitiveness and technological competence is already sidelining the concept of a university as an intellectual experience that widens horizons before the strong economic and social pressures of early adulthood squeeze out such refinements. This plan takes it further still.

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