Education | ukwatch.net

Another Education is Possible

JamieSW — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:33:13 +0000

The testing regime in schools is breaking down. Before the summer break SATs papers were lost or badly marked; pupils were absenting themselves from the tests and head teachers were demanding an end to these wasteful and useless exams. One parent from Sunderland, truck driver Stuart McAnaney, has two sons: James, 11, and nine year old Matthew, at St Anne’s RC Primary School. He said, “I think it is absolutely disgraceful that this has happened. When James was sitting his SATs he was in a terrible state because he was so stressed. I think they should be scrapped altogether.”

From this month a new secondary curriculum has been introduced which encourages schools to put the creativity and fun back into learning. Some in government seem to have recognised that the teaching by numbers approach to learning doesn’t work for all children.

However, the pressure of league tables will force many school management teams to play only lip service to the new rhetoric. Teachers will be forced to continue teaching for the tests as accountability mechanisms such as performance management and lesson observations are used to enforce compliance.

This tension between creativity and the current testing regime can be exploited. Staff at Filton High School, South Gloucestershire, have begun to offer a glimpse of another type of school where learning is more engaging and relevant. We have started to develop a collective approach to curriculum design that engages pupils by dealing with relevant social justice issues and offers them a real audience for their ideas.

Since 2005 both teaching and non-teaching staff have formed a curriculum group called Alternative Futures. We wanted pupils to begin to act in a more critical way. Meeting after school, between 15 and 35 staff regularly attend and plan two-week themed cross-curricular learning projects around current issues. All departments have been represented. Laura Storey, an English teacher and South Gloucestershire NUT equal opportunities officer, says, “The cross-curricular nature of the fortnight enables our students to see the links between their lessons in a way that makes their learning both fun and relevant. Perhaps as important, it also enables teachers to work collectively. Many staff feel that we are beginning finally to control the content of the curriculum.”

Radical thinking

Notwithstanding the new changes in the secondary curriculum, as it stands the school curriculum is geared towards preparing young people for career paths and to promote “an efficient and flexible labour market”. What radical teachers have to ask themselves is, how can we promote radical thinking in our pupils?

With the rise in anti-immigrant racism and the success of the British National Party (BNP), this year staff decided to tackle the issue of cultural diversity, identity and racism. The school has increasing numbers of parents from Portugal and Eastern Europe. Bristol itself is a major centre of Polish migration. The council has estimated that between 15,000 and possibly 25,000 Polish workers have found employment in the city in the last two years. In last year’s council elections the BNP stood in a neighbouring ward to the school on an anti-migrant ticket and, with little canvassing, got 400 votes.

Therefore in the maths department they created a resource called “The Human Race – the Migrant Species”. This allowed pupils to examine the history of migration not just of peoples throughout time but of how mathematical concepts travel from one culture to another and become assimilated into our thinking.

They then went on to ask the pupils to examine two statements: “Too many immigrants are coming into this country” and “Our country cannot afford to help immigrants”.

Pupils were then able to use data to help them critically examine contentious issues based upon facts and not preconceived notions.

As Year 9 pupil Louis said, “I always thought that there were lots of immigrants coming to this country, but I see that was wrong.” Pupils were able to calculate that the difference immigrants make to our population is 0.03 percent. But unless we are able to develop critical faculties within our young people they will always be at the mercy of the misinformation deliberately fed to them by the political right who own the media.

This work was complemented by the science department who worked on deconstructing the concept of “race” as a non-scientific term by exploring the idea of genetic variation.

The English department took an empathetic approach to migration. Using photographs taken by photographer Guy Smallman, pupils explored the journey of a Polish migrant who is shown to be living in appalling conditions in a wood outside a small English town. Information about how immigration benefits society and the reasons why people change country was fed into groups who then began to try to create the “story” of the man in the photographs.

The next stage was to give the groups information about shortages of workers in key areas in Bristol such as hospitals and schools. The pupils began to come up with solutions to staff shortages, as well as identifying any barriers that a migrant might have to taking up employment. Finally they had to write an autobiography as if they were the man in the photograph.

As with the other examples from last year’s project, an attempt has been made to embed learning in real, often controversial, issues. However, as this is a type of “offline” simulated reproduction of reality, a bridge is being built between everyday issues and more abstract concepts such as justice or equality.

This process allows pupils an opportunity to reflect and offers them the option of repositioning themselves to work out their own values and beliefs. During this year’s project on racism one Year 9 pupil, Tasha, commented, “I liked learning about other people. I didn’t like Polish people before – they’re foreign. But now I know they’re not trying to take over. I like the work we’ve done in English because writing about someone’s life makes you realise how hard life is for immigrants. They don’t just get everything they want, like benefits and a house, like we think they do.”

To make projects more real we move out of the four walls of the classroom and bring in people involved in the struggles we are exploring, to talk and work with students. Last year the school looked at climate change and had an expert witnesses’ day. One of these was Elaine Graham Leigh who represented the Campaign Against Climate Change.

Learning also takes place offsite. During the Climate Change project in 2007 Year 9 pupils were offered a choice of trips: to learn how to measure a community’s carbon footprint; to work with community artists to make fashion items out of “rubbish”; to cook in Bristol’s top organic restaurant.

This year pupils went out and asked questions of the public about living in a multicultural society, and some of the responses shocked the students.

We also decided to work with Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR). Martin Smith and Weyman Bennett led workshops on music and migration. On the last day LMHR put on a concert for all the school’s pupils with Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. and Bashy.

The National Union of Teachers (NUT) has been very supportive. This year acting general secretary Christine Blower attended the last day of the project. She told staff that she was working with LMHR to see how a website could be developed so that anti-racist teaching resources such as our own could be shared across schools.

Since the late 1970s education unions have been squeezed out of education policy development and shoe-horned in to concerning themselves with pay and conditions issues. Nevertheless, the successful ballot over the NUT’s political fund earlier in the year showed that many teachers believe that the union has to engage with broader political issues such as racism and fascism.

This concern with broader political issues is reflected during the themed learning projects. There is a real buzz among a wider layer of staff about social justice issues. Twenty five staff turned up to an after school meeting of the Alternative Futures group to hear Martin Smith talk about racism and migration. The discussion focused on how to expose the BNP and the relationship between multiculturalism and anti-racism. During the Climate Change project in 2007 discussion took place about individual and social responses to increasing levels of carbon dioxide.

Anna Brooman, who is in her second year of teaching, was a key organiser of this year’s event: “As a new teacher, working on these projects has opened my eyes to the wider political agenda behind education and has also led me to get involved in my union. Earlier this year I represented the school NUT group at the lobby of parliament. I also spoke about our work at the Education for Liberation conference in London in June. It has been a fast and very enjoyable learning curve.”

Outside of the school we have begun to tap into new networks such as the Global Education Network which is exploring ways of introducing “global” issues into the curriculum. We were able to explain how our model of curriculum change offers a coherent method to enable this. We have been invited to lead a session at the Climate Change and Development conference for educators in October. Not surprisingly, other schools are signing up to the Alternative Futures vision of education.

The “common sense” of government approaches to teaching and learning then is in contradiction with what many teachers feel they should be doing. One London teacher put this well. “In my school I have to train staff in how to prepare a lesson for Ofsted. After I have done this I then suggest what they could do on a daily basis. Needless to say, the two are not the same.” Alternative Futures is situated within this political contradiction.

There are also plans for a radical education conference on Alternative Futures next year sponsored by several university education departments. Educators are beginning to want concrete solutions to the present ideological and political crisis in education. The practical initiatives we have outlined begin to pose questions about the struggle for control within the system and offer a glimpse of a different kind of education based on the needs and interests of teachers and students.

Student living - this isn’t Hollyoaks

Alex Doherty — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 09:32:15 +0000

With the beginning of the 2008/09 academic year fast approaching, students will soon be settling in to the realities of student life. For new students this means at some point they’ve made a choice: between studying away from home on the one hand and continuing to live with their parents on the other. Almost a third of students choose the latter option. This often means a long commute to a university chosen on the basis of its location instead of its merits – but at least these students have the security of a roof over their head. For those who have chosen to study away from home, often unaware of the true cost of student life, this means moving in to student accommodation and an ongoing struggle against poverty, unscrupulous landlords and, more often than not, appalling living conditions.

From the first day of the first semester there is one thing that all students can be sure of: their maintenance loan won’t be enough to keep body and soul together. Students are entitled to no more than £3000 non-income assessed, which rises to a mere £4600 for students from the poorest backgrounds. Compare this with an average rent of £60 per week (which works out at £3120 for the year) and then add on the rising cost of utilities, food and other necessities and the loan system is exposed for what it really is – a disgrace. The only way for most students to make ends meet is to work at least part of the time during the semester and burden themselves with overdrafts and credit cards the rest of the time. During the summer holidays when the loan has dried up students are forced to seek out whatever work they can get and have none of the usual rights to Job Seekers’ Allowance or other benefits that most workers can fall back on.

The Government has done nothing to make student housing more affordable. Most first year students looking to live away from home for the first time look to move in to university owned halls of residence. In this way they are guaranteed good quality housing at a cheap price. Thanks to PFI, these residences are now being opened up to profiteering vultures from the private sector. To give an example from a 2002 Unison report; at Luton University student nurses were told they had to leave their halls of residence and move into new PFI-built halls. Their rents shot up from £177 per month to £244 per month with at least one student being forced to sleep in their car! Besides incredibly inflated prices, these profiteers also force students to sign longer contracts, so that students living at university during term time are forced to sign 52 week contracts and pay rent even when they know they won’t be living there.

Besides being unaffordable, private housing is also a playground for bad landlords. Surely students ought to be able to expect landlords to fulfil their contracts as an absolute minimum? Apparently not. More and more students are living with damp, infestation, poor or nonexistent heating and unsafe appliances – to the complete indifference of landlords. Landlords therefore often get away with breaking the law – the long and arduous process through the courts will always favour the landlord in the long run.

All this begs the question: why is student housing in such a bad state and what needs to be done to improve it? The question of housing isn’t, after all, isolated to students. In the current economic climate more and more people are finding it difficult to keep up with their rent and mortgage repayments. The Tories and New Labour have no solution beyond opening housing up further to the private sector. PFI and private landlords only succeed in driving students to the breadline and ultimately out of education altogether. The only way to win our rights for both a decent education and decent housing is through the organised labour and student movements. The NUS and the Unions must organise together at the grassroots and fight to force the Labour government to act on the housing disgrace. The Labour government must adopt socialist policies now to assure workers and students alike affordable and secure housing:

No to privatisation of student halls of residence!

Begin a massive programme of decent social housing!

A living grant for all students!

Making Money From Education

tim — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 16:10:02 +0000

The American education company Kaplan has announced plans to open a profit seeking university in the UK. Although only a small beginning, this opens the way to a profit-driven higher education system. The first move was the government’s, who recently relaxed laws on who can award degrees. They are in effect trying to open up the concept of a degree to market speculation and commodification.

Kaplan is already prominent in the US, and they are not altogether alien to these shores either, having joint ventures with Nottingham Trent and Sheffield universities. It also owns the Dublin Business School. Kaplan generates revenues of over $1 billion per year, so it clearly knows how to squeeze a buck or two out of our public education system.

Those leading a campaign against the possibility of a profit driven university are likely to be the Coalition of Modern Universities, which represents about 30 ‘new’ universities in England. They have already criticised the government’s relaxing of laws on the awarding of degrees, because the changes could rob universities of vital funds and would unsurprisingly create an even more class-divided, elitist university system. A senior figure within the CMU said: “There has been absolutely no consultation on principle, mechanics or implications for sustainability.”

The group prides itself on being the biggest player in attracting students from poorer backgrounds to higher education. However, whatever the motivations and creation processes of the new laws, the introduction of profit-driven universities will open up the British higher education system to becoming more like American system, the most elitist and expensive in the world.

SAT scores

That the potential university will aim itself at the more wealthy customers is confirmed by its running of the SAT system for entry into such institutions. “The conventional wisdom is that the [SAT] test is just another leg up for rich kids who can shell out $1,000 for a test prep course. To some, the likes of Kaplan and Princeton Review have turned good SAT scores into a commodity, another saleable ticket into America’s Ivy League aristocracy,” says Kerry Howley, an American teacher. Once such a university comes into being over here, as is no doubt the government’s intentions, it would be in direct competition with public, established universities.

The law of the market would then be applied with ever greater force on our higher education system, and will inevitably erode what remains of its public character. In the light of this, the government’s plans to remove the cap on fees, allowing universities to charge as much as they like, are clearly a part of a larger plan. But it is not wise, even from a long-term capitalist perspective, to open up university education to speculation when this has recently proved to be so volatile as to threaten the entire world economy. Do we want the same logic that has lead to the food crisis and driven millions more into starvation, to also be applied to the way we learn? No way!

Academies - attacking the poor in the name of justice

Alex Doherty — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 13:37:57 +0000

At the end of the last school year, schools secretary Ed Balls threatened nearly one in five secondary schools in Britain – 638 in total – with closure.

Balls has earmarked schools where less than 30 percent of pupils gained five or more GCSEs at grades A*-C, including English and maths.

Because this is much harder in areas of poverty and deprivation, he mainly hit schools in inner cities and council estates. In fact two thirds of schools where over 30 percent of pupils are entitled to free school meals are under threat.

But it is not the individual schools that have failed – it is government policies.

Balls intends to turn these schools into academies, even though the whole academies experiment, where control of state-funded schools is handed to private businesses or charities, has been a disaster.

Improved exam results are entirely the result of using easier qualifications – GNVQ instead of GCSE – and changing the school population – recruiting better-off pupils and pushing poorer ones into nearby schools.

Academies exclude up to two thirds more children than state-run schools.

Despite this, 26 academies are included in the list of 638 “failing schools”.

Unfortunately we have a government that just doesn’t learn. It is now talking of converting primary schools into academies.

The government digs itself in deeper every time because it is devoted to the privatisation of public services.

It is this agenda that lies behind the attack on “failing schools”. Many of these schools have had very good inspection reports.

Most had improving GCSE results and Ofsted classified several as “outstanding”.

But the academies programme can’t be sold to the general public on the grounds that it gives more power and control to the rich.

So instead, the government regularly claims that its policies of privatisation and business involvement in welfare services are ways of promoting social justice.

No socialist can be complacent about children getting low qualifications because of family poverty. But we cannot swallow government lies about privatisation.

McJobs

The root cause of low school achievement is poverty, including the demoralisation and insecurity that comes from working in a McJobs economy.

Schools can make some difference but it is difficult under the constant pressure of exam league tables, Ofsted inspections and government ministers announcing that you have failed.

Schools in poor areas need a big boost in funding, and the freedom to develop a different curriculum and more interesting ways of learning.

Though there are now signs of a relaxation of the centralised national curriculum, only schools in better off areas are likely to benefit.

Schools in the poorest areas are kept constantly under government threat.

It is beyond dispute that growing up in poverty reduces your chances of a successful education. But poverty doesn’t affect all children the same way.

For example, some single mothers with a good education, who live in poverty because of problems juggling work and childcare, are able to give their children lots of help.

Some teachers are very good at inspiring and supporting children to succeed. So some children do succeed against the odds, but the general trend is undeniable.

This is an enormous problem in Britain because there is so much child poverty.

It increased massively under Margaret Thatcher’s conservative government – from 14 to 33 percent. Under New Labour child poverty has started to rise again.

It is a scandal that, in one of the richest economies in the world, nearly three million children – one in four – are growing up in poverty.

Gordon Brown has himself to blame. As chancellor he set modest targets for improvement, 20 years to abolish child poverty, but soon let things slide.

The minimum wage is too low to keep a family and the tax credit system is often impossible to understand.

International studies of school achievement link low achievement in British schools to the extent of child poverty.

There is more poverty here, but poverty also has a bigger impact than other countries.

There are many reasons for this – the emphasis on testing makes young children feel they have failed, and a rigid national curriculum makes it difficult for teachers to relate to children’s interests and local environment. It is hard to make learning exciting.

Competition between schools has been encouraged which leaves some schools with a high concentration of deprived children.

These policies were introduced by Thatcher but have been continued by New Labour.

Countries with high levels of educational achievement such as Finland have lower levels of child poverty, but they also have education policies that mean poverty makes less of a difference.

All children there receive healthy, free school meals.

Excellent libraries and childcare make children enthusiastic readers.

Secondary schools in Finland are small, with an average of 300 students, avoiding large anonymous schools where vulnerable children slip through the net.

Classes are small too, and there is excellent help for those who are struggling.

New Labour’s education policies have failed, but Gordon Brown, like Thatcher and Tony Blair before him, prefers to blame individual schools.

Resistance

But if the government is now threatening hundreds more schools with closure and privatisation, this will only increase resistance to their policies.

Instead of isolated struggles in each area, there will be a broad and vigorous political struggle across England.

Already the NUT and all the other teacher unions, Unison and many other trade unions are affiliated to the Anti-Academies Alliance.

Now is the time to challenge a desperately weak government and its damaging neoliberal policies.

Terry Wrigley is a lecturer in educational development at Edinburgh university. He is the author of Another School is Possible. It is available from Bookmarks, the socialist bookshop. Phone 020 7637 1848 » www.bookmarks.uk.com

Military Recruitment at Schools and Colleges

tim — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:15:45 +0000

Who’s the new guy in the leafy attire handing out fitness advice and wads of cash?

After moving the motion objecting to army recruitment at congress, confirming our solidarity with NUT and overwhelmingly supported by you all, our local campaign began in earnest this week. The Army have set up a stall in the drama hall during enrolment offering a £5000 bursaries to students to commit themselves to 4 years in the army after leaving college. With no other employers have been granted this privileged access,and no other organisation has been offered the opportunity to counter the one-sided propaganda; we were understandably concerned. Their material as one member put.. “ its like a promotional material for a sports centre for bird spotters”. Why has the army has been permitted access during enrolment week when students are making important choices about their future. Pressure, bribes or inducements from outside institutions are inappropriate in this context.

In response to UCU’s distribution, and in solidarity with our UNISON branch, we leafleted outlining our opposition to the army’s recruitment activity in the college during enrolment. As a direct consequence our college principal publicly lambasted our new branch secretary through a microphone in front of the assembled college, at a meeting called at the start of the year. The army had been distributing their literature unchallenged to all curriculum desks throughout enrolment. Our concern is for the welfare of our students, particularly the 16-18 year-olds, and a profound distaste that they are being recruited with inducements and under false pretences to an institution which is failing in its duty of care.

A recent independent report by the Rowntree trust has condemned the army for using false and misleading propaganda to recruit young people. A full-page article in yesterday’s Observer newspaper (‘Record numbers of ex-soldiers in jail as combat leaves mental scars’) supplies further evidence that the MOD are failing in their duty of care to soldiers, Soldiers comprise the largest occupational group in the prison system with the number doubling in the last 4 years to 8500. The Howard League for Penal Reform attributes this to ‘‘an inability to cope with civilian life, particularly for those who joined the services on leaving school’

Veterans in Prison argue that ‘‘they’re fighting in back-to-back conflicts, coming out and going back again; they haven’t got time to recover. There are not enough of them. They don’t have the right cover or equipment and they’re absolutely knackered’ ‘staff at [one prison] have become so concerned at the lack of support traumatised soldiers receive upon release that they have taken to issuing them with information packs giving details of mental health charities’

National and local public opinion is overwhelmingly opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our local community amongst others is struggling to deal with gun crime and violence, especially where it affects young people. As a community college we should oppose violence and should not be feeding our young people to the war machine. The UK has been criticised at the UN (Child Soldiers Global Report 2008) as the only country in Europe that recruits 16 year-olds into the armed forces. The army targets youth because they are more vulnerable to army propaganda, especially in areas of high poverty and unemployment where young people have fewer choices than in leafy suburbs. The Army is enticing young people with glossy propaganda that conceals the facts that:

- The Army is a racist, sexist and homophobic institution

- 20% of 16-23 year-old women recruits suffer sexual harassment (2006 Equal Opportunities commission survey), with 10% of new recruits report being bullied in the first 12 months (Army’s own figures, report arising from the recent Deepcut inquiry)

- Two thirds of people helped by Shelter, the homelessness charity, in 2001 were ex-armed forces

- Hundreds of soldiers have been sent to fight illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with defective or inadequate equipment

- Soldiers returning from the front-line are suffering record levels of mental breakdown, drug abuse and alcoholism as a result of the trauma that they have endured

The army own offices and seemingly unlimited funds for media advertising campaigns. They have mobile recruitment buses that have previously pitched up outside Tottenham Town Hall. Groups that oppose their activities are free to protest their presence in such spaces. But educational unions the NUT and UCU have taken the considered view that army recruitment activities should have no place in educational institutions, and this is a position that we intend to fight for. This is opposition to government policy, and trades unions have long fought for the right to express a political position. We plan to publicly express our position by having a protest outside our college on Wednesday lunchtime, 12.30 – 1.30pm.

Demonstrate at Tottenham Centre

UCU and UNISON have raised strong objections to management about the army in the college during enrolment, recruiting 16-18 year-olds under their FE Bursary Scheme. Although there are of course a range of views about the army within the UCU and UNISON, our common concern is for the welfare of our students and a profound distaste that they are being recruited with inducements and under false pretences to ease the army’s recruitment crisis.

Misleading Propaganda

The UK has been criticised at the UN (Child Soldiers Global Report 2008) as the only country in Europe which recruits 16 year-old into the armed forces. A recent independent report by the Joseph Rowntree Trust (www.informedchoice.org.uk) has condemned the army for using false and misleading propaganda to recruit young people. Army literature emphasises comradeship, active lifestyle, travel and training opportunities. It omits or obscures the risks of dying (estimated at one in 36 of those sent to Afghanistan), the long-term damage to physical and mental health, the legal obligations of enlistment and the demands of a military lifestyle.

Army Failing in Duty of Care

A full-page article in the Observer newspaper on Sunday (‘Record numbers of ex-soldiers in jail as combat leaves mental scars’) supplies further damning evidence of the damage that our students may suffer if we facilitate their signing-up. According to the article, ex-soldiers comprise the largest occupational group in the prison system, with the number doubling in the last 4 years to 8500. The Howard League for Penal Reform attributes this to ‘‘an inability to cope with civilian life, particularly for those who joined the services on leaving school’. Veterans in Prison argue that ‘‘they’re fighting in back-to-back conflicts, coming out and going back again; they haven’t got time to recover. There are not enough of them. They don’t have the right cover or equipment and they’re absolutely knackered’

Anarchist Scholarship

tim — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 16:44:33 +0000

Thanks for taking some time to answer these questions today, David. For starters, could you tell us about the Anarchist Studies Network: what work does it do and what do you hope for it to achieve?

The ASN was basically established, I suppose, to do two things: create and foster links between the growing number of people doing research on anarchism (whether they were students/academics or not); and, building on that, to promote further research in the area and help disseminate the results. A group of us (lecturers and postgraduate research students) in the Politics Department at Loughborough University who were working on various aspects of anarchist history, politics, and theory were keen to raise the profile of research on anarchism—because, without wanting to be paranoid, it’s still difficult to get scholarly (i.e. properly researched) work on anarchism taken seriously within the education system in Britain.

Some of us belonged to the Political Studies Association, which allows its members to create “Specialist Groups” on all kinds of subjects, so we set up a Specialist Group for the Study of Anarchism, which means that we get a certain amount of funding from the PSA. The name was later changed to ASN. With the help of our more techie members, we’ve since set up a wiki web site and an e-mail discussion list. There have also been a couple of annual meetings where all the members got together to discuss plans. The PSA funding (which has no strings attached so long as it’s used to do what we want to do in any case, i.e. promote the study of anarchism) has allowed us to fund various seminars, workshops, and conferences, and to give financial support to members who needed help to be able to attend these events—not to mention the forthcoming ASN conference in Loughborough this September.

In its succinct definition of anarchist studies, the ASN states “For a number of us, what we are calling ‘anarchist studies’ no longer necessarily takes anarchism as its object of study but as a standpoint from which to study the world. Anarchist contributions to thought are making a reappearance in a number of fields, challenging established orthodoxies. Perhaps, against all odds, we are witnessing the emergence of a new anarchist paradigm in academia.” Can you describe some current examples of how anarchist ideas are informing new approaches to the imposing challenges leveled by capitalism in recent years? And what is the relationship of anarchist studies to the ongoing revolutionary project to achieve anarchy?

Plenty has been said and written over the last few years about the resurgence of interest in anarchist ideas, and the influence of anarchist modes of organizing within social movements, trade unions, worker co-ops, and popular protests of all kinds, as well as in the broader alter-globalization “movement of movements.” There are still debates to be had there about the nature of the relationship between some contemporary anarchisms and earlier anarchist movements, and this relationship clearly varies from country to country (the situation in the States, say, is different from that in France). But the remarks you quote in your question could probably be read in two ways.

One reading could be that “anarchist studies” is not just about the study of anarchism, but that it is about bringing an anarchist perspective to bear in doing research on any subject. Sharif Gemie, for example, once described himself to me as an anarchist historian rather a historian of anarchism. In international relations, someone informed by an anarchist methodology might reject the state-centric approach of most analyses in that field (see Alex Prichard’s recent PhD on Proudhon and international politics). And I’ve just seen a call for papers for a panel at the Association of American Geographers’ 2009 annual conference that proposes to explore the possible contribution of anarchist theory and practice to a radical geographic theory (Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus were, of course, geographers). Barry Pateman (in his introduction to the forthcoming AK Press edition of my book) also talks about “that critical grey area between independent anarchist scholarship and the academy.”

His concerns have to do with “what we are doing when we research the history of anarchism and anarchists. Some recent scholarship appears to suggest that the lives of anarchists—their hopes, fears, contradictions and, yes, moments of inspiration—are no more than objects for intellectual experimentation.” On the other hand—although I understand the healthy skepticism towards many academics whose research (and teaching, for that matter) is entirely divorced from any political commitment—I do get a bit weary of those “activists” who draw a clear distinction between themselves on the one hand and “academics” on the other, refusing to see any value or use whatsoever in scholarly research. As if the fact that some of us happen to earn our living working as teachers in universities and colleges means that we can’t also be politically active in other ways.

Tell us about the ASN Conference happening September 4-6, 2008.

This isn’t the first conference that ASN members have been involved in organizing or that the ASN has subsidized, but it’s the first ASN conference as such. The point of it was really to bring together as many people as possible who are doing some kind of research on any aspect of anarchist history, politics, or theory: partly just to find out what’s going on out there, because so many people working in these areas are more or less isolated. And we’ve been quite pleased with the response: there are going to be around 100 talks and I think over 140 people are now registered. Whereas we were originally thinking mostly in terms of developing networks within the British Isles, there are going to be participants from Canada and the US, and from right across Europe as well as/including Turkey.

We’ve also managed to attract a good mix of well-established researchers (such as Martin Miller, who published his study of Kropotkin in 1979 and David Goodway, who’s been writing radical history for many years and whose recent Anarchist Seeds beneath the Snow is the culmination of fifteen years of work), post-grads, and people outside the education system (although it can’t be denied that money has been a problem in some cases, despite a system of bursaries).

You are also the reviews editor for the Anarchist Studies journal. Tell us a little about the journal (for those unfamiliar) and what you look for as reviews editor? What books have recently caught your eye that you endeavored to feature?

The ASN is kind of semi-officially linked to AS—not just because that would seem logical anyway, but because AS actually grew out of the Anarchist Research Group (ARG), a precursor of the ASN. There were a couple of successive History Workshop Conferences in the early 1980s (HW, dominated by New Left Marxists, was interested in “history from below”) at which the anarchist strand was the second-best attended strand after feminism/women’s history That success encouraged us to set up the ARG, with more or less regular seminars in London, and subsequently a journal: Anarchist Studies.

The journal is multidisciplinary and, as Ruth Kinna confirmed in a recent editorial, we don’t have an editorial line: we judge everything we’re sent on its merits (properly researched, well written, convincingly argued, etc) and publish or not accordingly. As for the role of reviews editor, I probably ought to be pleased, but I’m currently extremely frustrated because there are so many books appearing that I would like us to review, but we can’t fit them all in!

I’d like to ask you a few questions about your book, A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917-1945. What started you on your path to researching anarchism in France during this period?

Having been totally alienated from Leninism by my experiences as a school student in the Trotskyist Workers’ Revolutionary Party, I first became interested in anarchism when I was an undergraduate studying French and German. When I decided to continue into post-grad study, I also decided to move away from literature and towards politics or history. It was at Sussex that I first became involved with a group of anarchists (which included, coincidentally, the philosopher Alan Carter), and I approached Professor Rod Kedward (who published The Anarchists in 1969) as a possible PhD supervisor. I originally wanted to do something on anarchism and May ‘68, but he persuaded me that the subject had been done to death. (The basic criteria for a successful PhD are that the thesis has to produce new material or to present an original interpretation of material already known, so you have to make certain pragmatic decisions about what you can research.)

An enormous amount has been published on the French anarchist movement up to 1914, because it was extremely influential, whereas the inter-war period was dominated by studies of the nascent communist movement (partly for understandable reasons—the importance of the French Communist Party in the history of the country— but also because labor history tended to be dominated by Marxists of one kind or another). So, studying the anarchist movement after what is generally seen as its heyday seemed the logical thing to do, and it turned out to be an extremely interesting, key period in the movement’s development in the twentieth century.

You mention in the Introduction that “although this is a study primarily at the level of ideology and organization, I have endeavored to avoid producing a history dealing solely with leaders or faceless organizations. I have tried—as far as the sources permit—to emphasize the feelings, the beliefs and the commitments of ordinary ‘grassroots militants’ to show them struggling with new and difficult situations, to rescue the memory of these otherwise unknown militants…” Did you set out with this goal in mind or was it the result of your extensive research?

My first exposure to history and historians was in the History Department at Sussex University, which contained a number of people who were quite prominent in the History Workshop movement. I was naturally attracted to the idea of “history from below” —a concern with ordinary working-class activists and the movements in which they participated, and the rejection of the idea that “history is the story of great men.” But the degree to which I was able to say much about the everyday lives of the relatively unknown activists I learned about was determined to a large extent by the available sources: such people tend, by definition, not to write books or articles, or leave much correspondence behind. Police files were sometimes useful, but very uneven and often of dubious accuracy.

Oral history was of limited use because of the period being studied. Using movement newspapers as a major primary source also tended to encourage a focus on organizations and political-ideological debates, rather than on individuals, since the most important of them were the official organs of particular organizations. Having said that, even when analyzing the debate over, say, how anarchists should react to bolshevism in 1920, it was interesting to see how individual activists writing in these papers developed different ideas and different responses, and how the arguments and positions adopted evolved in response to national and international events—something made possible by the openness of debate in these groups and their willingness to publish all shades of opinion. So, yes, I started out with a very bottom-up approach to history, but what is possible is to some extent dictated to you by the available material.

Could you summarize for readers the rise of anarchist communism during this period and the “increased distance both in terms of ideology and practice between anarchist communism and individualist anarchism”? What were the most apparent distinctions between these two orientations towards anarchism?

Anarchism as a tendency developed in France in the 1840s, but it was only really in the 1880s that it became an identifiable, autonomous movement whose program and tactics differed clearly from those of other socialist currents. By that stage, the vision of the future society to which most French anarchists subscribed had already become an anarchist-communist one: i.e. advocating the socialization of all property except for that which was for genuinely personal use, operating on the basis of need. Tactically speaking, French anarchist-communists accepted the need for organized, collective direct action, notably (though not exclusively) through labor unions. However, before the Great War there was still a significant individualist current within the broader movement, which was characterized by a rejection of the communist economic model and of the collectivist ethos, by an interest in anarchism (or “anarchy” as they often preferred to put it) as a philosophy and a way of life for the individual, and also by an impatience with the less “advanced” majority of the population—an impatience which often tended to lead to feelings of superiority and a disdain for the unliberated “mass” or “herd” (as some individualists put it).

However, most anarchists were turned against individualism: first by the futility and entirely negative consequences of the brief wave of anarchist terrorism in 1892-94; and later by its association with the indiscriminately violent (and equally futile) actions of the Bonnot Gang. When a national federation of French anarchist groups was finally created in 1913, it declared in favor of anarchist-communism and individualists were barred from the founding conference. What I concluded from my research was that anarchist-communists and anarcho-syndicalists on the one hand, and anarchist individualists on the other hand could no longer be said to belong to the same movement after the First World War. The gap between individualists and what we now call social anarchists was increased by the combined effects of the war and the 1917 Russian revolution. The first of these two events demonstrated that the anarchists’ decades long antimilitarist campaigns had failed to prevent the draft and war; the second brought home the fact that in France—universally seen, up until 1917, as the homeland of the revolutionary tradition—had not seen a social revolution (to complete the work of 1789).

This perception of failure triggered in most French anarchists a profound self-questioning. It made some receptive to the siren-song of the nascent international bolshevik movement with its base in the only European country which had succeeded in making a revolution; it made many others argue that what was needed, in the interests of efficacy, was a more ideologically and organizationally cohesive anarchist movement. This latter debate had of course begun many years before, but it was 1914-1917 which really gave it impetus. And, whereas Alexandre Skirda and others tend to emphasize the role of the Makhnovites (in exile in Paris), in fact when they published their Organizational Platform in 1926 they were pushing at an open door as far as many French militants were concerned: the argument for greater organization, the move away from what came to be seen as an absolutist emphasis on the autonomy of the individual was a result of lessons drawn from practical experience.

This “revisionist” tendency was linked to a new determination to see the anarchists once more playing a central role in the broader labor movement, and the historical evidence suggests that, in practice, anarchist-communists in the 1920s and 30s had far more to do on a day-to-day campaigning basis with syndicalists, left-wing socialists, unorthodox Marxists, and Trotskyists than with the comparatively much smaller number of individualist anarchists. The latter showed little interest in “the social question,” being more interested in interpersonal relations and what we would today call lifestyle issues. Relations between the two currents seem at times to have been extremely hostile.

Despite bitter disagreements amongst the various camps of organized anarchists, the inter-war years saw a massive growth of the movement, whether it was in labor union activity, anti-fascist action, or—in many ways a culmination of both—support for the Spanish revolution. Could you give readers an idea what you mean by “anarchist” when describing this growth and roughly how expansive it was?

Thanks to their strong opposition to the war effort in 1914-18, and to the reformist and “class-collaborationist” leadership of the CGT, the anarchists enjoyed a brief resurgence of popularity during the revolutionary situation that arguably existed in several European countries at the end of the Great War. But that didn’t last long for a number of reasons: notably, the creation of the Communist Party in 1920 and the Communists’ growing control over the revolutionary syndicalist movement; but also (according to the anarchist-communists’ self-diagnosis) their own inability to hold on to new supporters because of their disorganization and theoretical paucity.

The real growth in support for the anarchist movement was in 1936-37. This was caused by the anarchists’ consistent antimilitarism (which attracted some increasingly disillusioned former Communists); their radical stance with regard to the Popular Front government (their insistence on direct action and their attempt to push the general strike towards “generalized expropriation”); but, above all, by their association with the CNT-FAI and their high profile campaign in support of the Spanish revolution and the Republican forces. The tendency within the broader movement that benefited most from this was the mainstream, anarchist-communist Anarchist Union (AU), which had, in the interests of solidarity (in public at least), muted its criticisms of the CNT’s ministerialism.

We have to see the growth in support in perspective, of course: the anarchist movement was still very small in comparison with the Socialist Party or even the Communist Party. Nevertheless, the AU had around 2,500-3,000 paid-up members in 1938, and in the same period was printing around 20,000 copies of its weekly newspaper, Le Libertaire. They printed 100,000 copies of a special issue for May Day 1937. At the same time, the anarcho-syndicalist CGTSR had around 5,000-6,000 members, and the “revolutionary individualist” French Anarchist Federation claimed to be printing 6,500 copies of its fortnightly Terre Libre.

What this enables us to conclude about the number of “anarchists” or “supporters” or “sympathizers” there were in France at that time is unclear. Jean Maitron (the first serious historian of French anarchism) suggested that it might be possible to calculate the approximate number of anarchist sympathizers or supporters (depending on how you define those terms) by analogy with the known 1:20 ratio between Socialist Party members and voters: thus adding up UA and CGTSR membership would give us around 8,000 paid-up, active members, and suggest that we might assume about 160,000 sympathizers or supporters. There are several objections that could be raised about this idea, though, and it’s basically impossible to give anything like precise figures.

You place great emphasis on the incredible impact of both the Russian and Spanish Revolutions on the French movement—an impact they had on movements the world over. Can you tell us what particular challenges these brought to anarchists in France and how they attempted to meet them?

The Russian and Spanish revolutions represented moments of doctrinal crisis for the anarchist movement. It was confronted for the first time with actual revolutions in which anarchists played a significant role. On both occasions, the anarchists were provoked into questioning their own theories and their own visions of the Revolution. Significant sections of the movement found anarchism as a revolutionary doctrine and practice severely lacking. Important aspects of anarchist doctrine and practice were questioned and rejected, or so modified that it was difficult to perceive any clear and significant distinction between anarchism and other sectors of the revolutionary socialist movement.

The much-vaunted “specificity” of anarchism became somewhat problematic: what exactly was it that distinguished the socialist varieties of anarchism from non-anarchist socialisms? In the 1920s, this aggravated existing debates about anarchist organization and tactics, and led to the debate about Platformism; in the 1930s, French anarchists were in a dilemma about how or whether to criticize Spanish comrades (over “ministerialism”) who were in a very tricky situation—and, of course, that debate about the tactical/strategic choices made in Spain in 1936-37 is still alive amongst Spanish anarchists and syndicalists. On a practical (rather than doctrinal) level, anarchists in France were faced with the growing influence of Leninism, then Stalinism, in the labor movement, and were ultimately completely marginalized, despite their best efforts.

Your book relies almost exclusively upon French-language sources. Can you recommend English-language studies of anarchism from the same time period that complement your work?

There is very little available in English on the French anarchist movement, at least not in this period. There’s Richard Sonn’s book on the anarchists around the fin de siecle. And there are some excellent studies of French syndicalism (e.g., Jeremy Jennings and Wayne Thorpe). But if someone wanted to read something complementary to my History of the French Anarchist Movement, the best thing to do would probably be to read the historical overview provided in one of the general survey books like Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible.

Size Matters

Ellie Keen — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:08:17 +0000

There have recently been some fantastic investigative features in the print and electric press on the touchy subject of female surgical circumcision, also called cosmetic labiaplasty. One of the best, curiously enough, appeared in this month’s DIVA. This is a topic that needs airing and re-airing, but I’m going to take this space to tentatively suggest that there is also room in the feminist movement for a discussion of that curiously taboo subject: male genital mutilation.

In a culture of commodified testosterone, growing numbers of boys and men, some as young as three or four, some as old as eighty, are turning to genital mutilation as a form of self-harm. This in itself is not a new phenomenon, but as the culture of shame, anger and idolisation around the male sexual organ continues to increase, the phenomenon of boys and men damaging their own genitals, sometimes with extreme violence, is gathering pace. There are myriad individual reasons for this phenomenon, many of which are exacerbated by mental illnesses such as depression and paranoid schizophrenia, but the baseline reasons are fairly simple to grasp: a lot of boys have no frame of reference for what their penis should look like. Men are taught to see the appendage as a source of unimaginable sexual shame and embarrassment, or as a symbol of a sick, overzealous , hypermasculised culture in which they did not ask to be included, or, more frequently, both.

It’s not only the mentally ill who mutilate their genitals in private: you can pay a surgeon to inflict far more radical damage, a snip (literally) at £3-12,000. I’m talking, of course, about the booming industry of surgical penis ‘enlargement’, the nearest male equivalent to labiaplasty. We’ve all had versions of those relentless spam emails, offering in poor English to furnish us with a magnificent schlong for the price of a university education. Well, they keep coming because some people keep clicking – millions of anxious men and boys, in fact, all over the world, every day.

Yes, it’s fucking political. Male sexual neurosis is massively damaging, to feminism, to society, and to men themselves. This is not male apologism, or backsliding, it’s one feminist’s request for more discussion of a damaging socio-sexual taboo, in the context of a blog post in which I get to shout ‘COCK!’ a lot.

There, I’m glad I got that out of my system.

Gruesome butchery as labiaplasty undoubtedly is, the butchery involved boils down to a fairly straightforward amputation. Not so with penis ‘extension‘: I’ll spare you details of just what can go wrong, because Penny Red is a welcoming family blog, but suffice it to say: lots. And often. If you enjoy Bizarre magazine, you may click here now.

Thanks to the stalwart work of feminist writers and bloggers, there are now a lot of good, informative sites out there setting the record straight on what real female genitals look like. Sites that reassure women of all ages that they, too, are far less abnormal than they might have feared. Sisters working tirelessly and for free to undo the visceral harm done by the iconography of pornography and the language of fiction, erotica and women’s magazines in persuading girls that their vulvae should present as neat, hairless, odourless, tight pink slits with the sole purpose of funnelling equally tight, odourless, virginal vaginas, where all sexual sensation occurs. This is an ugly and damaging lie.

So where is the equivalent iconoclasm working to tear down the damaging fictions that young men internalise about their gender and physical sex?

The rhetoric of dickhood is entirely misleading, with emphasis on stiffness, straightness, rigidity, awesomeness, bestiality and hard, raging, pole-like qualities. The myriad of slang terms for the appendage range from the sublime – schlong, manhood, prick, dick – to the ridiculous – one-eyed trouser snake, luncheon meat truncheon! In fact, as most people are secretly aware, even the most impressive penis is no fearsome beast. They are extremely fragile things, normally soft, squishable and defenceless, generally flaccid, delicate , painful when struck, sensitive to touch and temperature. Freud was wrong. It’s not women who ‘envy’ the fiction of the perpetually hard, straining, bestial cartoon-penis – it’s other men,. That envy can largely be blamed on the shocking lie culturally perpetrated to convince young boys that their genitals are supposed to symbolise their masculinity and accordingly be other than the sweet, small, defenceless things they are.

If you’re laughing, stop. Now. I don’t believe it’s possible to call oneself a progressive feminist whilst taking the piss out of the sexual organs of just under one half of the human race. When it comes down to it, everyone’s genitals are ridiculous: messy, demanding, confusing and difficult to manage, with no instruction booklet and contents that generally differ wildly from the serving suggestion on the box. This does not mean that they are abnormal, inadequate or worthy of the childlike awe, tentative mockery, anger and aggrandisement that by turns characterise the treatment of the human prick in contemporary culture.

It is not surprising, then, that so many men and boys turn to surgery to change what they see as defective or abnormal, or to self-harm when they see a part of themselves as shameful and socially loaded in ways they reject. We just do not know how many men go through these experiences, how many operations are botched or how many wounds inflicted in private, because the subject matter is so sensitive that there simply isn’t enough data, and no comprehensive study has yet been done. All that we know is that it’s happening, and that it’s happening more and more.

The cultural markers of femininity are worn like a cloak and meticulously judged – from breasts to width of the waist and hips to degree of ‘curviness’ to hairstyle to set of the face and features. For men, only one specific part of the body is sexualised, and it’s kept under wraps, endlessly mythologised and certainly not featured in any fashion spreads. Feminists might argue that because women’s whole bodies are inevitably sexualised, men have it easier. Those feminists are right: men do have it easier. But that doesn’t mean that men don’t get a raw deal too – where little girls grow up seeing examples of perfect sexual bodies plastered everywhere they look, little boys experience the opposite – the cock is spoken of in hushed tones and never revealed, fictionalised, aggrandised, reduced to a few furtive glances in locker-rooms and arcane priapic symbols scrawled on playground walls and toilet cubicles.

In a perfect world, school PHSE lessons would include mandatory classes on sex and gender, in which children would be shown lots of photographs – not crude and misleading technicolour ink-drawings – of what real genitals look like. During these ideal lessons there would be open discussion of gender roles, physical sex, sexuality, feminism and gender egalitarianism. It won’t happen on these prudish little islands any day soon, not here where so recently we had laws banning the discussion of homosexuality in schools, but it’s nice to dream. Some girls dream of ponies. Today I’m dreaming of full-frontal PHSE photography with explanatory notes. It’s a vision thing.

The movement to reclaim the female body as a self-defined space is still a vitally important one, and it is perhaps just as vital to complement that discussion by extending its rhetoric to the male form. Talking about the realities of the female body in its many forms is a starting point for massive amounts of crucial feminist discussion of physical femaleness, of personal femininity, and of the difference and interaction between the two and the socio-political realities they produce. Talking about the male body in a similar way, and specifically about the cock – unlike for women, the only explicitly sexualised part of a man’s body – might just promote similar much-needed debate about physical maleness, personal masculinity and the difference between the two. Or at very least, it might make a few more people hesitate before doing inadvisable violence to the most sensitive parts of their body and paying for the privilege

SATs fiasco- Labour’s failure

tim — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:50:33 +0000

On August 15, the British Labour government’s regulatory body, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), terminated the contract of the company responsible for marking Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) school test papers (which are mandatory for all school children in England aged 11 and 14 years.)

The QCA had only signed the £156 million, five-year contract with ETS Europe (a branch of the US-based Educational Testing Service Global BV) in February 2007. However, a series of major problems with the administration and marking of the tests this year caused almost a month’s delay in publishing the majority of results for key stage two (11-year-olds) and three (14-year-olds). Key stage three results were not released until August 12, although some were still incomplete.

Not only was the deadline missed, but the accuracy of marking was severely compromised, with many schools reporting that inexplicable results in some cases suggested that the markers either did not understand the questions themselves or that there was not adequate time to check.

When ETS was awarded the contract to administer the SATs, it had boasted of a new method to ensure marking accuracy. Markers would have to sit online tests every time they had assessed 80 exam papers, supposedly to ensure they were marking to the given criteria. In practice, however, the markers were given no feedback other than a pass or fail and could not adjust their marking accordingly.

Not only was the marker training inferior to previous years, but markers did not receive papers in sufficient time, as they were sent from schools to a central depot and then on. This meant the papers had to be marked under tremendous pressure during school term time, further undermining accuracy. Papers/scripts that were near the borderline of grades were not double-checked, as was the case in previous years. On top of this, some markers received no papers at all, while others received papers for the wrong subject. Unlike in previous years, pupil registers had to be checked online and marks for every single question submitted online—an extremely time-consuming if not futile exercise, exacerbated by crashed websites and helplines that went unanswered.

Following the virtual collapse of the test paper marking system, the QCA and ETS Europe agreed to dissolve the contract with immediate effect. Under the agreement, ETS Europe is expected to pay back £24.1 million of the nearly £40 million it received to run this year’s testing process and is to be stripped of the five-year deal. Government agencies will now oversee the delivery of the last 30,000 results and the appeal process. ETS has been banned from contacting schools directly.

ETS Europe had hoped to prove itself in the English school system so as to expand elsewhere in Europe. It won the SATs contract despite a catalogue of past failures to deliver on its commitments. In 2002, software errors by ETS led to serious failures, including giving the wrong marks, in the graduate management admission test (GMAT) in the US. According to the New York Times, in 2004, mismanagement by ETS led to more than 40,000 teachers taking a flawed exam and ETS paying out millions of dollars in compensation.

From the very start of its contract in England, there had been problems with the delivery and collection of test papers from schools, the electronic registration and moderating system crashed, and markers and schools could not log on. The helpline was constantly engaged. Thousands of teachers dropped out of the marking scheme, and many other markers resigned. A backlog grew, forcing ETS to set up 24-hour emergency marking centres. According to the Guardian newspaper, at one point, the National Assessment Agency went in and found 10,000 unopened emails from increasingly desperate schools.

Now, the exams regulator, Ofqual, has asked Lord Sutherland to head an inquiry into the delays. Ofqual head Kathleen Tattersall said that if there is a significant rise in schools appealing over results, then all 1 million SATs results should be annulled. The general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, Mick Brookes, said that such appeals “are set to rocket.” He has urged the schools inspection body Ofsted to disregard SATs results when making a judgement on a school. Results that Ofsted deems poor could contribute to a school being placed in the failing category of “special measures,” in some cases resulting in heads and teachers losing their jobs.

State education given over to the market

While no parent, teacher or child in England will shed a tear on the departure of such a clearly incompetent company from schools across the country, the more fundamental issue exposed by this latest crisis is not the marking but the actual tests themselves. But rather than replace the testing system, as most teachers, educationalists and parents have been arguing—well before the latest marking fiasco—the government intends to replace one company with another in order to continue with the whole flawed testing enterprise.

Teacher unions have already cast doubt on whether a new contract could be awarded in time to deliver next year’s SATs and called on ministers to overhaul the system. Schools secretary Ed Balls said he was “open to reform long-term.” He floated “lower-intensity” testing but flatly ruled out suspending SATs for 2009.

The government has hinted that the data-handling firm Capita may be contracted to run next year’s SATs. Ken Boston, chief executive of the QCA, said it would launch an urgent tendering process and that he expected organisations that previously expressed an interest to bid again. ETS was one of five companies short-listed two years ago. According to the Guardian, two of the three other major exam boards have already ruled themselves out of the contract, on the basis that they did not believe there was a strong enough educational rationale for the SATs tests. Greg Watson, head of the OCR exam board, said it did not bid because the tests were used to measure schools against one another, rather than qualifying a child at a certain level and diagnosing skills. A second exam board, AQA, also said it had not bid because of concerns about the purpose of the tests.

One unnamed senior examiner said that the process was so educationally “vacuous” that it would actually be more suited to a company such as Capita, which is used to dealing with large-scale public sector data projects rather than educational examinations. So indefensible have the SATs now become that a former aide of Tony Blair admitted recently that they risked turning schools into “drab, joyless assessment factories” where preparation for tests crowds out real learning.

The disparity between the overblown election promises the Labour government made on education policy and the subsequent mess that it has made in the school system has been widely acknowledged. But the government and the media are seeking to conceal how and why this has happened.

The cash-starved and moribund education system that emerged after 18 years of Conservative-rule was the one of the most glaring examples of the socially regressive policies of the Thatcher and Major administrations.

In the absence of a mass socialist alternative to address this, the right-wing “new” Labour Party under Blair successfully capitalised on popular support for a radical break with the pro-market policies of the past and for a reduction in the levels of social inequality that rocketed following the speculative boom of the 1980s.

On taking office in 1997, Blair and then-chancellor Gordon Brown kept rigorously to Tory spending limits while introducing cosmetic changes in education—such as more classroom assistants and the introduction of learning mentors. Most significantly, however, the Labour government sought to introduce the most pro-business agenda in education for a generation. Virtually every area of education was opened up to corporate profit making; from the building of school infrastructure, the development of business-friendly “specialist schools,” the increase of “faith schools” and to the setting up of private “academies.”

State schools have become testing grounds for ever-more uninspired ways to narrow the already prescriptive national curriculum and force children through a selective testing system. The effects of teaching to the tests—as in the present SATs—on especially young children is to squeeze out the joy of learning that should be inherent in an imaginative, widely scoped, generously resourced syllabus. This contributes significantly to the growing levels of disaffection amongst pupils that has been confirmed by international reports on the levels of unhappiness amongst children in the UK.

Furthermore, teachers have been demoralised as they are turned into part-time administrators of prescribed curriculum, while being scapegoated and even publicly hounded by the government for its own policy failures. Many well-meaning teachers have found themselves grubbing for each test paper point instead of being free to open young minds to the exploration and discovery of the world around them. Crowning it all, each school faces the constant threat of government inspection whereby they are monitored, praised or punished on the basis of fulfilling increasingly arbitrary targets. Schools are encouraged to compete against one another—via league tables—in a desperate bid for decreasing resources. At the end of this process, parents are thrown into a scramble to get a place at the “best” school for their children.

The end result of the corporate-inspired curriculum and the assessment system—the implementation of which has been the mainstay of the Labour government’s education policy since taking office in 1997—is the straitjacketing of the intellectual and imaginative capacities of children in order to provide for the demands of big-business and industry.

The government’s education policies have long since alienated millions of parents, but such is the damage it has caused, the very corporate interests that it sought to serve have signalled their dismay at the results of the school system. After complaining about the low literacy and numeracy levels of school levers, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) announced recently that it was withdrawing its support for the government’s new diplomas, which were intended to replace the current A-Levels (taken at 18 years of age). Whatever new schemes Labour devises in response to such criticisms, its continued drive to redistribute wealth away from working people to big business and the super-rich, further fuelling social inequality, means it is incapable of arriving at a “better,” or more just education policy.

Smash School Privatisation

Ellie Keen — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Next Step In The Anti-Academy Campaign

Following last week’s actions against the privatisation of UK education in Wembley, North West London, a new call out by campaigners to re-squat the land and put another obstacle in the way of Blair’s profitable education program, centring the campaign against school privatisation right under the nose of the new Wembley Stadium.

For two years the Wembley Park Sports Ground site has been a constant pain in the butt for the local council, for the private investor, charity Ark, whose founder is multimillionaire French/Swiss financier Arpad “Arki” Busson, and for the UK Brown fronted government.

Now campaigners and activists not associated with the previous campaign are calling on people to converge on the sports ground, re-squat the site and put a halt to this, the latest corporate grab of UK education, sending a clear message to the investors and the government – hands off our schools and our children.

Residents and teachers have continually squatted the land, halting development, since 2006. In recent weeks local teachers, business owners and residents instigated direct action to draw attention to Ark gaining control of the public sports ground, in order to build their next privatised Academy school, one of six they plan to open by September 2008.

The previous campaigners have now been hit with huge costs and fines, are banned from the site for two years and face prison time for even remotely being involved in any further campaign against the Wembley Ark Academy.

The sports ground has been used by local schools and residents at £1 per session for decades, the local schools in the area do not have their own playing fields. The land is also home to protected trees and various wildlife, including colonies of bats.

When private investor Ark takes over they claim the use of the sports ground will be “affordable” and also claim their will be more amenities there for the local community.

But, as parents have been finding out while visiting the site, expecting to see a nice big shiny new school – the school is not built yet. In the meantime, from September 2008 60 pupils, 200 pupils by September 2009, will be temporarily housed while the school is built around them, leaving them in the middle of a construction site, breathing construction dust and put at risk from overhanging cranes and other construction machinery. And all the while, at the expense of people’s safety, private investor Ark will start raking in the profits, straight from the UK taxpayer.

Local residents have been continually lied to on all issues surrounding this development. The main argument by Brent Council and Ark for the need of the school was 200 children would have no school place, thus no education, if the Academy was not built. But Brent Council neglected to inform residents, and Ark themselves, that there were two other sites in the borough where the school was more needed and appropriate land was available.

Brent Council also neglected to tell residents there were other investor options in the school. Residents were only informed of the Ark investor.

Now it has come to light that Brent Council have been stealing children from other local schools, canvassing parents to change schools to the new Academy, thus reducing pupil numbers at the two remaining state schools in the area. As pupil numbers fall at the state schools, so does the funding, leaving those two schools under threat of closure, leaving only the privately-run school open for business.

Brent Council also promised to relocate all the small local businesses affected by the Wembley Academy development program. To date they are still waiting, despite their imminent eviction of current premises on 31 July 2008.

The age old question now sits on the mouths of those directly affected in the area, and more so by all across the country questioning UK school Academisation – if they are lying, deceiving and cheating at this stage, can these people be trusted to run UK schools?

Tony Blair set up the Academy school system in 2000, where private investors were asked to come up with £2 million investment to buy their very own state school. The further running and redevelopment costs of the school would be footed by the UK taxpayer, usually a fee of around £30 million per school. The government argument for this was with state education failing on many levels the only answer to save UK education was begin a process of “Academisation”, in other words, privatisation.

Now the £2 million is not being paid by the investors. Academy schools no longer have to follow the school curriculum. They are failing worse than the remaining state schools. Expulsion rates are sky-rocketing and the private interests are increasingly gaining control of what is being taught in their schools, leaving children’s education in the hands of some of the largest most powerful companies in the world, as well as some religious groups, which, looking at closely, can only be considered fundamentalist.

The Wembley Park Anti-Academy Camp will be open from this Sunday, 27 July 2008. The plan is to maintain a presence on the site and halt all preparations for the school, sending a clear message to local authorities, the national government, and the private investors, you are not welcome in our schools.

Join the campaign. Save our schools from the hands of the corporate elite. Smash School Privatisation. No to education for profit.

Details:
Wembley Park Sports Ground, Bridge road, Wembley, NW9
Nearest tube: Wembley Park (metropolitan and jubilee line)
Turn left out station, walk up to main junction of Bridge Road and Forty Lane, turn left, walk up to left-hand gate where car wash sign is and you’re there.

Buses:
From Mill Hill or Kensal Rise – 302 (get off at Blackbird Hill)
From Golders Green – 83 (get off at Wembley Asda or Wembley Park tube)
From Brent Cross – 182 (get off at Wembley Asda or Wembley Park tube)

SATS - New Labour's education failure in microcosm

Ellie Keen — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 23:16:03 +0000

If you are looking for the reason why New Labour has spent more on education yet failed to improve it, look no further that the present entirely predictable crisis over SATS – Standard Assessment Tests. All the three notions that are wrong, and foolish, and muddled about government education policy are there:

First, the notion that if you hand anything at all over to the private sector, it will magically improve. Second, that if you want to make teachers and schools perform better, you set them arbitrary targets, and kick them if the targets aren’t met. And third, that everything in education can be measured in crude tick-box forms, which can be completed by anyone who can read, because no sophisticated judgements are required.

How else could we have got to a situation where schools have to revolve round the demands of simplistic little tests on their pupils; where those tests can be marked by people who have no qualifications or experience in education; and these people can be employed at a pittance by an American company to do work which could be done far better and with much greater understanding by experienced and qualified people whom the British taxpayer already employs?

And that is not the worst of it. Our government not only insists on finding someone – anyone – from the private sector to do work which the public sector could do better and cheaper; it then gives them a contract which means they can foul up as badly as they like, and still not be fired without a golden goodbye of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money.

SATs are the tests taken at ages five, 11 and 14, to chart the progress of both schools and their pupils. They have always been unpopular with teachers, pupils and parents, but popular with politicians, for whom they provide a source of meaningless statistics which can be deployed to prove more or less anything. The administration of these tests has been outsourced to an enormous multinational company called ETS, or Educational Testing Services. ETS have been given a five year contract which is apparently binding no matter how badly they foul up. Nice work if you can get it.

As schools break up for summer, almost one in five primary schools still does not have a full set of marks, and many of the results for 14-year-olds are likely to be delayed, perhaps until September. The results we have are clearly flawed, and teams of ETS employees are searching for thousands of test papers which have apparently been lost. We know of incomplete marking, of pupils wrongly marked as absent, of pupils’ work being left to moulder in the schools, and much more. Any school putting in this sort of performance would be in special measures, and rightly so.

We hear calls for the resignation of the education secretary, Ed Balls, but that will change nothing. What we need is what I fear we’re not going to get – a change of policy.

Down, Wembley Way

JamieSW — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 19:22:46 +0000

Campaigners against a new city academy in Wembley (see SchNEWS 639) are keeping up their protest despite the camp they set-up being evicted on Wed 16th July.

On Tuesday, a court hearing against Wembley Tent City in North London served an injunction against one of the protesters, Hank Roberts, and fined him £3,500. Undaunted Hank and others swiftly returned to the camp and moved their tents on to the roof of one of the buildings facing demolition. He was later joined by other protesters resisting the eviction.

City academies were dreamt up by the government as a way of offloading some of that terribly burdening cost of education, and turning it into a money-making scheme for wealthy types wanting to set up their own schools. As they are privately owned they don’t come under the same strict guidelines faced by state schools, allowing them to come up with their own curriculum. And, of course, there is no evidence that they are any more successful than standard state schools.

The Tent City is part of the campaign against the Wembley Park Academy, an American and British educational charity sponsored and run by The Ark, a group of millionaire merchant bankers and hedge fund speculators. It will still require £30 million of taxpayers money as initial funding. If the building gets the go ahead it will see the demolition of a community centre and a sports field used by local children.

On Wednesday, cops turned up to issue an injunction to the protesters with threats of arrest if they were ignored. Displaying their usual over-zealous tendencies, they even threatened to arrest some journalists who had joined the protesters on the roof.

As well as getting a lot of media coverage for their campaign – with journos from the BBC and ITV turning up to have a nose around, Wembley Tent City has also received a great deal of support. A spokesperson for the camp said there were over a hundred supporters on-site after the court case on Tuesday, and there were still about 50 people there when council bailiffs turned up later in the day. Perhaps in light of the strong support, the bailiffs slunk away without removing so much as a tent peg.

Much of the support has come from the neighbourhood, with many recognising the good the campaign is doing for the local community. Bailiffs are expected to remove the last of the protesters on Friday at the just plain unnecessary time of 6:30am, but protesters are quick to point out that this is just the beginning of the campaign and on Friday the High Court will decide whether their court case against the company will be heard.

Find out more about the campaign and how you can get involved at www.tentcityoccupation.co.uk

The Great City Academy Fraud

Ellie Keen — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:52:55 +0000

book Review

The Great City Academy Fraud, by Francis Beckett

It is impossible to commend this book highly enough. When the whole City Academy saga started Brent was chosen as one of the first 3 proposed in the country. As local NUT Secretary I was intimately involved from the start. We witnessed the deceit, the spin, the secrecy, the bribery and the downright dishonesty and lying. I collected the papers and the evidence and thought of writing a book. In common with most people I never got round to it. I’m glad I didn’t, I couldn’t have done the job a tenth as well.

It’s an elegantly written book packed with killer quotes and facts. I have the rather desecrating habit of turning the ears of pages down if they have a particularly important or germane fact or quote. By the end of the book almost every other page had been dog-eared.

I read the book whilst camping out at the occupation ‘tent city’ we have set up to oppose an Academy on the Wembley Park site. You can imagine that I and my colleagues have been absorbed in studying and finding out as much information as possible about the academy programme, yet still I found out so many things I didn’t know and gained more insights into the depth and perfidy of these would-be state education privatisers.

Amongst many things, the book shows how Primary schools will not escape and will be included in the academies’ increasing trend to be all-through 3-18 schools (the bigger the school, the cheaper the cost per unit – sorry – child); how private schools are being allowed to become academies; how academies are now being built entirely with public money with so-called sponsors only being expected to make annual revenue contributions to the academy trust; how Local Authorities, as being responsible for education, are to be ended; how democratic consultation and procedures have been trampled into the dust and the legal goalposts bent, ignored and moved with the regularity and speed of atomic clocks; and how there is a determined plan by religious groups to turn the clock back.

So, to quote two brief extracts from the book, the first regarding the role of religion in education, and the second regarding the role of charity, or rather the role it shouldn’t have, in education (but if you use them I want you to promise me that you won’t do it without buying the book, because you’ll miss so many other good ones).

He points out that long before the academies became the vehicle for it (1995) a booklet from a Mr Burn and Mr McQuoid, now involved with the Vardy foundation, said, “In Britain the Christian churches were active in the field of schooling long before the state took over….in retrospect it is a matter of regret that the churches so readily relinquished control of education to the state….”. And there you have it says Francis, “the state must be driven out of education and it should be handed back to the churches, our function as tax payers should be confined to providing the money with which people like McQuoid and Burn can make sure we can bring up a generation in their own image”.

He quotes Clement Atlee, who was later to become Labour prime Minister in 1945, writing in 1920. He said, “If the rich want to help the poor then they should pay their taxes gladly. A right established by law, such as that to an old age pension, is less galling than an allowance made by a rich man to a poor one depending on his view of the recipient’s character and terminable at his caprice”. He quotes Robert Louis Stevenson who called taxes “the true charity, impartial, impersonal, cumbering none with obligation, helping all”.

“ Charity” , Atlee wrote, “is always apt to be accompanied by a certain complacency and condescension on the part of the benefactor and by an expectation of gratitude from the recipient which cuts at the root of all true friendliness”

Francis then writes, “For these reasons, in the early part of the 20th century it became the view of the Labour Party – and broadly speaking remained so until 1997 – that the rich should aid the poor through the tax system, rather than by charitable gifts; and that education, health care, social security – all the elements of the 1945 Atlee settlement – should be paid for from taxation”.

“What city academies represent, therefore, is a return to the idea, condemned by Atlee, that the rich should contribute voluntarily, rather than through the tax system. But there is a new twist. The sponsor can get all the things a nineteenth-century philanthropist could get, and which Atlee grudged him: control of how the money is spent, a ‘monument’ to himself, the gratitude of the recipients. But unlike the nineteenth-century philanthropist, he does not have to pay the cost of the thing he is ‘giving’ – or even a substantial contribution towards the cost”.

Francis, you have done a service to all of us, full credit to you. As you point out, “Each funding agreement contains conditions upon which the Academy can be returned to the public sector”. We should repay you by defeating this attempt to end state education. This means all out war to stop new academies being built, and campaigning and fighting by any and all means to bring all existing academies back into a fully integrated state education system. Over to you, readers. A journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. We have started and this is an excellent guide.

The Silent Conflict: Harlow College

tim — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:37:47 +0000

A year ago, teaching staff at Harlow College staged a five-day strike: an unprecedented action for them but one which reflected the desperation of the situation as a politically motivated principalship, led by Colin Hindmarch, played an ideologically driven game with the interests of learners in order to smash the union. The conditions imposed upon teachers included a massive reduction in wages for many with the introduction of a new unqualified ‘tutor’ role, the imposition of an effective 56-hour working week and reduction of holidays from 45 to 30 days a year. This was imposed despite the fact that Hindmarch created more management positions and raised their pay by 11%. However, on top of all this, around 40 experienced teachers were denied opportunities to continue working there because they were deemed to be opposed to the new Teaching and Learning Strategy. A further similar number of teachers opted for voluntary redundancy, unable to accept such a draconian and spiteful regime.

Since the headline-grabbing events of last June, there has been little said and even less printed on the state of affairs at Harlow College. This is not because it has settled down. On the contrary, the situation has become ever more desperate, in particular for the students.

But why the silence? The college principalship was suffering most due to adverse publicity and news reports which exposed its cruel, politically motivated initiatives; it cleverly contrived a situation which would stifle criticism, in particular from the one source which should have been the most vocal: the Universities and Colleges Union. After the redundancies and the failure to abide by the law to meaningfully negotiate the new contracts, huge pressure from the union and Bill Rammell MP was placed on the college to accept ACAS negotiations. The college accepted this with the proviso that UCU would never publicly criticise the college. This UCU foolishly accepted.

In the wake of this agreement, a Working Party was established to find a way forward, due to conclude at Christmas 2007. However, enjoying the continued silence of UCU, the college pushed back this deadline month after month. It is now set to conclude in September. Coupled with a new learner agreement which students were obliged to sign upon enrolment which also prohibited them from making public criticisms, this has meant that the College is now able to bask in relative silence. Only a Guardian article of 18th March 2008 exposed a hint of the appalling conditions at the college, thanks to the bravery of the president of the local NUS refusing to sign the learner agreement. However, UCU, like the principal, was tragically ‘unavailable for comment’. The college continues to hold its remaining teaching staff and students hostage to a never-ending working party which the union foolishly allowed itself to be outmanoeuvred into accepting.

Now we must turn to the details of what has been happening at the college, tucked away from public scrutiny. The staff turnover rate continues to be alarmingly high; one principal tutor in English resigning after little more than a fortnight in position, a sociology teacher sacked after a month and a psychology teacher given two hours to clear his desk after having joined UCU less than 24 hours previously.

The LSC and Ofsted published damning reports on the college last autumn. Ofsted was most scathing, pointing out their shock at an ICT class of 100 students being taught via a personal address system.

At a public meeting effectively forced upon the Principal and Bill Rammell, Colin Hindmarch claimed that the costs of redundancies were not high, at only around £150,000. When pressed to reveal the actual figures, some months later, he acknowledged that the cost was just under £1 million. Now seeking further clarification, corporation board minutes reveal it to be more like £1.3 million.

Some may argue that this could be justified if the college improves its service to students and achieves better results. But this is perhaps the most tragic story of all. In March 2008, the college delayed releasing its winter A-level exam results to students for almost a week. When finally revealed, no details of grades were published but only a paltry 58% of AS-level exams were passed – a huge decline on the previous year. Following this, the chairman of the Corporation Board, Martin Coleman, said in the local paper, “We are happy with the way things are going.” The significance of these results are that these students have only experienced learning under the Hindmarch regime, including his peculiar ‘subject days’ where students learn the same subject once a week but for the whole day.

The college also rigged the elections to the posts of student representatives on the corporation board. Realising that the NUS leader would have won any open contest, they contrived a complicated delegatory system to avoid any public debate and to insulate the corporation board from hearing real concerns and criticisms.

The college is also engaging in the practice of withdrawing students from their exams weeks before they are due to be held. The students are then transferred onto short ICT classes which they cannot fail to pass. This then serves to distort the ‘success rate’ data because the student will receive certification and the failure to complete the course which has occupied them for the rest of the year would not be revealed in any figures. Accounts of students begging to be allowed to sit the exams that they have been studying for months, under wholly inadequate conditions, have been rife. Many parents have had pay for private tuition and are bitter that this may be exploited by the college as they may still take credit for the results achieved.

The local MP and minister for the area, Bill Rammell, has been most reluctantly dragged into the dispute and now finds himself accused of complacency and expediency. He once criticised UCU publicly for their methods last year but refused to give details so they could be given an opportunity to justify themselves. He also disassociated himself from the article published in the Guardian but refuses to elaborate on those elements which he considered were untrue. He also claimed that academic opinion on ‘Subject Days’ for FE colleges were mixed, with some claiming they were a good idea. Can any reader enlighten us as to where subject days are deployed successfully?

Last month, Rammell and Hindmarch attempted to pacify critics by inviting a few select individuals around the college to see the wonderful new facilities. This may have made Rammell look good for the taxpayers’ money being invested but most concluded that the college could not blame poor resources for the college’s failures. Because of this, Hindmarch was subjected to wholesale criticism where he even conceded that ‘subject days’ were failing, citing the fact that May – a crucial month for exam preparations – has two bank holidays, depriving students of essential learning time for any course they study on Mondays. This was pointed out to him when he first tried to impose ‘subject days’ in March 2007, but he simply sacked those who raised such professional concerns.

Scandalously, Bill Rammell still opposes any calls for Colin Hindmarch to resign. He claims that to remove him would be the ‘populist’ thing to do but is not in the interest of the students. Even though Hindmarch has the LSC, Ofsted and the QIA almost constantly in residence, providing stabilisers for this child in blue braces who cannot ride his bike, Rammell insists on protecting him. His majority is only a tiny 97 votes and yet he has spoken up to protect Hindmarch’s position with far greater voracity than he ever did to protect the jobs of around a hundred teachers this time last year. No one believes that Rammell would ever send a child of his to an institution run by Hindmarch and most people are truly shocked at his attitude and downright complacency. The real reason why he will not call for Hindmarch to resign is because Hindmarch will ignore him. This will expose the reality of Rammell’s impotence and failure to properly act upon the incorporated status of colleges which allowed this wholly unaccountable situation to arise.

There is no end in sight for the conflict and it is foolish of Mr Rammell to continually search for the shortest route for a mystical Harlow College paper towel so that he can wipe his hands of the whole affair. The college faces a huge litigation bill when UCU goes to court for protective awards for the college’s failure to meaningfully consult over the redundancies, and there are cases for unfair dismissal and victimisation as well. Harlow College is a tragic saga and its full story will be known one day. This article provides just a glimpse of a curriculum’s worth of lessons that we could all learn from.