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How to defeat the free school agenda

Teachers, unions and school communities working together are a powerful force, writes JONATHAN WHITE

Michael Gove's free schools programme is in big trouble. A succession of tawdry scandals have thrown harsh light on its weaknesses - arrests for fraud and allegations of a DfE cover-up at the King's Science Academy in Bradford, a school closed in Sussex after catastrophic Ofsted inspections, the Al Madinah free school in Derby ending secondary education after Ofsted described it as "chaotic and dysfunctional" and a National Audit Office report that effectively accused the government of railroading through free schools regardless of value for public money.

Yet despite mounting evidence that his policy is unravelling, Gove continues to use free schools as a wrecking ball against comprehensive, secular and democratic education.

Academy chains and religious organisations are taking greater control of our schools and they sponsor a growing proportion of the applications to open a free school.

The profit-hungry private equity funds, which have wrecked both Sweden's free schools and the US higher education system, and who sit at the heart of the coalition government, are waiting in the wings.

Gove's assault on the school system is a "shock therapy" incarnation of the 30-year assault on comprehensive education.

Comprehensive education was a historic advance for working people, part of a period of great democratic and social progress.

Yet it was never properly completed and never part of a truly systemic change that challenged the power of big monopoly companies and finance capital in Britain.

Thus, it too easily fell victim to the great class counter-offensive that has taken place over the last 30 years, an offensive whose ideological expression was neoliberal thought in both its Tory and new Labour forms and which is documented in Melissa Benn's powerful book School Wars.

As a result, if Labour does enough to win power in 2015, it will inherit a fragmented, part-privatised system.

Yet there are signs of hope for those who support comprehensive education.

Labour has begun to move away from its mindless support for privatising education.

In spite of unhelpful Daily Mail-oriented soundbites about putting rocket boosters under "parent-led academies" - whatever that means - there is clearly some recognition that it's time to call time on the era of deregulation. Labour's recent policy announcements signal a slow shift away from Andrew Adonis's vision of academies as the saviours of the school system, toward reviving the idea of a "middle tier." They also appear to be slamming the brakes on the slide toward schools packed with unqualified teachers.

Whether or not Labour continues this policy drift will depend on whether progressives and the left can give effective leadership to more "subterranean" developments - the growing revolt among teachers and the emergence of parent-led community campaigns around our schools.

Teaching staff have clearly had enough of the tireless attacks on their profession.

The campaigning alliance between the NUT and the NASUWT and the renewed attempts to push for unity among teaching unions are clear symptoms that teachers are sick of being the focus of punitive policy and aggressive rhetoric, itself a consequence of the relentless focus on the school system in neoliberal education policy, driven by Tories and new Labour alike.

Teachers also have a powerful potential ally in their school communities. The NUT in particular appears to realise this. The mobilisation for strike action on March 26 includes a call for campaigning in the community around demands that link the attacks on teachers to the wider issues of privatisation and the quality of education services.

The key to successfully mobilising community support though will be active work with parents in building sustainable community alliances.

And there's evidence that this is beginning to happen. In the battles to defend community schools from forced academy conversion, for example, scores of local campaigning alliances have emerged that bring together teachers and parents.

Similarly, in the battles to prevent the imposition of free schools, dozens of campaigns have arisen in defence of existing community schools.

In London alone, impressive campaigns have been fought in defence of the Sulivan primary school in Hammersmith & Fulham and Snaresbrook in north-east London.

In Waltham Forest, the campaign I am part of - Our Community, Our Schools - has evolved in some ways which I think have wider relevance to the fight for comprehensive, democratic education.

The first and most fundamental task we set ourselves has been to engage and sustain the interest and commitment of local parents by engaging directly with their fears.

This means being able to reach out beyond the comfort zone of the left and engaging actively with the concerns shown by parents from a range of different communities and backgrounds.

The marketisation of the school system and the propaganda generated by the government about community schools have successfully stoked up fears that have to be recognised.

That's why we've worked hard to engage directly with local parents, keeping them at the centre of our campaign.

The second job we've set ourselves is to provide political education.

In part this is about linking the free schools policy to the government's agenda, the wider marketisation of education and the general attack on public services.

However, drawing the links is not enough in itself. Political education is also about people feeling their power and experiencing success.

That means making sure that we are being practical in our objectives and making sure we understand how this particular strand of policy can be influenced.

For example, it's very difficult to stop a free school being set up. The legislation has been drawn up precisely to make sure that there are almost no levers open to community opposition or local authorities.

So our objectives have been to delay and obstruct these proposals where possible, to put democratic pressure on free school sponsors to be open and transparent and in the meantime to erode the support bases for these schools by exposing their problems and promoting our excellent community schools.

This means trying to ensure that we're using every tactic open to us.

Seeing strike action by teachers as the ultimate weapon in our armoury has always been a flawed strategy but never more so than in campaigns against free schools.

So we've tried to learn from the imaginative tactics being employed by campaigns around the country to give expression to democratic opinion.

Petitions, mass meetings, leafleting, campaigning around planning and press work all have a place.

We've also tried to build the widest possible alliance of forces, unifying local parents, teachers, head teachers, unions, local councillors and MPs.

It's not always easy. Understandably, for example, head teachers and local teaching unions don't always see eye to eye.

However, we've had great support from John Cryer, the MP for Leyton and Wanstead who recently described the free schools programme as "barking mad."

Finally, we've tried look forwards, beyond fighting defensive battles to build support for the kind of school system we want. This is not simple. The chaos into which our school system is descending, coupled with the sustained propaganda offensive against comprehensive schooling, has left its mark.

Yet we believe that a common sense is still current in our communities on which it is possible to develop a positive campaigning agenda that can itself act as the foundation for building commitment to egalitarian ideas about education.

Evidence from polls conducted by the NUT and NASUWT suggests that most people are opposed to the idea that their schools should be run by religious organisations, would prefer them to be run by the local authority and overwhelmingly reject schools being run for profit.

 

We believe that underpinning this common sense is a democratic feeling about schools in our community which we need to connect to.

As well as believing that everyone should have access to a good school in their communities, most people want their schools to be open and accountable to them and they want to know that their children will be treated fairly and equally.

In our experience, there is popular anger about decisions being taken behind closed doors to set up or take over schools in our community by a shady alliance of DfE civil servants and advisers, unaccountable private companies and religious organisations.

What this suggests is that if we want to build popular opposition to neoliberal reform and a positive movement for comprehensive education, democracy, fairness and quality are our strongest cards.

This is something we're trying to build into our campaigning. Our hope is that the experience of campaigning for these ideas will build commitment to a platform in which education is seen as a vital part of our democratic culture - a democratic right to which each should have equal access, a democratic tool which creates active, thinking and skilled citizens, and something that must be articulated through a democratised system, embedded in and accountable to our local communities.

To end on a truly optimistic note, Our Community, Our Schools received a massive boost recently with the news that the DfE and Oasis Community Learning, the Christian academy chain which wanted to set up a free school in Waltham Forest, have decided to pull the plug on the scheme.

It's unclear at this stage but it appears that they were failing to get the applications they needed. This is a small but significant blow in the fight against free schools and it's given great heart to our fledgling campaign.

Arguably, the future of comprehensive, progressive education depends on a flowering of such local movements across our communities.

For those active in education campaigns, the job of weaving local campaigns into a mass movement and creating genuine mass pressure for a democratised education system is arguably the task of our time.

 

Our Community, Our Schools has a campaign website at ourcommunityourschools.blogspot.co.uk and you can follow them on twitter at @OurSchoolsE17

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