IN THEIR press release welcoming the abandonment of the schools Bill, the NEU said: “The fact that the schools Bill will not progress is a relief as it did nothing to resolve the problems of a fragmented system.” 

It’s true in so far as the Bill wasn’t bringing all schools back into a system of local democratic control. 

However, the white paper was attempting to bring all schools into a unified system where every school had to belong to a large private trust with central government oversight and regulation.  

It was this last pledge that was not popular with multi-academy trust (MAT) CEOs who didn’t want that level of interference from the Secretary of State, and which was the main reason for its withdrawal.

So the end of the schools Bill is not really a victory. We are left with the same fragmented system we had before. 

Standalone academy head teachers and MAT CEOs will remain free to do whatever they want with the schools they control as there will be no “academy quality standards.”

It’s also clear that the government wants to push all schools, whether maintained or academy into MATs. They don’t need new legislation to do this. 

Ofsted will be used in the way it has for several decades. Change is needed, schools need to work collectively together but this needs to happen in a local democratic framework where local communities, staff and pupils have a voice.

In 2020 the Socialist Educational Association (SEA) launched the Give Us Back Our Schools (Gubos) campaign because progressive reform cannot be achieved in education without reversing the structural changes made since 1988 and implementing a programme of democratisation across schools, colleges, universities, central service providers and local authorities.  

Gubos is working to push the political parties and the education trade unions to prioritise this campaign. The drive to totally outsource the school system has to be resisted.

A brief history of the attack on schools

Gubos is not just a response to academisation. It represents opposition to a raft of attacks on the education system that go back much further. 

In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher forced compulsory competitive tendering on councils and over the last 40 years governments of all persuasions bought into the idea that “private” was good, “public” bad.

Outsourcing has allowed employers to cut workers’ terms and conditions in the search for ready profits. This was the true aim of introducing competition into public service delivery, hidden, dressed up in waffle about efficiency and value for money. 

In the education system the key buzzword was “freedom” for schools to spend money as they saw fit. 

This, it was argued, would allow individual schools to better meet the needs of their pupils and target money more efficiently.  

School structures have been deliberately built around the claim that schools would be forced to improve by introducing competition. 

Schools would be made accountable to “stakeholders” with the introduction of league tables, Ofsted and “parental choice.” 

Before the 1990s the local education authority (LEA) was the employer of staff in schools and central service staff — cleaners, cooks, advisory teachers, caretakers, educational psychologists, supply teachers, payroll and personnel services, IT support and so on. 

These arrangements encouraged fair recruitment practices and ensured that staff were suitably qualified. LEAs provided teachers’ centres where staff could go for advice, meetings and training.  

These created opportunities for teachers from different schools to meet and share good practice. Schools were not in competition with one another.

But in 1988 the Education Reform Act transferred many of the powers (including some financial powers) and responsibilities from LEAs to heads and nominally governing bodies.  

It also gave the option for head teachers to go further and turn the schools they manage into grant maintained (GM) schools. 

GM schools got their funding directly from central government, bypassing the local authority completely. The funds given to GM schools were then deducted from local authority budgets. 

Once head teachers were given control of schools’ budgets and the “opportunity” to opt out of using local authority-provided services, the floodgates to outsourcing were opened.  

The business model operated by these private companies offering cheaper services relied on cutting conditions and wages to boost profitability.

The birth of academies 

This change to the way money was provided for central services had a devastating effect on local authorities. Once a certain tipping point was reached, it was no longer viable to provide many school services as the authorities could no longer be sure of finances year to year. 

Inevitably, over time central services diminished, central service staff were made redundant, years of capacity, experience and expertise lost. 

This in turn made it much easier to convince schools to opt out entirely and become semi-privatised academies and join unaccountable MATs, run by CEOs paying themselves six-figure sums.

The academy system though is merely the tip of the iceberg. All schools compete for pupils and funding with other local schools, and because the system is now so fragmented and incoherent, most schools — even local authority schools — are not really accountable to their communities. 

Parents, guardians, pupils and staff who for whatever reason encounter issues in the school system often find they have no voice.  

The fightback

Although it is important to win on pay, the public-sector unions must stop just reacting to the latest attack and start planning how to end profiteering and bring public services back in house, making them accountable to the taxpayer and responsive to need. 

These latest strikes have to demand fully funded pay increases in line with inflation but in addition unions need to demand that public services are brought in house and are made democratically accountable. 

The elite blame the conflict in Ukraine, Brexit, Covid etc for the problems we are experiencing today but the effects of deregulation, outsourcing, underfunding and privatisation of our public services was being felt long before 2016. 

These are the tools which have been used to drive down the pay and conditions of workers and trash our public services.

The people cannot control what they don’t own. Give us back our schools. Give us back our services.