Socialist Outlook : SO/03 - Spring 2004

Politics

Schooling in Europe: towards a single currency

Richard Hatcher

Richard Hatcher discusses the impact of neo-liberal policies on education in Europe, including in Britain, France and Italy, and proposes some ways of developing the opposition to them.

The education dimension of the post-war boom was the period of ‘massification’ in the 1960s and 70s – the expansion of provision and, in many European countries such as Britain, France, and Italy, the introduction of the comprehensive school. This ‘historic compromise’ of class interests in education ended in the 1980s and has now been replaced by a neo-liberal agenda which is forcing the convergence of European education systems, in spite of national specificities. The Lisbon summit of 2001 made explicit that education policy was primarily a vital part of economic policy. Lisbon has led to a series of EU policy papers and working groups on education, promoting a process of convergence based on a framework of common objectives, common performance indicators, pilot projects and examples of ‘best practice’. Parallel to this the Bologna process aims to harmonise higher education to promote employability, and the Bruges process has a similar aim for vocational education.

Neo-liberal globalisation provides three related business-driven agendas for school systems.

 To produce human capital for competitiveness in the global economy.

 To adopt a business model of management.

 To open up state education to private providers.

The production of the future workforce

The consequence has been the creation of a more differentiated school system, for two reasons. First, business needs a differentiated labour force. Second, educating everyone to the same level is an unnecessary drain on state spending. In countries with a comprehensive school system governments have relentlessly attacked the notion that ‘one size fits all’ and promoted diversity and choice in the name of extending consumer democracy and responding to children’s supposed different ‘aptitudes’. The result is a more class-divided system with segregated academic and vocational pathways leading to different job destinations. In Britain New Labour has abandoned any pretence of access to a common cultural formation for all. From age 14 lower-achieving pupils will be allowed to follow a diluted, skill-based work-related curriculum. Foreign languages and the humanities (including history and the arts) will be optional, and it is mainly schools in working-class areas which will abandon these subjects.

The ‘New Public Management’ of schooling

The application of the business model of management of public services to the school system has provided government with a three-pronged strategy.

Decentralisation of operational power to schools

The government’s argument is that decentralisation is both more efficient and more democratic. It enables schools to change more rapidly, to respond to the specific needs of local communities, and to be more locally accountable. (It can also have the advantage of deflecting criticism of education policy - for example, of the level of funding - away from central government.) Decentralisation has two elements:

 The construction of an education quasi-market based on parental choice and competition between schools.

 The reconstruction of head teachers as ‘chief executives’, with in practice three key powers: control over the school budget; the employment and management of staff; and the development of a school plan to meet government objectives.

New forms of centralised strategic control by government

Decentralisation and market competition by itself does not guarantee government objectives. In fact it poses a problem for government: how to drive change and control the decentralised powers of headteachers. It requires new mechanisms of state regulation of the work of teachers: a combination of a prescribed curriculum, pupil attainment targets, regular testing of pupils, and a system of rewards and sanctions. The main instruments here are punitive school inspections and pay linked to performance, including pupil performance. The key relay between government policy and school performance is the new managerialist role of the headteacher.

The role of private providers

Globally this is taking two principal forms. One is the state subsidising of private schools. In France, for example, around 20% of pupils spend some of their schooling in such schools, mainly run by the Catholic church. The most dramatic example is Spain, where in Madrid now over 50% of pupils go to state-subsidised private Catholic schools. A dual class-divided system is being created as a matter of policy. A recent borrowing from the US is voucher systems, state funding to parents to buy private schooling, now in place in three regions of Italy and in Sweden and Denmark.

The second form that privatisation takes is private companies coming into the state system to provide elements of education provision. England is the most advanced case in Europe. New Labour believes that business participation is essential in order to break up the conservative and bureaucratic culture of the school system and bring efficiency, flexibility and innovation. Labour also wants to foster the British education industry as a major player in the global neo-liberal services economy which is booming whether or not there is agreement on GATS. [1]

Dozens of LEAs now have private companies involved in providing and managing their services. What about private companies running state schools for profit, as happens in the US? In Britain there are two problems: it is politically a risky step, and it may not be profitable enough to attract private companies. However, the government has gone half-way there with two policies. One is the Private Finance Initiative. At present PFI companies run school premises and employ non-teaching staff. What some education-for-profit companies are demanding is to employ the teachers as well. The second policy is ‘Academies’, state secondary schools run by business sponsors though not at present for profit. The government’s aim is one in every town, and at least 30 in London. The logic of Labour’s policies is that sooner or later private companies will be permitted to run academies for profit, similar to those Charter schools in the US which are run by Education Management Organisations.

But most education companies do not want to run LEAs or schools. They aim to be the cement rather than the bricks, the software of the system not the hardware (though in the literal case of information technology in schools they are making a fortune out of both). Almost every government education policy initiative has involved private companies, not only helping to implement policies by, for example, running courses for teachers to get them on-message, but also by helping to formulate the policies themselves. This is not confined to Britain. In Germany, for example, the shock of getting one of the lowest average scores in a comparative survey by the OECD of national education systems has given the neo-liberal reform of the school system a boost. Private companies such as the media giant Bertelsmann and Hay McBer, Labour’s consultants on the performance management of teachers, are playing a key role.

A process of radical cultural change

It is important to recognise that the neo-liberal project requires a profound cultural as well as structural change in education, changing not just what we do, as teachers, parents, pupils and students, but who we are. New identities have to be fashioned:

 The headteacher as chief executive, utilising business management strategies to secure not only the compliance of teachers but also their commitment to government agendas.

 The teacher as competent technician, delivering curricula devised elsewhere, and the ‘facilitator’ of individualised ICT-based learning.

 The parent as skilled consumer in the education marketplace.

 The pupil and student as flexible entrepreneurial individuals responsible for their own learning and future employability.

A process of convergence in Europe

Italy is an example of the parallels elsewhere in Europe to what has happened in England. The common lower secondary school (the scuola media unificata) was set up in 1963. In the 1980s it began to be undermined by the introduction of parental choice, school competition, school-based management, and commercial sponsorship leading to a more class-divided system. The new Moratti reforms go further. Berlusconi’s ‘three Is’ curriculum of informatica, inglese, impresa (information technology, English and business) means a reduction of curriculum time and the abolition of projects to tackle under-achievement and for the integration of young immigrants and pupils with disabilities. At age 13, students will be sorted into academic and vocational tracks, going either to colleges like English ‘specialist schools’, leading to university, or into vocational education and training. Companies will be able to be involved in education in various ways: from simple work placements to half-time work and study programmes (from fifteen years of age). The reforms allow for variation among Italy’s regions, which will reinforce inequality. The next phase announced by Letizia Moratti, the minister of education, is the revision of the status of teachers. They will be subjected to political control concerning the content of teaching and the management of classes, increasing the power of headteachers.

Opposition and resistance

The transformation of school to fit the neo-liberal agenda is difficult, and the policies create their own opposition:

 The increased workload and micro-management of teachers provokes their opposition, which takes the form both of collective action and individual exit from the profession, such that there is now a shortage in some areas and subjects.

 The regime of frequent national tests is disliked by teachers, pupils and parents. A vote by the NUT to boycott this summer’s tests was narrowly lost. Yet the government fears relaxing control in case teachers go ‘off-message’.

 Labour policies reinforce inequality, which compounds the scepticism of parents whose children lose out – principally Labour’s own working-class base - and of the teachers who teach them. Yet the government will not challenge inequality because it would mean attacking the privileged position in education of the middle class voters they depend upon.

What is our alternative to the solutions the neo-liberal agenda offers? Mass resistance now to the neo-liberal offensive is the first line of defence, exemplified by the mass discontinuous strikes against decentralisation in France a year ago. However, we cannot simply defend what exists, for two main reasons. The first is that the existing system continually reproduces working class failure at school. The second is the powerlessness that many working class parents feel in the face of a bureaucratic and unresponsive school system.

The first challenges us to rethink what we teach, how we teach it, and how we organise the lives of pupils and students in schools, in order to create meaningful relationships between ‘school knowledge’ and the experiences and purposes which they bring to the classroom.

The second raises the question of two traditions within the democratic education movement in Europe. The first tradition sees uniformity of national provision, imposed by the state, as the best guarantee of equality in education, and localism as a threat to it. The second sees national uniformity as itself often promoting inequality, and a potential for democratic reform through popular demands for locally responsive provision. These are positions the left needs to rethink. How can we best promote popular participation in democratic education reform? How can we best tackle the perpetuation of patterns of inequality in education? And under what conditions can forms of local diversity of provision provide part of the answer to both, coupled with national struggles, in specific national contexts?

Education at the European Social Forum

These are some of the issues which will be debated at the European Social Forum in London in October. Education was an important strand in the Forums in Florence and Paris. Out of the discussions a network is developing, bringing together, among others, militants in the NUT and NATFHE, the FSU in France, the STEs unions in Spain, and Cobas Scuola in Italy. The London ESF provides the opportunity to extend these teachers’ union links, reach out to organisations of parents and students, deepen our analyses and discuss strategies and campaigns.

Further information about education at the ESF and articles on education in Europe can be found on the Socialist Teachers Alliance website www.socialist-teacher.org

NOTES

[1] GATS, General Agreement on Trades and Services.

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