Education not for sale!

« Harpymarx

A bill to create a new class of parent-led “free schools” will be announced in today’s Queen’s speech, and after that it should be all systems go for the Birkenshaw, Birstall and Gomersal Parents’ Alliance. The group hopes its 900-pupil school will be among the first approved under the new law, which will allow parents, charities, religious groups and social entrepreneurs to set up independent schools within the state sector.

Furthermore

Rachel Wolf, a former adviser to Michael Gove and founder of the New Schools Network, a group dedicated to increasing the numbers of state schools that are independent of local authorities, says the law already allows schools to own their own assets, employ their own staff and set their own admissions arrangements. What’s needed, she says, is a law to prevent local authorities from selling off their unwanted school sites to developers – so they’ll be forced to sell or lease them to groups like the Birkenshaw parents instead.

Former adviser to Michael Gove, Rachel Wolf and director of New Schools Network (funnily enough the organisation comes across as ‘independent’ it’s only when you look at the website do you see the connections between the organisation and the Tories). Obviously, this organisation is actively encouraging these parents in Kirklees to set up an independent school. One of the parents in this group was asked by the reporter whether they were in negotiations with Serco. She said they were but at the same time dodged the question. Serco who seems to have many fingers in the corporate pie, from running an oppressive racist immigration prison like Yarl’s Wood to Secure Training Centres aka prisons for kids such as Hassockfield, prisons, Flexible New Deal contract for three regions: North, Mid & South-East Wales (North Wales); Coventry, Warwickshire, Staffordshire & The Marches (West Midlands); and Greater Manchester.

And that’s the scary thing about these proposals from the Con/Dems is the fact that democratic control will be taken out of the public sector and given to charities, religious groups, big business and private sector. Transparency and accountability will be fundamentally eroded. Education will about class privilege where schools will be competing for scarce resources, and the ideology will be about conflating the interests of corporate capitalism and the individuals who will be receiving the education. Hopefully people will kick against this……