Thatcher’s hidden agenda in 1988 was to destroy comprehensive education, bring teachers to heel, promote private education, destroy local authorities and substitute training for education in state schools. Ten years later, the establishment of action zones, or education ghetto areas, will bring these poisonous policies to their logical conclusion. Children who live in them will receive a more restricted and oppressive education than elsewhere, or will have to join the middle class commuters who travel miles to school each day “Harman-style.”
For those who are too apathetic to escape the net, the national curriculum will be scrapped and the basics will become the holy grail. As in pre-war elementary and senior schools, they will be doomed to concentrate on those things they find most difficult, and will rebel in droves. These schools will lose local authority protection and their teachers will not be covered by nationally negotiated conditions of work. They can expect to be exploited. They will be run by partnerships, could be privatised, and will be “free” to do just what local businessmen require.
Blunkett will sell our children to them in return for extra money. It won’t stop there; these schools will prove prototypes, for the privatisation bug is addictive. Already Blunkett is threatening to turn the educational straitjacket in primary schools into a throttle, by restricting the curriculum in all of them. It can end only with multinationals exerting the same influence on our education as the Catholic Church did in the middle ages. As in poorer countries, those who supply the cash will expect to control social policies.
David Blunkett has the nerve to say that “Zones will offer hope to those in less favoured parts of the country...for greater educational opportunity,” when they will clearly be offered less. This may not be as nauseatingly hypocritical as it seems. Blunkett’s personal experiences have given him an unrivalled contempt for teachers and local councillors. The pattern of his own schooling gave him no understanding of educational breadth and left him overvaluing exam-oriented knowledge.
This explains why he doesn’t know the medicine he dispenses is poison. But the charge of hypocrisy sticks on other policies: these schools will have neither a comprehensive timetable nor intake. They will come bottom of his odious tables; they will be special, not mainstream, schools; their policies will be controlled by non-educational interests and they will slip out of democratic control.
The sad thing is that secondary schools which innovated, and flouted the national curriculum in the interest of their pupils, by teaching to their strengths, have at his behest, been branded as failing schools. They contain some of the best teachers but their merits have been spurned and their approach vilified. Now they can come in out of the cold only if they turn their classes into large-scale remedial groups, a failed policy that confines pupils’ vision of the world to their own restricted experiences.
The tragedy is that much more could be achieved with more cash and imagination. Blunkett does not need to go cap in hand to business, nor does he need to hand over control to those who have a different agenda from our national education policy. This cup of cold poison should be poured down the sink.