Tories step up state co

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Not many new schools are going to be built under this government wanted to.

The 1960s brought openplan schools, a school without individual closed-off class rooms but with activity areas and quiet corners.

Team teaching where teachers worked together using their own individual skills; was introduced, as was the integrated day, where activiles were to be all day long, giving play as much importance as mathematics. By the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s primary education, especially infant education, had developed into a very wide education.

Classes were usually smaller than 30 children, materials were plentiful and teace bs tee he picture is picture thumbs down on learning through play rapidly increasing as heads try to fill up their school in constant fear of being the next school to be closed or amalgamated.

Child-centred education is becoming impossible under these conditions. In Marge classes children have to sit in one place and not move around activities. Blackboard work and rote-learning are the only ways a harassed teacher can control so many children. Even school dinners, the only hot meal many children get, are becoming a thing of the past.

Slowly the Tories are destroying good schools. Obviously they find them dangerous places as they do teach children to question and think for themselves.

LAST Tuesday, suddenly,

government brought out a White Paper called 'Training for Jobs'.

In this they propose to cut 25% off the money which they pay to local authorities to provide non-advanced further education •le.g. technical colleges), and give it to the Manpower Services Commission.

In its editorial on Friday, the Times Educational Supplement commented that the resentment provoked by such a move 'is more likely to bring this government down than anything which look likelre opposition parties look tikely to do. really going on here?

Basically, this annexation of further education by the government is no surprise; it is a continuation of something it was already doing, with the TUC's approval.

To understand the developments in further education we have to go back twenty years. Up to 1964 industrial training was simply a matter for negotiation between unions and employers in each industry, while technical education was something people had to get mainly by going to evening classes in technical colleges provided by local authorities.

In that year, an Act was passed setting , up industrial training boards for most industries. These had the power to levy money from employers, and to pay it back in grants only to those firms which provided training to an agreed standard.

This in turn led to a big increase in day-release to colleges for apprentices. Provision for these new students then became further education's bread and butter.

However, many employers delayed cooperating with this arrangement, in part because it threatened their freedom to use apprentices as cheap labour. And in 1973, as the post-war boom was clearly coming to an end, the Heath government passed an Act drawing what few Colin Waugh, a member of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, looks at the history behind the Government's announcement that it will cut 25% from local authorities' further education budgets and give it to the Manpower Services Commission.

teeth the training boards possessed.

The same Act also brought a new state body - the Manpower services Commission -into existence.

As youth unemployment grew through the 1970s, this oncetiny quango was expanded massively. Accountable only to the Secretary of State for Employment, it was fully supported by the TUC, who sat on it with the CBI.

It was given the role of containing the social effects of youth unemployment under the guise of providing industrial training. This it did mainly through the Youth Opportunities Programme (two-thirds of which was the notorious WEEP -Work Experience on Employers' Premises).

The industrial training boards were ceasing to have any real function, and one of the Thatcher government's first acts was to wind most of them up. In 1981, when youth unemployment finally exploded in uprisings across the country, Tebbit rapidly announced the Youth Training Scheme.

This was designed to turn the majority of 16 yeai olds into an army of cheap labour on an allowance fixed by the state.

The TUC successfully opposed compulsion and demanded an increased allowance, but otherwise it supported the scheme, on the grounds that it represented a real expansion of training.

In fact, the Youth Task Group

uD

Report, in which the details of implementation were spelt out, is believed to have been actually written by the TUC Education Secretary, Roy Jackson.

However, as YTS was introduced - from April 1983 - it soon became clear that young people themselves thought differently, and huge numbers of them . have simply stayed away from the scheme.

One effect of this has been financial crises and threatened redundancies in FE colleges, which had been urged, both by the MSC and the lecturers' union NATHE, to budget for an inrush of new students under YTS.

At the same time as it took a tighter grip on the purse strings of further education, the MSC has all along been saying that colleges are too expensive and inflexible to deliver YTS, and implicitly pressing for changes in both lecturers' conditions of service and the curriculum.

Recently it has been announced that in its second year YTS will be still more heavily concentrated in firms rather than colleges, and nothing is being done by the MSC to check the flood of private profitmaking 'trainers' cashing in. Under this pressure and the threat of ratecapping, local authorities have started to build up a cut price further education system on the fringes of mainstream provision, using staff employed on temporary contracts and inferior conditions in 'training workshops' On top of this, both the MSC and the government directly have tried to intervene in the curriculum, with directives banning political and social education from YTS courses.

YTS, then, is quite close to crisis, and last week's White Paper can be seen as part of the Tories' efforts to get a grip on it, by seizing direct control of a big chunk of local authority provision.

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0 08 5-00= PROMISES NORTHLESS Community occupation to save this Birmingham school Simultaneously, they are also rying to reintroduce compulbion by pressuring careers vorkers to report YTS refusers • the DHSS, so that their lenefit can be docked. • In addition, the government s also using the MSC to attack he school system (through ind Vocational Education omething called the Technical nitiative) and Adult Education through its Adult Training Strategy). The obvious implicaion is that fighting back must nvolve fighting for TUC withIrawal from the MSC.

What is less obvious - but no ess vital - is that we must, at he same time, start putting ogether an explicitly socialist perspective on the content and lims of education and training, nd that means going back to he archives where the educaional ideas of the Chartists, he Plebs League and John MacLean are at present gatherng dust. THE government isn't just cutting and changing schools and tech colleges. The Polys and Universities are being moulded to the new conservatism too.

Since the mid-'60s higher education is supposed to have been available to any and every qualified applicant. Of course there were wide discrepancies from college to college about what 'qualified' actually means, but when it came down to the vast majority of would-be entrants, the school leavers, a couple of A levels would get you into a college.

As the cuts have turned on to the Polys and Universities, this old principle which directed higher education for about 15 years has gone by the board. The White Paper, A Framework for Expansion, published in 1972 when Thatcher was at the DES proposed expanding college places up to 1.2 million. Now the number of full-time students is KE only 600,000 and resources are being cut.

Polytechnics are partially funded by local authorities and with rate-capping a substantial number are expected to reduce their contribution to nothing, which is what the government wants. Oxford Poly, for example, will lose 6.5% of the budget when the Council pulls out.

But while both Universities and Polytechnics are having their budgets cut between 5 and 10% over the next ten years, student numbers are to be slightly increased until 1990 when an 8% drop is timetabled.

More students, with less money available, means fewer resources and larger class sizes.

As well as the financial attacks on higher education, which will result in some college closures, certain course closures, redundancies, a large number of mergers and probably privatisation of ancillary services, the government is waging an ideological battle.

NO MORE CUTS IN Redirecting education to meet the needs of industry doesn't just mean propping up and encouraging science and technology courses (in fact the last round of university cuts did attack scientific universities. UMIST were told to cut by 24% and Salford by 40%).

It involves cutting back on social science and humanities courses.

While Universities and Polytechnics are juggling with their under-graduate teaching, postgraduate research is to be increasingly funded by industry, and private funds mean private control of the type of research carried out.

The University Grants Committee accepts this and has warned against expecting student choice to continue to be the arbiter of research direction.

From now on industry and charities will decide, in the main, what research goes on, and more alarmingly what doesn't.

EAT By Tony Brockman LAST YEAR the government put forward a pilot scheme known as the "Technical and Vocational Education Initiative' (TVEI) under which local education authorities (LEAs) could apply for money run to courses for 14 to year olds.

Given that most government edicts now involve taking away money from education, you might be forgiven for being suspicious about their motives.

Essentially, the government is only paying out under IVEI in order to get control over what is taught in schools. The funds are not administered by the Department of Education and Science, but by the Manpower services Commission, so there is not even a token input from the educational establishment.

In order to get the money, the local education authority has to satisfy the MSC that its schemes will fall into line with the MSC's "criteria"

Last year's 'pilot scheme' was not even finished before the MSC announced a massive expansion to involve half the authorities in the country. Labour councils joined Tories in the scramble. Council officers worked weekends to write the applications. Consultation with teacher unions was minimal or absent.

The scheme as it stands presents a major threat to comprehensive education. To qualify, a local education authority must in effect select a group of students who will be labelled as a 'technical stream'.

The definition is left up to schools or local authorities, and will depend on the employment conditions in a particular town or the discipline problems of a particular school.

In an area of highly skilled engineering work, for instance, the stream could well be renuinely technical, but in another area where employment chances are down to zero, the stream might be used by head teachers to get rid of problem' students for a while.

Instead of receiving a wide education, this technical stream will be given training for jobs — which usually do not exist.

Local employers have to have a say in the course, and there has to be 'work experience' - unpaid labour in school hours. Control of what is taught will pass out of the hands of teachers to the Department of Trade and Industry and Norman Tebbit.

Just as the Youth Training Scheme tries to train youth to accept low wages, so TVEI will train students to accept working life without question. More subtly, the blame for unemployment is transferred from the Government to teachers and, ultimately, the kids themseives.

Resolution

The last conference of the National Union of Teachers passed an emergency resolution which pointed out the dangers of the scheme and called on local branches to monitor it. Yet there is a danger that teachers and Labour councils, faced with rate-capping and cuts, will try to get TVEI money, thinking that they will be able to 'get round' the MSC's control, and spend the money to keep the schools running.

Once a scheme has started, even if it has managed to get through the initial MSC scrutiny, teachers given jobs under the scheme will be very vulnerable to the threat of funds being cut off if they displease the MSC. It is likely that many of these teachers will be appointed on fixed-term contracts.

This further strengthens MSC control, because they can easily be got rid of.

Taking the MSC's 'fool's gold' is no substitute for fighting to keep and improve our schools.

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without the usual gestures towards 'consultation' • the

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EDUCATION 78 IARS 83. -