From the President: Their past is our future (part 2) - lessons from UK schools

Imagine a schooling system where the government has legislated to prevent the construction of any new state schools, where high profile business people with political links to the ruling party own and run chains of schools and successful local state schools are compulsorily closed after fabricated inspections by external agencies also with links to those chains.

This is the current state of schools in England and Wales and a thundering warning for Queensland and Australia as a whole.

In the July Journal (Volume 119, number 5), I explored lessons from the Swedish school system - lessons learned from a study tour undertaken as part of a national delegation led by the Australian Education Union. This article exposes the horrible truth about the corruption of public education that can result from the logical conclusion of the policies of choice and autonomy in education that currently dominate the Australian political context.

The free school movement of Sweden has translated into the academy and free school systems in England and Wales. Of the more than 25,000 schools in those nations, almost 4,000 schools are now classified as academies and 300 are free schools. Each academy has the authority to set staff pay and conditions, employ unqualified teachers, determine its own curriculum, control enrolments and assume control of all land and assets. Forty-two free schools have opened in districts with no forecast need at a capital cost of some £241 million (AU$438 million).

The free school movement has spawned a number of school chains that are well on the way to becoming dominant in the education system. These chains have established a dubious standard for the management of public funds to run education. Lord John Nash, a schools minister in the current UK government, is a major donor to the Conservative Party and runs the Future Academy chain.

While profit making from education is currently not permitted in England and Wales, the academies/free schools have stretched legal credibility by engaging in commercial arrangements that see large sums of money transferred to related entities for the provision of school-related services (a feature I identified in Sweden as well). Another area of concern is the central government resuming land from local authorities to be handed to chains to establish academies/free schools.

If the financial arrangements for these UK schools have a distinctly unsavoury character about them, the educational standards agenda that underpins the move to academies and free schools is revealed as a farce. Concerns about the independence of the Office of Standards for Education (OFSTED) and the role of that organisation in forcing schools to become academies, have gained prominence in the UK. Links between OFSTED inspectors and academy chains or free school sponsors have further sullied the reputation of that organisation and fuelled community backlash against the policy as a whole. One school I visited is engaged in a High Court battle to overturn an order for the school to close and be amalgamated with a local free school.

The purported need for academies and free schools to improve the quality of education is not borne out in reality. Numerous examples exist of academies and free schools being declared “inadequate” and placed under “special measures” by OFSTED. Some 52 per cent of students in free schools are being taught in schools deemed to be “inadequate”. In May of this year, one academy chain closed after the government ordered that it not be allowed to open any new schools because of concern about falling standards. The six schools it managed were left without the means to operate as a consequence.

Many characteristics of the UK model are shared with Sweden and are the current vogue in this country. The mantra of parent choice, parental control, school autonomy and education “reform” dominates the policies and practices that have led to the dismal state of education in both nations. It is this topic that will form the basis of the last article in this series, “Lessons for Australia” to be published in the October edition of the Journal.

Kevin Bates
President

Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 119 No 6, 22 August 2014, p7