Post-war education policy has been marked by a remarkable consensus between the major parties in favour of reform. The twin orthodoxies of the post-war educational settlement — 'equal opportunity' and 'progressive education' — have been superceded during the 1970s by 'the needs of industry', 'declining standards' and 'austerity'. The current crisis of education, argue Rick Hatcher and Ken Jones require new responses from socialists which go beyond the narrow reforms or classroom militancy which different sections of the Left have previously espoused.
British education expanded after 1944 to the point where, in 1979, it was the biggest single area of government spending. Conservative, as well as Labour governments, accepted that an expanding education system was a guarantee of economic efficiency. Along with the growth of spending went a policy of increasing 'educational opportunity', so as to open up the state and industry to the reinvigorating influence of state-educated managers and technicians. The election of Wilson's first government in 1964 was the highpoint of the argument that the modernisation of education and the growth of opportunity — two sides of the same coin — would see a regeneration of British industry.
Governmental intention, however, was not translated into educational practice. Education was not reorganised in a way that prioritised technological knowledge. The determination of policy goals was rather left to a section of the intelligentsia and civil service which, in the tradition of Matthew Arnold, valued the cultivation of a national unity through a shared experience of education above the subordination of the school to the direct demands of the labour market. Their policy reports — notably Newsom in 1963 and Plowden in 1967 — contained only the vaguest recognition of 'national economic need'. Protected by this tradition of policy-making, and encouraged by the increased involvement of teachers in the shaping of new curricula, a minority of teachers was able to introduce radical changes into the classroom — changes intended not so much to increase the occupational opportunities of individual working class children, as to encourage their critical awareness, either as individuals or (more rarely) as members of a social class.
Change
In the mid-seventies these traditions of reform were still firmly established at the centre of British schooling. The years since then have seen their gradual eviction and replacement.
The onset of recession coincided with a gathering criticism of state priorities. The OECD drew attention to the lack of correspondence between British education and economic need. James Callaghan, shortly after he became Prime Minister in 1976, made a well-publicised speech about the dangers of the allegedly dominant classroom approach, which emphasised, he said, 'social', rather than 'economic' factors: individual child development, rather than the child's role as a future worker.
These critical tendencies found outlet in the 'Great Debate' on schooling organised by the Labour Government in 1977-78, which attempted to create a new consensus on educational policy, whose central feature would be the relationship between school and work. This relationship was understood not just in a technical sense, but in an ideological sense: schools would develop not only the 'skills' but also the 'attitudes' necessary to work. Whereas previously there had been an unquestioned assumption that more schooling (of whatever kind) led to economic growth, now it was intended to specify the kinds of education suitable to a trained, consenting and adaptable workforce.
This was the focus of Labour's 1977 Green Paper. Although 'equal opportunity' was retained as a motif of policy, it was in a secondary role. School and work — the need for the school to respond to the requirements of economic life — was the dominant theme. At the same time, of course, the Labour government was responding to economic crisis with cuts in social spending. Policies essential to the 'equal opportunity' strategy — such as the expansion of nursery education — were largely abandoned. Capital spending, essential to effective comprehensive reorganisation, was heavily cut.
While Labour's cuts attracted sharp criticism (though little effective resistance) from party and unions, its emphasis on the school-work connection was welcomed by the TUC and treated with caution rather than condemnation by the teaching unions. The mixture of approbation and silence with which it was received indicated a considerable weakness in the labour movement's educational policy. It had no firm conception of educational purpose to set up against the government's insistence on the needs of (capitalist) industry.
This weakness was to become more glaringly apparent as Margaret Thatcher's government began its restructuring of education.
The Tories' policy
The Tories first moves were directed more towards a reinforcing of educational inequalities than towards a reshaping of the school, to meet the needs of work (and unemployment). The 'Assisted Places Scheme' encouraged students in state schools to take up places in the private sector. Labour legislation compelling authorities to make secondary education comprehensive was repealed. All this was accompanied by a rhetoric of 'parental choice'; state education had become unaccountable, teacher-dominated and remote from the requirements of work and family. Individuals must be given the right to exercise some influence over it.
It would be a mistake to see these statements as the mere cosmetic overlay of a policy whose entire thrust was to increase inequality and benefit the rich. 'Parental choice' is an ideology which has some autonomy from issues of the distribution of wealth and of opportunity. Undoubtedly, it allows a greater concentration of educational privilege; but it is intended to do more than that.
The 1980 Education Act, for instance, gave parents the right to choose which comprehensive school their children could attend. In practice, this means that schools already privileged as a result of their intake, location, history and resources will have their popularity reinforced, whereas schools already deprived will have their plight confirmed. Not planning, but the aggregate of individual consumer demand will determine the character of the school. In order to remain open, in a situation of falling student rolls, schools will have to match the needs of a parental choice that is educated, so the Tories hope, in the virtues of a traditional educational philosophy. Inequalities will increase. But the intention is also that parents will have their role as ferocious individual defenders of their own child's educational destiny confirmed, and that their potential as participants in a collective movement of educational reform will diminish.
The labour movement, like the other traditional defenders of reform, is ill-equipped to respond to this strategy. It has habitually seen state education as an unmitigated benefit. The inadequacies of the school as a means of forming individuals with the kind of knowledge of the world that allows them to transform it, has never, this side of the war, been seriously dealt with. No attempt has been made to form a collective, popular conception of the purposes of schooling. Not surprisingly, Conservative attacks upon the remoteness and inadequacy of schooling have had some resonance.
Such was the initial focus of Conservative policy. In four years of government, however, the Tories have been forced to come to terms with some of the problems posed in the Great Debate, the urgency of which is underlined by the existence of mass unemployment among youth whose rebellious potential was demonstrated in the summer of 1981. The Tories have thus developed — alongside increased post-16 provision in the schools — a 'Youth Training Scheme' which will be open to every 16 year old in the country. The YTS promises to all a year of training in a range of workplace skills, either directly, through practical experience in factory or office or indirectly, in college-based courses.
Youth Training Schemes
The YTS marks the biggest change in British education since comprehensive reorganisation took off in the mid-sixties. There are a number of points which should be made about it. First, it is not a system of apprenticeship. The skills to be learned are neither as specific nor as complex as those of the apprentice: the student is to become an adaptable worker, not a particularly skilled one. Second, its 'training' function will be subordinate to its 'management of unemployment' function. It is not as if the YTS will increase the number of jobs open to youth. When the course is over, they are likely to return to a life on the dole. The YTS will have served its purpose if it helps instil the disciplines of work in a workforce which faces an unemployed future. Third, much of the training will be under the control of employers. As the head of the Manpower Services Commission puts it: 'Training is about work-related skills and is immediately concerned with employment. It is for this reason that training in this country must be employer-dominated and ultimately employer-directed.' Thus the school is to be almost completely excluded from the YTS, punished for the years in which it deprioritised the 'world of work'.
What will soon exist, then, is a system of training, operating outside the traditional forms of educational control and considerably influenced by employers, for whom it will largely replace apprenticeship schemes. Its trainees will be paid £25 a week — an inducement, in effect, to leave school or college education, where they are entitled to no maintenance allowance. Meanwhile, the Tories are taking steps to consolidate the traditional 'academic' (and in effect selective) sixth form. What is being evolved is not a comprehensive system of post-16 education in which the study of (and participation in) production would be complemented by an all round general education, but a two-tier 'tertiary modern' system of 16-19 education, in which tomorrow's manual workers and unemployed will be cut off from access to a general education and involved in schemes which offer no right to work at their conclusion. The new initiative, moreover, will have an effect on the curriculum of the entire secondary school. The academic/vocational split at 16 will be prepared for lower down the school.
The YTS is the result of a complex of concerns: with unemployment, with training the workforce to new technical specifications; with outflanking the traditional educational institutions and personnel and with delivering them a traumatic shock to alter their approaches to questions of curriculum and educational purpose.
Unsurprisingly, in view of its contribution to the Great Debate, the labour movement has been sparing in its criticism of the YTS. It has largely been concerned with questions of its own influence and of the conditions of service of the trainees involved in the schemes. Will trade unions be represented on the MSC boards that oversee local implementation of the YTS? Will there be safeguards against the use of trainees as cheap labour? Satisfied with the answers it has received, it has been content to approve the scheme. Trade union officials have been told to ask employers to take on YTS trainees, and to make sure that they have adequate status and conditions and a 'worthwhile' training. YTS schemes which operate in work places will need to have the support of unions there before they are approved by the MSC, but, since the unions agree with the substance of the scheme, this right of veto is unlikely to mean very much in practice.
Likewise, the main teaching unions — the NUT and NATFHE — have been concerned not so much with the content of the scheme, but with preserving — within the framework of endorsement of the YTS — the influence of their members. The NUT has been unsuccessful in this respect; the general trade union movement, though, has gained some influence. Many of the YTS 'Area Management Boards' are headed by trade unionists. This influence has been gained at the expense of wider principle. The YTS will help put the stamp of 'industrial need' upon post-16 education. Historic developments — the implementation of alternative goals to those of equal opportunity — have been set in motion without the glimmer of a critical response from the labour movement.
Teachers
The exclusion of teachers' organisations from the YTS is part of a general trend to exclude them from the council of State. It follows upon the closing down of the Schools Council, a national consultative body on the curriculum, on which teachers' unions were heavily represented. At the same time, teachers face sharp attacks on their pay, jobs and conditions of service. The most important union, organising half the teaching force in England and Wales is the National Union of Teachers. Economic attack and the closing of the channels of its influence have thrown its perspectives into crisis. The traditional strategy of the NUT leadership of relying on the State, suitably pressured when necessary, to make progressive reforms in education, and to reserve a favoured place for the teaching 'profession' in terms of living standards and influence over the curriculum, is now in disarray. Teachers' pay has steadily declined — an increase of around 30 per cent is needed to restore salaries to the high point of 1975. Job losses — though not compulsory redundancy — accelerate. Employers wish to alter conditions of service to make more use of short-term contracts and introduce an element of compulsion into lunchtime and after-school activity. At the same time cuts and restructuring strike a blow at the NUT's educational objectives.
The NUT's response has been contradictory: partly a greater willingness to use trade union forms of action, partly an attempt to re-establish a (non party political) consensus around educational expansion and reform. In 1969-70 it took national strike action over pay, and won, Shortly afterwards it affiliated to the TUC. Since 1979 it has been forced to call strikes in several areas against the cuts, most notably the strike in Barking in 1982, which lasted seven weeks and succeeded in retaining nearly two thirds of the jobs that a Labour authority wished to cut. Thousands of teachers struck on September 22nd 1982 in support of the health workers. There has been a change in the make-up of branch officials, [illegible] to a greater emphasis on trade union methods of struggle. The general social crisis has also affected the union. [illegible] adopted increasingly radical policies on racism and sexism, Its 1982 conference voted to support unilateral nuclear disarmament. A diffuse but forceful movement of women teachers has begun to campaign on both trade union and educational issues. Its effect was felt at the union's first ever conference on equal opportunities in 1983, when the executive's positions were several times defeated.
But this shift to the left has now come up against the limits of what is possible within the union leadership's strategic framework. To go beyond it would require a more thorough-going commitment to strike action and the abandoning of the union's avowedly non-political stance. (It refuses to call for a Labour government in preference to another five years of Thatcher, let alone contemplate affiliating to the Labour Party.) The union's executive will not renounce political 'neutrality', nor accept the intrusion of issues like unilateralism into union debate. The union president responded to the disarmament vote at 1982 conference by declaring that it was outside the aims and objects of the union, and would not be implemented. The semi-secret 'left' grouping on the executive chose to sacrifice conference policy for the sake of the unity of the leadership. The disarmament resolution was in part a symptom of wider politicisation in the union, On many issues this politicisation has been forced on the union by a government determined to make contentious many areas of social policy which had previously been matters of agreement among the parties. In addition, incessant attacks on jobs, education and pay have forced upon many teachers a consciousness that education and politics cannot be separated.
We are seeing, though, a polarisation rather than an homogenous radicalisation of teachers. For every teacher who is stimulated to take up political issues there is another who, intimidated by unemployment or buttressed by political conviction, will argue for a quiescent response, in the best traditions of public service, to the government's attacks.
As a result — and in the absence of a decisive advance by the working class movement — the NUT is struggling to maintain its half-share of the teaching force. Other teachers' organisations which vaunt their non-political nature claim to be increasing their size, They include the Professional Association of Teachers, founded in the wake of the 1969 pay strikes and pledged never to go on strike, and the AMMA, historically the union of grammar school teachers, now 80,000 strong which has a similar attitude, in practice. The NAS/UWT, the second largest teachers' union is affiliated to the TUC. It was founded in the 1920s, to represent the interests of men teachers. [illegible] recently, it has presented itself as a tougher organisation than the NUT, combining trade union militancy with a non-political stand. Its militancy is, in fact, questionable — it has taken far less action against cuts than the NUT — while its educational stand emphasises the cultivation of discipline and 'morality' and fits quite neatly into the new educational climate.
The membership war among the unions is an important reason for the NUT executive's counter-attack against the politicisation of the union. Worried by the danger of membership loss, anxious to preserve what remains of the union's traditional influence as a non-partisan educational lobby, and convinced that a successful action-based fight against the cuts is impossible, the executive is now attempting to re-create an educational consensus, and in the process, to demonstrate that its traditional strategies are still effective. Shunning a practical alliance with the labour movement, the executive is now organising, simultaneously with a clampdown on political discussion in the ranks, an attempt to woo politicians of all parties, church people and other notables into a non-political campaign for 'education for national survival'.
The Left
The executive's line is for the most part supported by the teachers who lead the 'NUT work' of the Communist Party. They characterise the executive as 'progressive', and brand its active opponents as ultra-left. Their desire to maintain an alliance with the leadership has, over two decades, drawn them into a position from which they oppose attempts to win the union to support abortion rights, or unilateralism. Correspondingly, they do not organise an active 'Broad Left' group — only a semi-clandestine caucus on the executive itself, which surfaces in unadvertised meetings at annual conference. Many rank and file supporters of the 'Broad Left' have become alienated and have worked with others, further to the left, on such issues as disarmament.
Until recently, the major left opposition was provided by the 'Rank and File Teacher', a grouping dominated by the SWP. Its tendency to make continual unsuccessful calls for unofficial action, its failure to address the political arguments of the NUT leadership and its lack of internal democracy led to its decline. It was formally wound up by the SWP earlier this year — a decision which, whatever the vagaries of the SWP line, has weakened the influence of the left in several areas.
The main force on the left of the union today is the Socialist Teachers Alliance, which has two supporters on the National Executive, receives about 40 per cent support for its positions at annual conference and has a growing influence among union activists. Its aims can most simply be described as making the union more militant and more political. Thus it has emphasised the unilateralist campaign among other things, as a means of relating a union on the margins of the labour movement to a major force in British political life. That the debate about the 'aims and objects' of the union — its political or apolitical nature — is now so sharply posed is substantially a result of the STA's emphases.
Labour's policies
No politics of education can confine itself to the teachers' unions. It is also necessary to affect the educational policies of the major classes, and of the parties which represent them. The Black Paperites, who were largely responsible for the changes in Conservative policy and its populist 'cutting edge', certainly understood the importance of rejecting a purely sectoral approach.
In this perspective, the Left has to develop a critique of, and a challenge to, Labour's educational programme, so as to equip it to respond adequately to a situation in which the heights of educational debate have been captured by the Right, and in which state policy is concerned more with the stratifying effects of the 'world of work' than with the equalising of opportunity.
It has to be recognised that Labour's policies are more radical than ever before: full comprehensivisation, the encouragement of 'mixed-ability' grouping, attacks on private education, the introduction of post-16 maintenance allowances. All such measures are to be welcomed; but they do not tackle the fundamental problem — the effects of an unequal division of labour on the curricula and systems of selection of the school. Thus Labour's programme remains weak in several respects. It echoes the assumptions of earlier decades in its contention that the needs of working class children can be met at one and the same time as education is developed in a way consistent with the interests of employers. It neglects to answer the criticisms of the right on issues where they have achieved some public resonance. And, above all, it shows no awareness of the need to mobilise both resistance to Conservative attacks and campaigns for forms of education which differ both in their content and systems of control from present models. Labour continues to rely on administrative action as the major means of change. It seeks to develop no major movement among teachers, or parents, or, least of all, students.
The focus of these various issues is 16-19 education — particularly the YTS. The fate of the YTS, and its eventual impact on the labour movement, cannot be predicted. But it is already possible to point to the success of the YTS in combining in one project both a response to right-wing themes of 'relevant' and 'basic' education, and to the discontent of the trade unionists with the existing system of industrial training. The priority for the left, in the Labour Party, and the unions, is to put forward an ideological alternative to the YTS which revitalises Marxist conceptions of polytechnic education: the combination of practical work with a high level of general education which starts from practical experience, but which encompasses far broader issues. For the Marxists of the 1920s, polytechnic education entailed not only an understanding of the tasks of the workshop, but of whole branches of production and, indeed, the production process as a whole. Questions of technique were linked with those of the organisation of the labour process. The YTS will be, ironically, an eventual benefit, if it forces the left of the labour movement to produce a unified programme for education which discusses far more thoroughly than in the past, the content of education, its relation to the 'world of work', and to the experience of and motivation of students.
The forcefulness of such a transformation will depend to an important extent on the winning of teachers' organisations — especially the NUT — to a different conception of their role: politically, in developing a closer relationship to the labour movement and a rejection of 'non-aligned' attitudes; educationally, in a commitment to encourage union members to become practitioners of a (carefully) partisan education.
The immediate focus for such issues is the coming general election. What government offers the best opportunity of the NUT's policies being carried out? It is evident that only a radical Labour government could implement even the existing policies of the NUT on the expansion of education, on disarmament, on racism and sexism. The NUT leadership, however, refuse to abandon the union's traditional non-party political stance — and it is undoubtedly the case that the great majority of union members support them in this. The STA faces the task, not of issuing calls for Labour Party affiliation which can only at the moment have a propagandistic character, but of attempting to explain the political nature of the challenges the union faces, and, in that context, of discussing the aim of Labour Party affiliation. It will be a long process — but one which will serve to provide a political framework for the many separate issues, from disarmament to 'equal opportunity', which are now common currency in the union.
KEN JONES is a member of the National Executive of the NUT, and of the STA and author of Beyond progressive education. RICHARD HATCHER is a founder member of the STA and the author of numerous articles in Socialist Teacher, Radical education and other magazines.
*Scottish education is administered differently, has different structures and its own teaching union. This article is primarily applicable, therefore, to England and Wales.