[Education For Tomorrow: No 100, 2009]

A culture of corruption

 The storage of horse dung would be a suitable use for the Houses of Parliament, suggested William Morris, in his Utopian socialist novel News from Nowhere. Judging by the election results, millions clearly agree with his sentiments, even if the horse dung is in short supply these days.

Teachers and other education workers are often generous to a fault in donating their own time and money in the schools where they work. School trips, sports events, charity sponsorship and classroom incentives are just a few of the many examples where contributions, in time and money, that are routinely and selflessly given without a second thought. So it can come as a shock to learn that this culture is not shared at other levels.

The news that Schools Secretary, Ed Balls, and his partner Yvette Cooper have been 'caught with their hands in the cookie jar' (Education 22/05/09) might come as a surprise to some. But MPs' expenses pale into insignificance compared to the payout from the public purse given to the likes of former Royal Bank of Scotland Chief Executive, Sir Fred Goodwin. Parliament is full of people who support the decaying capitalist system that legitimises greed and corruption. They are tainted by its values.

Two-thirds of British people live on £25,000 or less. Nine out ten earn less than £40,000 a year. MPs are already on a guaranteed minimum of £62,000. Not content with a reward that is far in excess of the pay the vast majority of us receive, these MPs have been fiddling their expenses claims at the expense of the rest of us while driving down public sector workers' pay and conditions and attacking benefit claimants as 'scroungers.'

Corruption spreads like a cancer. The privatisation agenda in public services undermines the concept of service to the community and promotes in its place the motivation of private profit.

Those that expose it face threats and intimidation. The recent case of the three teacher union reps suspended after they revealed that their head teacher had been paying himself huge bonuses from the school budget is a case in point. They had compiled their facts carefully and sent a dossier to government auditors and as a result have been re-instated, but how many more examples are there where insufficient facts or intimidation result in the corruption remaining hidden.

Cosmetic changes
A change in faces at the top won't stop the rot and neither will a change of government. All the parties in Parliament are involved. All of them support the status quo and the most likely victors in the general election will be the Tories, and their policies make grim reading.

Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove promises that a Tory victory at the general election will see the creation of thousands of primary academy schools and academies becoming 'the norm'. He asserts that academies have a better record of improving student achievement than community comprehensive schools.

Yet the recent fifth annual report produced for the government by Price Waterhouse concluded, 'there is insufficient evidence to make a definitive judgment about academies as a model for school improvement'. This is backed up by a new study by the Centre for Economic Performance, at the London School of Economics, which found that the exam results of academy schools are no different from those of comprehensives. 'Overall,' they state, 'these changes in GCSE performance in academies relative to matched schools are statistically indistinguishable from one another. The same pattern emerges if all state schools in the academy's local authority are used as the comparator group.'

The Tories, like New Labour, ignore the facts if it doesn't suit them. Their plans for education workers were revealed at a recent Tory Policy Exchange seminar where Amanda Spielman, an education consultant for the infamous ARK, (currently running six academies) attacked the unions for blocking the changes to teachers' pay and working practices needed to 'raise standards.' Gove went further and attacked the whole education establishment (local authorities, Department officials, academics etc) for blocking progress and promised a battle royal if his party wins the next general election.

New Labour in government is as sleaze-ridden and incompetent as the Tories they replaced 12 years ago. They have served the rich and powerful at the expense of the vast majority. It's time to develop policies that address the real and urgent needs of the rest of us, and transform society in the interests of working people.

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