The Labour Party, not content with the trillion pound bail out of the bankers, now plans to extend its 'flagship' academy schools program to allow universities and bosses to run the worst performing schools. Academies were originally developed as a way to allow business types to take over a school in the state sector by putting up two million quid, and having the complete control over subsequent budgets, curriculum, and also hiring and firing. Around 200 academies have opened so far and the anti working class Labour Party has consistently promised to speed up the programme in coming years. This has proved very profitable to the social parasites who have leached hundreds of millions from state education over the past decade, but a complete disaster for working class pupils and teachers.
The long term goal has been to allow academies to become selective schools, excluding poorer pupils with learning problems, whilst channelling the 'brighter' pupils (those from middle class and upper working class backgrounds who have stable home lives and the money for computers, learning support etc) into academic streams. Working class pupils are directed to a myriad of pseudo subjects related to media and communication studies, neither of which are recognised as genuine subjects by universities. This would allow better off parents to avoid having to bear the cost of sending their brats private-yet another case of the welfare state being used to support the labour aristocracy and the middle classes!
Even this revanchist goal has proven unachievable under the bosses system. The constant theft of money which should go on pupils, but is funnelled into the pockets of the sponsors, who, incidentally no longer even have to put up any front money, means that academies are failing. Sheffield Park Academy - opened last year by the Duke of York following a £30m redevelopment - will become the third of the academies in South Yorkshire schools to be placed in "special measures". The school replaced a conventional comprehensive which was said to be making "reasonable progress" before shutting. Sheffield Park's sister school, Sheffield Springs Academy, which is also run by the United Learning Trust, a front for the fundamentalists of the Anglican Church, received a critical judgement from Ofsted in June of 2009. Its teaching was said to be inadequate, although Ofsted stopped short of placing it in special measures due to political pressure. Earlier in 2009, the Richard Rose Central Academy in Carlisle was placed in special measures following a protest over poor behaviour and teaching by parents. Its chief executive, who was recruited from the NHS without any teaching experience, subsequently quit. Unity City Academy in Middlesbrough was also placed in special measures, linked to the influence of fundamentalist Christian Richard Vardy, who has sole control of curriculum in the school, one of more than ten schools he has stolen.
This attempt to out do the tories in the run up to an election shows just whose side the Brownites/Blairites and union leaders are on-the bosses and the middle class wannabees of the better off workers. Those who think Labour will somehow become pro working class after defeat are pissing into the wind. Even with 13 years of faithful knee cushion and lip balm service to the lords of humankind in the boss class, Labour feel such fealty to their mates and peers that they have to just keep giving and giving. Lord Harris, who founded Carpetright and already runs several London academies, is included in a list of sponsors who will be allowed to run multiple schools, all of them with state money-that's working class taxes-and outside of any local democratic control. Brown trotted out the usual blandishments regarding ambition, excellence etc in what will prove a failed attempt to stop the Tories from winning the general election in May, stating: "Local authorities will be able to draw on the world-class excellence in these new chains to drive up standards in weaker schools. And primary schools themselves will be able to opt to join a chain. The evidence is clear – schools often work best when they work together. When schools partner with other schools - operating under a common leadership brand, with a shared ethos, and a shared commitment to excellence – standards are raised for all; the stronger schools and the weaker schools." This is regardless of the proven failure of his project to raise standards, even on its own anti working class terms.
For those revolutionaries who think voting Labour, and that telling working and unemployed people to vote Labour is a smart tactic which will 'help organise the resistance', to coin the term of one particularly deluded old labourite in one of the myriad micro sects which despoil the political landscape, a reckoning will await them in the future when workers have to fight tooth and nail against the racist, Imperialist and viciously anti working class Labour Party, as they have had to do, like millions in West Asia and beyond for a decade or more. The question will be raised of those like the SWP who support the Labour Party: 'where were you when my school/hospital/job was being destroyed by the bosses and the Labour Party'? The job of genuine communists is to expose this socialist support for our class enemies whenever and wherever we get the chance. The SWP and their ilk have crossed the Rubicon, as they have many times before, in choosing to support our class enemies.
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