New Labour's Tory Educational Policies

[Francis Beckett]

Here's a revolutionary idea from the education secretary. Get private sponsors - anyone with £2m to spare - to own, run and operate schools. Appeal for "potential sponsors in the business community, churches and existing educational trusts". The government will pay all running costs and most of the capital costs. Sponsors will contribute to the initial capital required.

City academies? No, this was an announcement made exactly 20 years ago, at the 1986 Conservative party conference, by the then education secretary, Kenneth Baker. And he called his bright idea city technology colleges (CTCs). Academies came much later, in 2000, when the then education secretary, David Blunkett, told us they were to be "owned and run by sponsors" who could be "businesses, individuals, churches, other faith groups or voluntary bodies". The only difference is that sponsors of academies are even freer. They are no longer restricted to urban areas, nor to secondary schools. Academies can be all-age, and specialise in any subjects.

Other than that, city academies are the same as CTCs. So when the Labour government arrived in 1997, it should have been able to look at the history of CTCs to see if the idea worked.

The first thing it would have found is that Labour had thought the idea a dud. Labour's then education spokesman, Jack Straw, told the House of Commons: "No programme has been such a comprehensive and expensive failure ... [it] is wasteful and wrong, so why does he [the education secretary] not scrap it altogether and immediately save £120m, which could be spent on a crash programme of repairs and improvements, as we have demanded?" He was horrified that the government was spending many times more money on CTC pupils than on state school pupils.

He was pretty scathing about the rest of Baker's policies, too. Baker was "the architect of the lethal combination of city technology colleges, opting out, the local management of schools, an inflexible national curriculum". Every one of these is now the policy of the government Straw has adorned since 1997, without the smallest protest from him.

But perhaps his deadliest attack was a 1990 press release in which he said sponsors were "second-order companies whose directors were interested in political leverage or honours". In the case of academies, we have had to discover this for ourselves.

Baker's 1986 announcement was the creation of a "pilot network of 20 city technology colleges in urban areas". Sponsors would own their CTCs and run them, employing all staff.

At first, Baker wanted sponsors to put up £8m towards capital costs, but it rapidly became clear they were not going to put up anything like that amount. He made it known that he would accept £2m. The government would happily stump up the rest - on average, about £10m.

The one lesson that should have been learned from the CTC episode is that wealthy people and big businesses do not part with anything like enough to build a school, and normally expect something in return. Baker realised there was no point in expecting sponsors to contribute more than a token sum.

Labour took a long time, and the searing experience of its ill-fated Education Action Zones, to learn that lesson. But by the time city academies were launched, it had learned it. So it decided on Baker's bargain £2m for its academies. Of course, £2m was worth far less by March 2000, when Blunkett announced the creation of city academies. By then, a new school cost not £10m, but more like £30m.

In order to attract sponsors, Baker said business people could name their colleges after themselves or their companies, and dictate the curriculum. It was to be the ultimate sponsorship opportunity: to be known as a company that cared about education, to have your name and logo engraved on the hearts of schoolchildren, and even to ensure they were taught the skills your company required.

Yet it was not enough. Margaret Thatcher herself had to be called in to try to twist arms, personally telephoning the chairman of BP, who turned her down, even though his company was at the time spending £9m on community activities, £1.9m of it on education.

So CTC sponsors tended to be smaller companies. Michael Ashcroft was chairman of the Bermuda-registered security services company ADT and a guarantor of the Conservative party's overdraft. He paid just £1m to sponsor the ADT CTC in Wandsworth.

In January 1990, he made it clear how his business interests and Wandsworth council's politics could benefit, in a private letter to the council leader, Sir Paul Beresford: "From a political point of view, the higher the profile that can be given to the creation of the CTC concept here in Wandsworth the better, and no doubt this will be of much help to local Conservative candidates for the May 1990 elections.

"I have suggested to the prime minister and Kenneth Baker that it would be helpful if a small ceremony could be held on or around April 2 1990, so that the college can be formally handed over ... to the new CTC trust. The prime minister's presence would, of course, guarantee publicity."

You might wonder whether a tobacco company ought to be sponsoring a school, but British American Tobacco's money was accepted in Middlesbrough.

Brighton property speculator Ivor Revere's aborted CTC in Sussex triggered a National Audit Office investigation after it was discovered he had paid £2.3m for the site and charged the taxpayer £2.5m for it. After Revere's withdrawal, the government was left with a disused school whose value was declining. It was still unsold four years later, in 1993, and security was costing £1,000 a week.

Jack Straw thought this was the last straw. "Is not the truth of the city technology college programme that financial controls have been so inadequate that ministers and donors have been able to play fast and loose with public funds?"

With academies, the government supplies the money and the sponsor spends it. If, as many sponsors do, he chooses to spend it buying goods and services from his own companies, that is his affair. For example, Sir Peter Vardy's schools paid £111,554 for "support services such as marketing and recruitment" to his car dealer firm, Reg Vardy Plc, and £14,039 to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association as reimbursement for time on academy business spent by Sir Peter's brother David. None of this work was put out to tender, which is a legal requirement in state schools.

A businessman, Cyril Taylor, was appointed to head the CTC Trust. Today, now Sir Cyril, he heads the trust that promotes city academies.

I was shown round the first CTC, Kingshurst, near Birmingham. The spacious classrooms, full of the latest technology, would have turned most state school teachers green with envy. Nearby stood crumbling, cash-starved schools for the pupils who could not get into Kingshurst. Its sponsor, the automotive company GKN, had a manager in the school to advise the head and the teachers on teaching and curriculum matters, though he had no experience of education.

Ann Jones became vice-principal of Kingshurst when it opened in 1989, and is now its principal. She thinks CTCs have been "an enormous vehicle for change in education. All 15 have valued vocational education and have given it real parity of esteem with academic education. We value being independent of local authorities, and not being constrained by what they might think." She does not think local authority interference has been replaced by interference from sponsors. "In our case at least, we have not had interference from our sponsors. We have always been student-led."

The last CTC to be authorised, in April 1991, was Kingswood in Bristol. After the, by now, familiar scramble for private sector cash, the chairman of Cable and Wireless and former Tory party chairman Lord Young stumped up the required £2m. The government handed over the other £8m.

Avon county council's deputy director of education, Edward Watson, bitterly contrasted that £8m for capital spending on the 900 children at Kingswood with the £4.5m he had for capital spending on the county's other 150,000 children. With the extra money, he said, all secondary schools could be fully repaired, all improvements they wanted could be done, all could have a new science laboratory, and there would be enough left over to give all primary schools an extra nursery class for a year.

Watson was unlucky. If he had been able to hold out for a few months more, he would never have had a CTC on his patch. By then, while the new education secretary Kenneth Clarke was blustering about the success of CTCs, he was actually in retreat. Kingswood was the 15th and last CTC.

Officially, the CTC programme never ended. No one ever said: "That's it, lads, back to the drawing board." But after the 15th of the "pilot network" of 20, there were no more. Clarke quietly killed off the only CTC in the pipeline, in Barnet, north London. Taylor started talking about his new big idea, requiring comparatively tiny amounts of private sector money and leaving the state controlling the schools it is paying for.

But in the programme's dying days, a system of smoke and mirrors was invented, which the academies programme has been swift to build on. The sponsor of Haberdashers' Aske's in Lewisham, south London, the Haberdashers' Company, a city livery company, did not part with a penny. Since it was already running a state school on the site, it "gave" the site to the new CTC. The CTC Trust promptly announced that the value of this site was more than £2m, and, magically, another generous sponsor had come forward.

Today, that city technology college is to become a city academy, , owned and controlled by the Haberdashers, benefiting from another large dollop of taxpayers' cash and taking over another local school. The Haberdashers' Company is still not keen on putting up money. Anything Kenneth Clarke can do, Charles Clarke can also do, and just before he left the Department for Education, the new academy went up on the department website. "The main sponsor," it said, "is the Haberdashers' Livery Company."

So how much was the sponsor putting in this time, in return for control of two schools instead of one? The council says it does not know; the school says no one there can discuss it; the Haberdashers' Company says only the school can discuss it. The relevant paragraph in the funding agreement is secret, and the government successfully blocked a request to see it under the Freedom of Information Act. Local rumour puts the figure somewhere in the region of peanuts.

http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/s...1885618,00.html

Francis Beckett's book about city academies will be published by Continuum in March

[John Simkin]

Here's a revolutionary idea from the education secretary. Get private sponsors - anyone with £2m to spare - to own, run and operate schools. Appeal for "potential sponsors in the business community, churches and existing educational trusts". The government will pay all running costs and most of the capital costs. Sponsors will contribute to the initial capital required.

City academies? No, this was an announcement made exactly 20 years ago, at the 1986 Conservative party conference, by the then education secretary, Kenneth Baker. And he called his bright idea city technology colleges (CTCs). Academies came much later, in 2000, when the then education secretary, David Blunkett, told us they were to be "owned and run by sponsors" who could be "businesses, individuals, churches, other faith groups or voluntary bodies". The only difference is that sponsors of academies are even freer. They are no longer restricted to urban areas, nor to secondary schools. Academies can be all-age, and specialise in any subjects.

Other than that, city academies are the same as CTCs. So when the Labour government arrived in 1997, it should have been able to look at the history of CTCs to see if the idea worked.

The first thing it would have found is that Labour had thought the idea a dud. Labour's then education spokesman, Jack Straw, told the House of Commons: "No programme has been such a comprehensive and expensive failure ... [it] is wasteful and wrong, so why does he [the education secretary] not scrap it altogether and immediately save £120m, which could be spent on a crash programme of repairs and improvements, as we have demanded?" He was horrified that the government was spending many times more money on CTC pupils than on state school pupils.

He was pretty scathing about the rest of Baker's policies, too. Baker was "the architect of the lethal combination of city technology colleges, opting out, the local management of schools, an inflexible national curriculum". Every one of these is now the policy of the government Straw has adorned since 1997, without the smallest protest from him.

But perhaps his deadliest attack was a 1990 press release in which he said sponsors were "second-order companies whose directors were interested in political leverage or honours". In the case of academies, we have had to discover this for ourselves.

It is this aspect of New Labour that former supporters find so offensive. It is not only true of education. Remember the comments that Brown and Blair made about privatization and the tax changes that increased inequality in the UK? Once they got in power they adopted the same policies as those that they condemned when they were in opposition. It is therefore not surprising that the Labour Party has lost 208,000 members since it took office in 1997. That is more that half its total membership.