Privatisation and schools in Birmingham
Richard Hatcher
Talk given at Birmingham Trades Council Public Sector meeting “Are we becoming Birmingham PLC?” 24 June 2008 alliance-against-birmingham-academies-logo
I’m going to talk about two issues – Building Schools for the Future and Academies – but we need to remember that they are part of a much wider outsourcing of lots of aspects of national education policy implementation and local authority and school functions, ranging from the National Literacy Strategy to school inspections to schools’ back office functions. The education market is a profitable sector of the British economy and a springboard for getting business overseas.
The CBI in its report The Business of Education Improvement (CBI 2005) identified two key new areas of profitable activity: the 2004 Children Act and Building Schools for the Future. Here I’m focusing on BSF but we need to remember that the Children Act also means big opportunities for the private sector as the local authority’s role is intended to be commissioning services rather than providing them.
Building Schools for the Future
All Birmingham secondary schools are to be rebuilt or refurbished in 6 phases. Phase 1 comprises 11 schools. 50% of the money is for new build, 35% for major refurbishment, and15% for minor works. Of course extra funding for school buildings is very welcome, but there are serious implications for the extension of private influence over the school system in Birmingham and the erosion of democratic control.
There are two issues. One is that 4 of the 11 schools will be funded through PFI (the other 7 through a Revenue Support Grant). The arguments against PFI are well known – it’s more expensive and commits the LA to long term repayments while the building is owned by the PFI consortium – and I won’t dwell on them here.
The second issue, and the most important, is that BSF is a vehicle for outsourcing of Council services. The Labour government’s policy is that Local Authorities should commission services from external providers, not provide them themselves. But the City Council has a choice. It has the legal powers to decide precisely how it wants the BSF programme to be used – it can restrict BSF to building new and improving existing secondary schools in the city, or it can use it as an opportunity to outsource services.
Opening the door to privatising services?
The BSF contract will be awarded later this year and we don’t know what the content of the bids is, but we can get an idea of the Council’s thinking from what it says on its BSF website:
‘The BSF programme is more than just new buildings, it includes changes to the way the curriculum is taught. Birmingham City Council has been looking for a group of businesses to work together to not only build/refurbish all the city’s secondary schools but to help transform teaching and learning.’
The Council’s invitation to tender was advertised in February 2007. In addition to the building work it invited bids to include the following (I quote):
vi) hard facilities management services;
(vii) soft facilities management services;
(viii) information communication and technology (“ICT”) services;
(ix) educational support services;
(x) education programme development services; and (xi) educational strategy services;
‘together with, as appropriate, other community facilities which may be integrated or co-located with such educational facilities and sites and which may include, for example, facilities for health, social care, leisure and facilities to support educational and lifelong learning outcomes’
So the threat to those services which are still provided in-house by the local authority is clear.
The BSF bidders
The final tenders from the two short-listed bidders were received in February this year and a decision will be made this year. The two bidders are Land Securities Trillium and RM (Research Machines, an IT company); and Catalyst Education (Birmingham) Ltd.
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Land Securities is the UK’s biggest property company. This is what its website says:
‘In addition to LS Trillium’s 900 employees, a further 15,000 people help to ensure the smooth running of our customers’ workplaces, 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. The most ‘visible’ services they provide include catering, cleaning and security. Less obvious, but equally vital services include gardening, porterage and engineering.
Whilst these 15,000 people generally wear the LS Trillium uniform, in fact they are employed by a series of specialist Service Partners organisations. We have long term contracts with these organisations to ensure we get the best value for money and highest possible service standards for our clients.’
In short, they have an army of subcontracted workers ready to take over Council services.
Catalyst Education (Birmingham) Ltd is a subsidiary of Catalyst Lend Lease and Bovis Lend Lease Ltd. Bovis Lend Lease is one of the world’s leading project management and construction companies.
‘The Catalyst business was founded by Bovis and the Bank of Scotland in the 1990s to bid for projects in Britain’s fast developing Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and Public Private Partnership (PPP) markets, a government backed programme that encourages private sector businesses to fund, build and manage public sector assets.
Separate consortia are formed for each PFI bid, with Bovis Lend Lease providing the construction expertise and a financial institution, usually the Bank of Scotland, acting as investment partner. Many projects, particularly in healthcare, also involve a soft facilities management provider and another group company, Vita Lend Lease, maintains the completed buildings.
In 2005 Catalyst Lend Lease was founded to oversee the development of the business, manage future bids and oversee the asset management of Lend Lease’s PFI and PPP investments in the UK. In 2006, Catalyst Investment Holdings Ltd was formed by Bovis Lend Lease Holdings Ltd and the Bank of Scotland to hold and manage the two businesses’ equity investments in 11 PFI projects.’ (Bovis website)
The vehicle through which the BSF project is to be run is the ‘Local Education Partnership’. The LEP is a joint venture company controlled by the private contractors who are awarded the contract. The composition of a LEP is: private contractor(s) 80%, Partnership for Schools (PfS – the DFES agency) 10%, BCC 10%. The contract will be for a period of up to 20 years.
This BSF programme carries 3 big threats :
1. Loss of services
The private sector regards the LEP, and the BSF programme in general, as a means of positioning themselves to gain access to the provision of educational and children’s services, and to use it as a springboard to bid for other Council services, cherry-picking the ones that are profitable.
2. Loss of jobs, worsening conditions
If services are outsourced many jobs in the City Council will disappear. The record of privatisation in the public sector is that pay is cut and conditions of employment are worsened in order to ensure profits for private companies.
3. Loss of democracy
Councils will come and go but the BSF consortium will remain for up to 20 years – which is likely to mean permanently in place. The LEP is supposed to be answerable to the Council, but it brings the logic of business methods and profitability into the heart of local government, and with it the danger that the tail will wag the dog – the LEP will impose its own logic on the Council.
Time is running short and the trade union movement in Birmingham, let alone the users of services, are still largely unaware of the threat that BSF poses. We have three urgent tasks: to find out what the BSF contract says about outsourcing; to spread information as fast and as widely as possible; and to gear up for a campaign to defend services against privatisation through BSF.
Academies
The second form of privatisation I want to talk about is Academies. I think everyone here knows what they are – in short:
- state schools
- secondary or all-through
- under private school legislation
- funded directly by government
- outside LEA
- run by private sponsors
- not for profit
- sponsors pay up to £2 million (often much less)
- government funding of up to £35 million for building
- government pays all future costs
- sponsor owns the land and buildings
- sponsor appoints a majority of the school governing body
- appoints and promotes staff
- freedom over staff pay and conditions
- freedom to devise the curriculum
In Birmingham 6 existing schools are planed to be replaced by Academies, with sponsors as follows:
Shenley Court and Heartlands – Edutrust (a newly-formed charity led by Lord Bhatia, which has never run a school)
St Albans’s and Harborne Hill – Ark (a charity set up by hedge fund investors.They already run several Academies in London))
Sheldon Heath – King Edward VI Foundation (who run several private and grammar schools in the city)
College High – sponsor not announced yet
In addition there is a seventh proposed Academy – the Eastside Creative Media and Arts Academy, and the threat, announced by the government last week, to turn some of the 27 so-called ‘failing’ schools into Academies.
So the stakes are very high. Academies aren’t run for profit (though who knows what a future government might do) but they are privatisation in the sense of handing over a public asset to private control. They also have damaging effects on neighbouring schools (for example by skewing their intakes to get more middle-class pupils and excluding high numbers of pupils). They are a threat to the very existence of a coherent and publicly-accountable secondary school system in Birmingham.
Why should we oppose Academies? For three reasons:
1. They won’t raise standards
2. They undermine local democracy and accountability
3. They are a threat to teachers’ and other school workers’ pay and conditions.
I haven’t time to go into all these in any detail, but briefly…
1. Standards
The government’s own commissioned evaluation, the Academies 4th Annual Report (PricewaterhouseCoopers July 2007) said the following:
‘…across the 21 Academies that were open in 2006, 40 per cent of pupils achieved Key Stage 4 Level 2 (5+ A*-C)… When compared to other similar schools, the level of performance in Academies in 2006 was similar to the two comparison groups (both 41 per cent compared to the Academy average of 40 per cent)… (PWC 2007, p36)
What the report is saying here is that Academies performed no better than similar schools which are not Academies. This is in spite of all the hype, all the extra funding, all the expertise which sponsors were supposed to bring. In short, it completely undermines the government’s claim that Academies do better.
Those that did improve did so for two main reasons: they changed their intake to admit more middle-class pupils (who tend to do better in exams), and they entered pupils for easier exams. See the Anti-Academies Alliance website for more information.
2. Democracy
A community school governing body has one-third elected parents, and places by right for elected staff representatives. An Academy governing body has a majority of governors appointed by the sponsor. There is only one place by right for an elected parent, and none at all for a staff governor.
Academies are not part of the local authority (in spite of the pretence by BCC) so they are not accountable to councillors or through the ballot box.
Edutrust and Ark, as well as many other sponsors, want to set up chains of Academies (in effect rivalling LEAs), in which case the key decisions are not made by the governing body but by the central board of trustees or directors.
Finally, the so-called consultation process is completely undemocratic, because the case against Academies is not allowed to be put and because the decision to have an Academy has already been made behind closed doors.
3. Workers’ pay and conditions
Academies are set up under private school legislation, so they are not bound by national pay and conditions agreements – in fact they don’t even have to recognise unions at all. Ark has just admitted, contrary to what BCC has been promising, that it won’t pay teachers on the national scales, and moves up the scale are dependent on their own performance management system. Teachers at two schools in Bolton and one in Derby are currently involved in strike action over pay if their schools become Academies.
Furthermore, any agreements or promises the sponsors make today they can break tomorrow, and there is nothing parents, school workers, students or Birmingham voters can do about, even though we pay for it through our taxes.
The Eastside Creative and Media Arts Academy
This is a proposal for a regional Academy in Birmingham, based in Eastside, geared to the ‘creative industries’, and admitting students at age 14 and 16. The sponsors are Birmingham City University (formerly the University of Central England) and the Ormiston Trust, a local company involved in both sponsoring Academies (2 in Sandwell, 1 in Walsall, 1 in Essex) and in the project management of Academy proposals.
All our arguments against Academies apply to this one, but there is one feature of the Eastside Academy which is different from all other Academies – it is going to select all its students. 300 pupils will be selected for admission at age 14 and the rest at 16. It claims that it will select by ‘aptitude’, but all the evidence about forms of selection indicates that they turn out to be forms of social selection. You just have to ask yourself, who will be the students most likely to demonstrate ‘aptitude’ in the arts? It will be those who have had the private music lessons, who go to ballet classes, who belong to drama groups – and they will predominantly be those students from middle-class backgrounds. In Birmingham 33% of pupils are on free school meals. How likely is it that 33% of the Eastside entrants will be? How likely that young people from poor areas such as the King’s Norton estate, with 45% on FSM, will be fairly represented? Isn’t it much more likely that the Academy will be more like a new grammar school in the city, specialising in the arts?
The Eastside Academy will damage other schools, in two ways. First, it will undermine other schools and colleges specialising in the arts – schools which do not have the luxury of creaming off the most talented students.
Second, it serves to legitimise the principle of selection on other grounds, so that it can be applied throughout the school system under the rubric of ‘diversity and choice’. It is no accident that two days after the Eastside Academy plan was launched by Birmingham City Council on 13 December 2007, Tony Howell said that some children should have the option to leave the classroom at 14 to learn a trade (BBC News 16 December). The consequence would be an even more socially-segregated school system.
The threat to the 27 Birmingham schools
Ed Balls, the current Secretary of State for Education, Children and Young People, announced last week that 638 secondary schools in England in which 30% of pupils did not achieve 5 ‘good’ GCSEs including English and maths in 2007 may be turned into Academies, into Trusts (a sort of Academy-lite), or closed. This applies to 27 schools here in Birmingham, which represents 36% of the City’s secondary capacity.
These 27 schools serve the poorest areas of the city and have high levels of FSM, yet the majority of them are succeeding against the odds. 18 of the 27 Birmingham schools have Contextual Value Added scores above the 1000 threshold (including five of the currently proposed academies), demonstrating that pupils are making above-average progress. The large majority of the 27 also have favourable Ofsted reports which praise the schools for improving. But in spite of this they are to be dragooned into becoming academies, trusts, to be twinned with ‘better performing schools’, or simply closed. Apparently the government will decide on their fate, on the basis of unknown criteria, in the autumn term. £400 million will be allocated to ‘support’ the 638 schools, but most of it is to pay for them to become academies and trusts, not to support teachers in the classroom.
This is a brutal attack on the school system in Birmingham, and in particular on working-class schools, which will throw the 27 schools into turmoil. Labour is ‘acting tough’ in order to shore up its failing school policies and impose more Academies and trusts. It attempts to be a ‘quick fix’ solution to the issue of raising standards of attainment in socially disadvantaged areas which contradicts everything we know about the process of improvement. It can only increase instability and anxiety in these schools, leading to demoralisation and problems of recruitment among students and staff.
AABA, the Alliance Against Birmingham Academies (which is supported by the NUT, NASUWT, ATL, Unison and GMB), has called for a collective response, rather than leaving each school to battle on in isolation, and a community response, in which every parent, every student, every citizen who is affected can participate. It has called on the Local Authority to arrange an initial meeting of governors, headteachers and teachers, school unions and parents’ organisations of the 27 schools as soon as possible.
So far the campaign against Academies in Birmingham has had only a limited response from teachers, parents and school workers, compared to campaigns elsewhere. This needs to change. We have been winning the battle of ideas – everyone in the country knows now how contentious the policy is – but we risk losing the struggle on the ground here in Birmingham. It is no exaggeration to say that the future of secondary schooling in Birmingham is at stake.
To contact the Alliance Against Birmingham Academies; phone 07842199352 or email no2academies@hotmail.co.uk
