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NEWS • VIEWS • INFORMATION • ADVICE


If it is not acceptable to ‘sell’ off the nation's health to privateers, why is it acceptable to sell off our children’s education?

Turn on any news channel, open a newspaper and one of the hottest topics for debate is the reform of the NHS.

The Liberal Democrats are in open rebellion. The Prime Minister has been forced to make a personal, public commitment to protect the NHS from his own government’s policies. So fierce has been the debate that even BBC news commentators appear to have rediscovered, at least on this one issue, the art of critical analysis of government policy.

The press, public and politicians are, quite rightly, united in their deep concerns about the implications of the provisions of the Health Bill on the values and ethos of the NHS and its potential to compromise universal access to quality health care according to need.

The lobbying and public outcry has led to intense pressure on the Coalition Government to give more detailed consideration to the Health Bill, particularly, to enable detailed and thorough consultation with healthcare practitioners and the general public. The indecent haste with which the radical reform proposals were being pursued could have led to serious and adverse unintended consequences.

A major concern expressed about the Health Bill is that it will create a market in the NHS giving access to a range of private providers and yet another Bill, which will have similar consequences for another major public service, is winding its way through the parliamentary process, virtually unnoticed, unremarked upon and unimpeded.

The Education Bill is set to put in place the final piece of the jigsaw of the marketisation of state education, handing ownership and control of schools to any willing private sector provider. Appropriate safeguards are completely absent, enabling the programme of academisation to sever links with democratically accountable local authorities and sweep aside parents’ rights and entitlements.

The Secretary of State for Education’s academisation project is being rolled out with the same undue and unnecessary haste that has generated such an outcry on the Health Bill. Without providing a scrap of evidence that academy conversion raises standards of education, which surely should be the key test for any change to education provision, the privatisation process, from which the Prime Minister has declared he will protect the NHS, is being railroaded through the state education system and will have an equally damaging impact on the values and ethos of state education as the NHS reforms will on health provision.

The DfE’s obsessive pursuit of academy conversion is resulting in public and employment law being flouted, as schools, working without challenge from the DfE and indeed in some cases encouraged by it, make covert decisions to apply for an academy order.

At a time of savage cuts to education budgets, which are causing the closure of vital services and massive job loss, schools are spending thousands of pounds of public money on engaging consultants and seeking legal advice to drive through conversion.

Concern for our own and our families’ health understandably provokes an emotional attachment to the NHS and a desire to protect it with which other public services find it hard to compete, but the same principled stand is required on the Education Bill that is being taken on the Health Bill. A delay to the passage of the Education Bill through Parliament and a temporary halt to the granting of any further Academy Orders, to enable a rigorous examination to be conducted on the potential implications on state education and on the processes being used currently to convert schools into academies, is required urgently.


"The press, public and politicians are, quite rightly, united in their deep concerns about the implications of the provisions of the Health Bill."


"Yet another Bill, which will have similar consequences for another major public service, is winding its way through the parliamentary process, virtually unnoticed, unremarked upon and unimpeded."


"The Education Bill provisions will complete the ideological assault on state education. They undermine the rights and entitlements of parents."


Further information, analysis and guidance on the NASUWT’s response to the Education Bill and the Union’s fight to protect state education can be found at www.nasuwt.org.uk/ChampioningEducation