EDUCATION CUTS DON'T HEAL - £2bn CUTBACKS

In 1996, at the Labour Party Conference, Tony Blair famously stated that his top three priorities on coming to office were 'education, education, education'. In 2009, as the New Labour project drifts inexorably towards its terminus, Ed Balls, now the Minister for Education, has set out to cut £2bn from schools funding, which is 5%.

Throughout the duration of the New Labour administration, there has been tolerance of, followed by flirtation with, followed by an opened armed welcome to, market forces. New Labour continued in much the same vein as Thatcher - favouring deregulation and free trade, neo-liberal policies and privatisation. Despite their spin in the run on to 1997, Labour were evidently not the new modest socialism that the country voted for. In fact, the gap between rich and poor has grown under Labour - as can be seen here.

And now the shit has well and truly hit the fan. Banks are collapsing, big businesses such as Woolworths have disappeared from the highstreet, small vendors are being forced to close their shops, the nation is in huge personal debt, our industry is being outsourced to countries with a less expensive labour force and there are close to 2.5m unemployed. And who is going to foot the bill?

Of course. It is us.

The government plans to make its biggest cuts in public services - in health, education, housing, justice, culture... And the first minister to declare the cuts in his department is Ed Balls (ever willing to please the Prime Minister). The plan is to reduce the number of headteachers and senior management - federations of schools will develop meaning a management team can run numerous schools simultaneously to save money. This comes only months after the very same department welcomed the need for greater personalisation of educational provision, in the form of personal tutors and so on. Balls seems to be of the opinion that headteachers are little other than bureaucrats - commodities - that can be disposed and dispensed at will. Balls, in his wisdom, feels this will not affect the quality of teaching.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Balls said “If we are going to keep teachers and teaching assistants on the front line, that means we are going to have to be disciplined on public sector pay, including in education.” How fucking generous of him. It's nice that he is showing the courtesy to those working in education by not getting rid of their jobs to plug a deficit caused by his party's wanton liberalism, it's nice that he is only going to curb their pay. He is quite the altruist. Similarly, after asserting he hopes that comprehensives may come together into federations with a single headteacher and a number of deputies, he adds "But we are not going to have larger class sizes." Again, very generous, despite the fact that class sizes are already too large, are having a detrimental effect on learning and are affecting those of lowest ability the most.

Schools will also be expected to cut back on their purchasing of books, teaching equipment and computers and individual schools are expected to make 10% spending cuts.

My God. Education is Labour's pride and joy, along with the NHS. If this is what the government is doing to Education, I dread to think what will be cut in other public services. The issue is that school children and teachers should not be punished for the laissez-faire capitalism of City bankers and the governments selective myopia. I don't know how Ed Ball dares state that he is doing something good by the teachers by not kicking them out of their jobs to save money.

If Balls is looking to make some saving cuts for his department, he should look a little closer to home. The DCSF which Balls heads most probably has more than its fair share of policy wonks - certainly enough to be able to churn out contradictory policy findings and agree with both, before deciding they haven't the money for either. Or maybe Labour should cancel its commitment to ID cards, or to Trident, or call back the troops - all which are far less necesssary and financially gumptious.

This does not bode well. Cuts may well be necessary, but certainly not in education.

WHAT WILL THE TORIES DO?

Tomorrow is GCSE Results Day and Ed Balls plans to mark this occasion with a 'scathing attack' on the Conservative plans for education under the shadow schools secretary Michael Gove.

The Labour Schools Secretary will attack the Tories plans to create a two-tier system, in which academic qualifications are held in much greater esteem than vocational qualifications - this will effectively force schools to push unsuitable students into academic disciplines in order to keep up in the insane league tables game.

Before looking at the Tory proposals which Balls is attacking, let's make sure we're not making a good guy/ bad guy scenario. The last 12 years of educational policy under Labour have hardly been in the spirit of equality and cohesion. Labour have encouraged private businesses and dubious entrepreneurs to buy failing schools and do as they want with them. Under Labour, the gap between rich and poor has expanded, with obvious repurcussions on education. Although I'm tending towards agreement with what Balls will say tomorrow, it's more out of opposition to the Tories than out of loyalty to NuLab's education ideas.

Balls proposes that Gove's policies will expand and entrench the 'academic'/vocational divide. The fundamental problem with exacerbating this divide is that it inevitably dichotomises into good/bad. Achievements in mathematics, sciences and languages are held in particularly high esteem by the Tories - it may not only be vocational education that is put at risk, but also those A Levels that are often derided - Media Studies, Psychology, Sociology. These A Levels have a higher take-up rate in comprehsive schools, and I see it as no coincidence that it is these subjects that are looked down upon by the Conservatives. In the case of Sociology and Media Studies, maybe the dislike is something to do with the fact that these two subjects open students eyes to the workings of our modern society and our modern political sphere. Sociology equips students with a working knowledge of inequality, so it is no surprise that Gove and co favour 'hard' subjects. Physics won't expose the flaws in their policies.

Gove's recent statement of intention to 'overhaul' the league tables by according different weighting to 'harder' subjects is laying the groundworks for further divisions to be introduced. A better overhaul of league tables would be to scrap them.

What is blazingly apparent is that the Conservatives are offering nothing new - merely their old policies repackaged, with Cameron tying a ribbon of lexical obscurity around it. The Tory's plans to split and divide academic from vocational learning flies in the face of Labour's attempts to bridge the two through the Diploma scheme. The plans also suggest a move towards a tripartite system for the 21st century. I've heard the virtues of grammar schools being expounded with increasing frequency recently. This is all well and good for those 11 year olds who pass the 11+ - less so for the 80% who failed and were effectively abandoned in the underfunded secondary moderns. Think Billy Casper.

Although Balls is by no means the flagbearer for a perfect education system, I am more concerned with the encroaching Jolly Roger of Gove and his retro-conservative band of picaroons.