From Workers' Liberty Teachers NUT conference bulletin 2007
The Unicef survey into the well-being of children across 21 industrialised countries placed the UK 21st out of the 21 countries surveyed.
A staggering 16.2% of British children fall below the poverty line, the second worst in the industrial world. The atrocious record of the government on child poverty was further exposed last week when figures showed the number of children living in relative poverty had increased by 200,000 to 3.8 million.
Martin Narey, chief executive of Barnardo’s and by no stretch a radical socialist, said, “This is a moral disgrace. In 1999, we were all excited by the government’s determination to eradicate child poverty and, on the way, to halve it by 2010.
“We are a country where we can countenance individual bankers getting annual bonuses of £22 million while we give a family of two parents and two children, living on benefits, £10,000 to live on for a whole year.”
"At last a budget which business can be pleased about"
As if to rub salt into the wounds of those once regarded as the bedrock of Labour support, Brown’s budget abolished the 10p income tax rate, reducing the annual income of anyone earning under £16,000 at a stroke. Meanwhile, the rich gained millions through a cut in the basic tax rate and reduced corporation tax. "At last a budget which business can be pleased about", said the chief of the right-wing Institute of Directors.
A government with this record on child poverty can make no claim to be concerned about the welfare of children, including their educational welfare. Indeed, it is schools serving our most socially disadvantaged areas that are the most likely to be failed by Ofsted and then vilified in the media.
Learning from Finland
Much of the debate in the media so far has been about families and relationships with little focus on education and schools. Yet the report placed Britain 4th from bottom in terms of the educational well-being of children.
Our government is obsessed with competition, privatisation, ‘standards’, testing and league tables. In contrast the Finnish government is more concerned with equality, democratic public control and the emotional well-being of children. Interestingly they top the Unicef table for educational well-being by a mile.
The Finnish education system is based entirely on comprehensive schools. Schools are relatively small and teach children from 7 to 15 years, with no primary/secondary transfer at 11. This removes the unseemly and destructive scramble for school places at the age of 11 which characterises our system.
School meals are free to all pupils and there are no university fees and students can stay in the upper secondary stage (loosely equivalent to sixth forms) for up to four years. Contrast this to the means tested school meals and fees system in England.
The Finnish Education minister said in 2004, "We don't divide at an early stage between students who do well and those that don't manage so well in schools. Studies show that it is dangerous to divide too early into different educational paths.
"We believe that if we invest in all children for nine years and give them the same education then we will reach the best results."
Can anyone imagine a Labour or Conservative Education minister making such enlightened comments. Instead they promote a dog eat dog environment in and between schools. Here constant testing pits child against child, league tables pit school against school and the media is obsessed with so-called ‘good schools’ and ‘bad schools’.
The Finnish do not hand over large amounts of cash to private business people like Djanogly and Vardy – schools are run democratically by local authorities and children go to their local school. Finland also has among the smallest class sizes in the OECD. The result? Pretty much unmitigated success.
The result of the Blair experiment in tests, privatisation and competition with investment targeted at anything but reducing class size? Unmitigated disaster for the children and staff in our schools. Recently the East Midlands BBC programme ‘Inside Out’ ran a story about John Illingworth, one of thousands of teachers driven out of schools by the madness of New Labour’s education policies. But the problem is more than just teachers on the edge, it’s students stressed out (as confirmed by Childline research) by a constant diet of exam pressure, an uninspiring, highly regulated curriculum and government imposed league tables. In such a climate is it any wonder that nearly 60% of UK children aged 11, 13 and 15 cannot say they find their peers “kind and helpful”. This is nothing short of a catastrophe.
It’s long past time for the media to do a serious analysis of New Labour’s policies for education. It is those policies that cause teachers to leave the profession, children to become increasingly unhappy and strikes to occur at schools like Colonel Frank Seely in Calverton.
It is those policies, despite huge amounts of money spent on pet projects - like the proposed additional academies - which dazzle some parents and transfix the media but put the UK in the dire position identified by this excellent Unicef report.
Liam Conway, Notts NUT