Education

Achieving control of Ruskin College was central to the WEA/extension project. From the summer of 1907 onwards, its supporters threw themselves into open propaganda, behind-the-scenes lobbying and bureaucratic manoeuvring — all aimed at purging the college of whatever stood in their way. As well as setting up the committee to oversee the writing of Oxford and Working-Class Education, setting out the structure and to some degree the content of study at Ruskin College, the August 1907 Oxford Delegacy/WEA conference also set up an Oxford Tutorial Classes Committee, with Oxford tutor William Temple...

Sheila Cohen (NUJ/UCU) discusses the sorry state of trade union studies (courses accredited by the TUC and available at a variety of further education institutions) and what can be done to promote independent working-class education. Like so many other things during the long New Labour years, trade union studies has become wrapped in an incomprehensible coating of jargon and bureaucratese. The structure and content of Stage One Reps’ courses and others is now dictated almost entirely by something called “accreditation”, ie criteria for awarding the qualification, which itself sits meanly in...

Under the pressure of rising working-class self assertion across the country, the University extension movement accepted Albert Mansbridge’s scheme for tutorial classes and committed study (as opposed to more “popular” bigger lecture classes). This acceptance was spearheaded by a group of young, socialistic Oxford tutors. Supported by prominent figures in the church, civil service and ruling class generally, members of this group worked with Mansbridge himself and the other main Workers’ Educational Association activist, J MacTavish, to produce a report, Oxford and Working-Class Education. In...

Frances Streeting works as a teaching assistant in a secondary school. Tell us a bit about the work you do. I work with students who find it difficult to keep up with their learning. My role is to ensure that they can be included in mainstream class, helping them get their work done or at least achieve something. Teachers always say “if that teaching assistant wasn’t in my classroom, I wouldn’t be able to teach”, so we’re pretty central to the needs of students in school, in terms of their learning and their care. Some of the children we work with have got problems in their lives that I as an...

We reject these cuts as simply malicious ideological vandalism, hitting the most vulnerable the hardest. Join us in the fight It is time to organise a broad movement of active resistance to the Con-Dem government's budget intentions. They plan the most savage spending cuts since the 1930s, which will wreck the lives of millions by devastating our jobs, pay, pensions, NHS, education, transport, postal and other services. The government claims the cuts are unavoidable because the welfare state has been too generous. This is nonsense. Ordinary people are being forced to pay for the bankers'...

Speeches from the opening session of Ideas for Freedom 2010, "How do we fight the Tories' plans for schools?" (10 July) The chair was Gemma Short, a first year teacher and AWL member from Sheffield. Jean Lane, teaching assistant and UNISON activist in Tower Hamlets I’d like to concentrate on the cuts we’ve faced up until now and how they are going to multiply in the coming period, particularly after the October spending review. Turning outstanding schools into academies is going to take money out of the central Local Education Authorities that fund all of the schools in their area and all of...

The Workers’ Educational Association was founded in the early 1900s by Albert Mansbridge. Part 1 Mansbridge was exactly what the Christian socialists in the university extension movement hoped to produce: a working-class person who believed in harmony between the employers and the workers, and who thought adult education could bring this about. Mansbridge came up with a solution to the extension movement’s problem of not attracting a sufficient number of workers to its project of preaching class harmony. This solution was the tutorial class. The Education Act passed in 1902 was shaped by the...

The campaign to keep philosophy at Middlesex University is all but over, and has effectively failed. The management has not backed down on its decision to close the department. They have not budged an inch. Why the hesitancy in giving this assessment? Some of the people that took part in the campaign are proclaiming a victory. The research school, the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), has been snapped up by Kingston University, along with four of the six Middlesex staff: Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward, Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford. Postgraduate students enrolled with...

The management at Middlesex University have decided to axe the world-renowned philosophy department. While the department is very successful - philosophy is the highest research-rated subject in the university - it just doesn't make quite as much money as other departments. The staff and students were told the shocking news on 26 April. The staff and students set up an online petition, which you can sign http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/save-middlesex-philosophy.html. The students were due to have a meeting with the Arts Dean Edward Esche on Tuesday 4 May in the morning, and assembled in...

Labour’s manifesto commitment to “take over” the 1,000 least successful secondary schools in the UK (slightly less than a third) was not much more than an extension of an already existing policy. But it did have echoes of the kind of education policy the Tories’ Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families Michael Gove has been saying. Except that Gove goes that little bit further. Gove says much more of the state’s education functions can be handed over to private business (they could take over schools and make a profit if they want). For Ed Balls, who wrote the manifesto, if...