Defend adult ed, defend ESOL (PR5)

Adult and Further Education is in crisis. The retiring Joint General Secretary of the University and College Union (UCU), Paul Mackney, slammed government policy. At the recent UCU Congress, he described Labour’s approach as “grounded in amnesia from the back of the Fag Packet Institute”.

Attacks on adult and further education are not new, but there has been a shift in both the ideological underpinnings and the severity of the attacks over the past year. There are two distinct, but interrelated, themes: withdrawing the right of asylum seekers, migrants and refugees to study for free, which will hit ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) particularly hard; and the move to a “demand-led” system, “employer engagement” and the widespread privatisation of the sector.

From September, asylum seekers will have to wait six months before being eligible for free classes. Recognised refugees and working migrants will have to pay – some colleges will be charging around £300 for a part time class, and anything up to £1,770 for a full time class. This is despite the fact that around 80% of working migrants earn less that £5.99 per hour.

These “reforms” are intended to deprive migrants, specifically from central and eastern Europe, of access to free English language learning. Even the Sun noted that if people fail to access ESOL in the first six months of their arrival they are unlikely ever to begin learning English. “Learn Our Lingo” screamed its headline on 11 June – but for many this will simply be impossible. A survey of ESOL students in south London found that 41% could not afford to pay.

The attack is fuelled both by cost-cutting and by Labour’s general strategy of demonising asylum seekers, refugees and migrant workers, yet it is aimed at people who are pivotal to Britain’s current economic “success story”.

Adult education policy is increasingly being driven by neoliberalism, as well as racism, with a push to “engage” employers. As Chancellor, Gordon Brown commissioned the recently published Leitch Review of Skills, and its recommendations make grim reading: a greatly increased role for employers in “educating” their workforce; Individual Learner Accounts; and “contestability” – meaning that colleges will have to compete with private training providers for government contracts. This would all result in a fragmented and privatised adult education system run by, and for, the bosses.

Paul Mackney said of Leitch’s report: “Employers have failed to meet the country’s training requirements; without change there’ll be serious skills problems; the solution is to put the employers completely in charge . . . It’s a good diagnosis but poor prescription – a bit like trying to cure diarrhoea with dysentery”.

But the shift towards an “employer-focused” agenda is already underway. Colleges up and down the country are setting up “Business Development” units – all of which are failures!

The National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education (NIACE) reported that the number of people in work and studying actually fell by 8% last year. As funding moves towards only those courses and qualifications valued by the bosses, potential students are voting with their feet. In 2005-06, the number of 19-29 year olds in further education fell by about 10%; the number of pensioners by 26%, and adult and community learning by 10%.

An eighty year old student was quoted in the Guardian asking: “Why do they give me a free TV licence but take away my keep-fit class?”

The answer is simple. The government is opposed to any notion of collective lifelong learning provision, save that which the middle classes can afford and “business” is willing to pay for.

In the face of these attacks, both students and adult education teachers are becoming more organised and militant. The UCU has led the campaign, but it has so far kept the ESOL issue separate from the wider campaign to defend adult education.

The campaign to defend free ESOL has been successful in mobilising teachers, students and the wider community and in forcing some concessions – notably allowing asylum seekers the right to free classes after six months. UCU organised a well attended lobby of Parliament in February, with a further lobby of Downing Street in June. Activists up and down the country have organised local demonstrations, including large protests in Bradford and Sheffield.

In London, under pressure from campaigners, and from a growing revolt amongst MPs reaching into the Cabinet itself, Mayor Ken Livingstone announced a further £15m for ESOL provision. The fact that this concession was announced after a 1,200-strong rally in London in April, with three feeder marches convening in Hackney, was no coincidence.
The success of the London demonstration is all the more encouraging given that it was organised by an ad hoc campaign group of UCU activists and members of the local refugee community, with minimal help from full time officials.

At the same time as announcing extra £15m for ESOL in London, a further £25m was found for adult education in London as a whole, to make up for a 6-7% cut in funding and to avert massive redundancies. These small concessions prove that militant campaigning works. This extra injection of cash is only a partial solution, given that the entire system is in crisis. The money is a stop gap measure for one year only, and colleges outside London will get nothing.

On the issue of teaching redundancies, the threat of industrial action has also forced concessions. A ballot for strike action in London in June initially involved 12 colleges, with a high vote for strike action. As the union had demanded any extra funding be used to save provision and jobs, those colleges imposing compulsory redundancies were progressively reduced to just one, with Hackney Community College coming out on strike alone. Even though the action was a success it is shameful that the union allowed Hackney to strike in isolation. Where unions and employers have negotiated to prevent compulsory redundancies, voluntary redundancies may still mean that provision will shrink, with lost learning opportunities and teachers’ jobs under threat next year.

Redundancies are equally evident across the country. At Harlow College UCU members went on strike for three consecutive days in June – an unprecedented development in a sector which rarely sees anything more than one-day strikes over pay. Harlow is an extreme attempt to reform adult education along neoliberal lines. Unless management is defeated, 35% of teachers will be placed on support staff contracts, resulting in a loss of pay of up to £10,000 a year. A ten hour weekday at work will be imposed, along with the requirement to work on Saturdays and, under new contracts, staff can be sacked for failing to “live the vision”.

Clearly, the scale of these attacks is much wider than simply a bread and butter issue of jobs. They are fundamentally political in nature, rather than the result of colleges being unable to balance the books, and they demand a political response from the union.
On the one hand migrants are demonised for failing to integrate, yet are denied the very means to do so. There is the stated intention of a “world class” adult education system, yet redundancies and funding cuts threaten the system’s ability to meet even the government’s own targets.

Ministers talk of the need to “professionalise” the “learning and skills” workforce, yet casualisation and poor rates of pay amongst adult education teachers persists. Government policy is a mess and adult education is paying the price.

The union needs to answer this crisis with a campaign linking the issue of redundancies and funding cuts to the attacks on migrants and asylum-seekers, drawing in other trade unions and community groups. We need a national Campaign to Defend Adult and Further Education. Such a campaign should fight alongside other education workers in primary and secondary education in opposing city academies and the creeping privatisation of schools.

UCU activists should send a message to the government and the employers: any attempt to impose redundancies, scale down contracts, privatise provision or charge fees will be met with massive strike action – organised with the support of the union leaders or independently of them if necessary.

In this campaign communists need to raise our own alternatives to Labour’s neoliberal model of education. We want schools and colleges which are run under the collective control of education workers, students and local communities themselves, and which are paid for by taxing the enormous wealth of the super-rich and their corporations. We fight for a democratic education system responsive to the communities this system serves, not the imperatives of capitalist profit.

James Drummond / Hackney

UCU in a personal capacity

Mon 08, October 2007 @ 20:05