‘Take charge’ of change says UK speaker

Bill Greenfields…has a chat at annual conference.

by Kerri Carr

The role of trade unions needs to be that 'we take charge of the process of change' for public education, delegates to Federation annual conference heard on July 2.

Britain's National Union of Teachers National Vice President Bill Greenshields said: "I'm comforted by the fact that the Chinese have no single character for "crisis" but instead "dangerous opportunity".

"I think that's the way we have to regard the world situation we are facing -- one full of dangers but also one full of opportunity and clearly we need to maximise the opportunity and minimise the dangers.

"I believe the world it full of dangerous opportunities. Together we can win -- another world is possible. Solidarity forever!" he added later.

"We have to build a level of opposition which is so broad and deep seated that it can challenge these big international pressures on government and it is a massive task for educational trade unionists," Mr Greenshields said.

"We need to be part of a wider movement that rejects the fundamental inequalities of our globalised societies, rejects the social mechanisms that sustain that inequality, and works strategically against these," he also said.

Mr Greenshields also spoke about the British experience, where following the ousting of the Tory Party the people faced New Labour, which also set about attacking state comprehensive education.

Mr Greenshields explained that during the Tories' time in government, where "comprehensive education was held to blame for everything from poor television to gang violence to teenage pregnancies and for the entirely fictitious declining educational standards" and there was a funding famine for education leading to crumbling school buildings, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were at the heart of a group that declared Labour "unelectable" for as long as it was identified with working class and progressive politics -- including progressive educational policy. They embraced the "free market" and "globalisation", rather than the weak form of social democracy that had gone before, as the salvation of humankind.

He said when Labour came to power it had two main policy strands for education: "Diversity and Choice" (based on "fragmentation, marketisation, commodification and privatisation") and "Every Child Matters" (based on schools working together to share expertise and professional development).

"Every Child Matters has been marginalised...in order that the diversity and joyous competitive agenda should be accelerated," he said.

Mr Greenshields said educational opportunities for children, the duties, pay, conditions and status of education workers and the very existence of state comprehensive education have been threatened under Labour's approach to public service reform.

He identified areas of struggle to include the attempted substitution of colleagues without teaching qualifications, teacher workload, teacher stress, performance related pay, curriculum change, testing and "league tables", public-private partnerships, the establishment of "academic" and narrow "vocational" curriculum pathways.

"To read the Government documentation you'd think we'd be pleased...because its all about choice, diversity, flexibility, innovation, expansion of opportunity, but I refer you...to Blair's two great challenges of modernisation, that is, the global market and making sure than government does not provide all welfare services," Mr Greenshields said.

"Thatcher never dared to propose the privatisation of schools. Now we see a Labour government putting much more money into schools...but generally taking that money to take us further along the 'direction of travel' towards privatisation."

For more about Bill Greenshields' address, including a video, click here.

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Last Modified: 27 Jul 2007