How globalisation affects education

Neoliberal globalisation is characterised by a territorial and sectoral expansion of capitalism, and it is now reaching the education sector, which implies a change of the direction and the objectives which education has had for many years. It’s about abandoning the idea of “education as a public service, as a basic right of every citizen, with the objective of providing for every child and young person a comprehensive education”, and replacing it with an education at the service of the economy, understood now not as a universal right but as a personal investment. This new concept of education has two aspects: opening up the education market, which is calculated to be worth some 2 billion euros, so that private companies can do business in this market; and offering an education which is at the service of the employers, adapted to the needs of the labour market.

Another characteristic of this new stage is a growing intervention of international organisations in the field of education. The World Trade Organisation advocates the opening of the education market and the liberalisation of this public service. The World Bank “recommends” privatisation and business management of schools and colleges, competition between schools, the imposition of “basic competencies” which aim to orientate the contents of education globally, adapting them to the needs of employment, a reduction in public spending on education and an increase in individual financing (education, like every investment, has to be paid for), and a management of the education system capable of making the expenditure profitable and of increasing efficiency.

The OECD also advocates education policies at the service of the economy, to which one of the principal contributions is the famous PISA indicators, which aim to evaluate all the young people in every country of the world with the same tests, producing a league table of the “educational quality” of each country. In fact the ranking of the results of the PISA surveys ends up defining what is quality and, in an indirect manner, shaping the curriculum, since every country wants to move up the rankings therefore ends up teaching the sort of knowledge which coincides with what PISA evaluates

Finally, the orientations of UNESCO, the only institution made up of ministers of education, which since the 1970s has promoted education understood as a tool of emancipation, have today lost all their force and the institution now has no power.

Education and privatisation

The privatisation of education has a number of consequences which affect various aspects of it. 1) The transfer of public money to private profit, now that the majority of privately run schools are subsidised with public money. 2) The creation of schools of different quality, now that the subsidised private schools enjoy double funding: public, through the subsidies and the education grants, and private, through the fees which parents pay. The payment of fees serves in addition to select the pupils now that only those families which can pay them have the possibility of accessing these schools. 3) The ideological and political control, through the complete freedom which the private schools have to define their own “ideology”. An ideology which is mainly religious, now that most of the subsidised private schools belong to religious institutions which can carry out the transmission of their ideology, including contravening the law itself, with impunity, as has happened with the rejection of the subject of Education for Citizenship by the schools belonging to religious organisations. 4) The lack of participation by teachers and parents, and much less by pupils, in the running of the schools. While in the public schools at present the largest organisation is the school council, in which the whole education community participates, in the private schools it is the owners who give the orders. 5) The application of “business criteria” to how the schools are run, with the aim of financial efficiency: that always means worse conditions of work for the teachers (in fact teachers in the private schools earn less than those in the public schools and work more hours), and the rejection of those pupils who could be more expensive for the school: pupils with more difficulties, which means more attention and resources, are directed towards the public schools. 6) The absence of objective criteria for the contracts of the teachers: the only criterion to select teachers is that of the management of the school, in spite of the fact that teachers are directly paid by the department of education, and therefore with public money. 7) Freedom from responsibility in two respects: financial, in that the administration subsidises one part and to cover the other part the school is supposed to find a formula to provide the necessary resources; and also in respect of the operation of the school and the results, which are considered the responsibility of the owners of the school, not the administration.

Privatisation takes different forms. 1) The subsidised private schools, which today in Cataluña have reached 40%. These are privately owned centres, mainly religious, but financed with public money. 2) Outsourcing of services: at present almost all the services which support the education system are in the hands of private companies: cleaning, transport, school meals, education psychologists, IT resources and programmes, evaluations, etc, which means profits for private companies gained from public money, worse service and worse working conditions. 3) Municipalisation, which means the handing over of responsibilities in education to the municipalities. At the moment responsibility for schools from 0-3 years and adult education has already been transferred. Municipalisation also means differences in the quality of services and, in most cases, handing over control to private companies. 4) Finally, it is intended to implement, through the new Education Act of Cataluña, a third way: public schools managed by private organisations

The increasing privatisation has as a consequence an increase in inequality between schools, the marketisation of education and therefore a worse education for those families with less economic and social power. In this way education, instead of being an element of social cohesion and equality of opportunities, becomes more an element of consolidation and widening of social differences.

The new Education Act of Cataluña

The Education Minister, Ernest Maragall, presented the draft of a new Education Act in Cataluña, coinciding with the publication of various studies (PISA, Bofill Foundation) in which it was stated that the attainment scores of our pupils are below the European average. School failure was the axis of a campaign orchestrated by the Minister to justify the proposal of the Act, blaming the teachers and the organisation of the public schools for the bad results of the pupils.

The results of the research studies (PISA, Bofill Foundation) tell us that our young people are not achieving the best educational results in the European Union, but they also tell us that expenditure on education in Cataluña is among the lowest in Europe, that the cultural level of the adult population in our country is among the lowest in the EU and that in the countries which obtain the best results, as in Finland, 97% of the schools are public. Taking all this into account we can say that education in Cataluña is the “best possible” and that the work teachers are doing in the classrooms compensates a great deal for the structural deficits of our education system.

Boys and girls spend 30 hours a week in the classroom and therefore we must start to change what happens in these classrooms. And that is exactly what no one proposes. Intellectuals, politicians and technical experts, generally with no teaching experience with children or adolescents, put forward proposals, reforms and laws which respond more to ideological, economic and party political interests than to the real needs of the population.

It is evident that it is necessary to improve but unfortunately, the draft which the Ministry of Education has presented as the basis of a new Education Act of Cataluña don’t go in this direction but in the opposite. In fact it is an Act which is not based on any pedagogic analysis, which doesn’t make a diagnosis of the needs, nor proposes measures for improvement. The Act speaks only of management and privatisation, proposing a business model of the school and a hierarchical organisation of the school, opening the way to the private control of the public schools and prioritising provision by the subsidised private schools.

The proposals of the new Education Act have not been discussed or agreed by teachers and they are not even original. Concepts like “autonomy of the school”, “professionalised leadership”, “private management of public schools”, “evaluation”, “municipalisation”…are formulas which emanate from the leaders of the World Bank, the EU and the WTO, with the objective of subordinating education to the laws of the market, marketising it, to benefit private companies. This is a model which has already been applied in some countries (Britain, Belgium, United States), and not only has it not improved education, it has increased inequality.

What the draft Education Act of Cataluña proposes

The Act opens the way for private organisations to control public schools. A fact which will produce grave consequences as much for families as for the workers in the public schools. Everyone knows that when a public service is privatised (as is happening with nurseries and health, for example) the results are always the same: a worse service for the users and worse working conditions (precaritisation) for its workers. Because private management which doesn’t give priority to financial profit is impossible. Furthermore, to open this new way, the Act also clearly favours the subsidised private schools, stimulating provision which extracts more public money for schools run by private owners (in most cases religious).

The Act proposes an authoritarian management in the public schools. It intends to reinforce the authority and the functions of the leadership so that they can take decisions in the schools regardless of the teachers, the parents’ Associations and the school councils. It is clear that a management in which the leadership carries out their role on behalf of the owners will mean moving to a model of authoritarian management which will eliminate the participation and the decision-making capacity of the educational community in the management of the schools and will make working in a team, which is precisely the best guarantee of a good functioning of the school, difficult. To move towards this system will demand some changes in the present structure of the public schools, which will definitively put an end to their democratic control.

With the excuse of obtaining better educational results, the Education Act of Cataluña anticipates measures such as the leadership being able to select their teachers – a measure which intends to put the responsibility of school failure solely on the teachers and which furthermore is what is already put in practice in the private schools without them having demonstrated any improvement in results. And the results, as all the research shows, depend more on other factors which the Minister intends to avoid: the social and economic reality of pupils who fail and the lack of investment in Catalan public education.

It is proposed that each school can establish its own curriculum. The diversity of provision of the public schools will increase and inequality between the schools will be consolidated. Education is a universal right and not a commodity which can be bought according to the money you have. The responsibility of the public administration is to ensure that all citizens can take advantage of this right, independently of their social, economic or any other type of situation. Only in that way can education fulfil one of its principal functions: that of contributing to compensating for social differences in origin and consequently guarantee genuine equality of opportunities to all citizens.

The draft Act says nothing about increasing public investment in education, and intends the schools to look for ways of financing themselves, which will also increase differences between them, and which will depend on the possibility which each school has to obtain more funding: the district in which it is situated, the type of facilities, the possibility of parents paying fees, etc. We believe that it is the public administration which must ensure the necessary finance to every public school and to do that it is necessary to increase the budget for education and put more resources, human and material, in those schools which admit pupils with more difficulties.

It also proposes an external evaluation of schools which would enable the establishment of a league table of test results. An evaluation which will result in giving more resources to those schools which obtain better scores and not to those which have greater needs. These are the elements which the Minister hides and intends to disguise when he explains his model of school autonomy to the media and in public meetings.

Faced with the impossibility of establishing a dialogue with the Ministry of Education and the refusal of the Minister to withdraw the draft, all the education unions called a strike to demand its withdrawal, to oppose privatisation of public education and to defend their working conditions. Nevertheless this act doesn’t affect only teachers, it is a social question: a public education which guarantees equality of opportunity and social inclusion is the basis of a democratic society. If the public system is dismantled the whole of society will suffer.

Teachers in the public education system of Cataluña, organised by all the unions (USTEC-STES, CCOO, ASPECP-SPS, UGT, CGT) were on strike on the 14th of February, with overwhelming support and with a demonstration which filled the streets of Barcelona with more than 70,000 people – teachers, students and parents. The theme of the protest was for public education and against the proposals of the new Act.

Appendix: Richard Hatcher

The key theme of the draft Education Act of Cataluña is school autonomy. The draft Act says that “autonomy must be extended to all the aspects of organisation and management – pedagogic, organisational, managerial, financial, and human resources”. This is exactly the situation in England. Each school, primary and secondary, has the autonomy to decide on the curriculum (within the context of national education policy), methods of teaching, the organisation of the classes, the timetable, and the allocation of classes to teachers. Each school receives an annual grant from the local authority, a grant which it can spend as it wishes, although most of it goes to the salaries of the teachers and support workers. The school also decides what services it wants to buy – such as school meals, cleaning and maintenance – and where it wants to buy them. The teachers and support staff are appointed by the school, not by the local authority or the government.

The draft Education Act says: “autonomy promotes diversity among schools, and therefore diversity of provision”. “choice and diversity” has been a key slogan of the education policy of the Labour government, which it borrowed from the previous Conservative government. The draft Education Act of Cataluña criticises the present system in Cataluña for “excessive uniformity”. This is exactly the criticism which new Labour made 10 years ago about the comprehensive school system.

The draft Act says that “the Act will establish in every school a leadership which is competent, professional, trained, stable, recognized and with the capacity to take decisions”. It speaks of “the leadership function… with its own conditions of work and clearly differentiated from the rest of the teachers”. In England the role of the head teacher has undergone a profound transformation. The government has greatly increased their power, modelling it on the chief executive of a company.

In England every head teacher appoints some teachers to be members of the school’s “senior management team”. Perhaps this is what the draft Act means when it refers to “a professional team capable of ensuring the management of the school”, with teams of teachers grouped around a nucleus of professionals who identify them, lead them and motivate them”. In England, below the senior management team there is a hierarchy of other ranks of teachers, on different levels of salary, including ‘middle managers’ who have managerial responsibilities for other teachers. Perhaps this is what the draft Act has in mind when it speaks of teachers having “the possibility of accessing posts of greater responsibility”.

In England there is a new system of ‘performance management’ of teachers. Promotion within the school to better paid posts depends on an evaluation of each teacher carried out by the head teacher, and including the performance of the pupils. This is a powerful management tool, especially in the context of national salary increases below the level of inflation. Again, there are indications of this development in the statements of the draft Act: “the Act will establish a professional career which incorporates diverse promotion routes” and “A professional career linked to the evaluation of the performance of teaching”.

The draft Act says the following:

“The possibility of forms of indirect management of schools created by the Catalan government with the intention of exploring formulas which have been demonstrated to be viable in other countries and which foresee the maintenance of ownership of the school by the state, while various bodies undertake the management of the school and the organisation of resources.”

Private control of state schools for profit is permitted in England. The Education Act of 2002 obliges local authorities which want to open a new school, or ‘turn around’ a school which has failed its inspection, to invite proposals from external bodies, including private companies which would run the school on a management contract. For various reasons companies have not been attracted to this opportunity. Private control of state schools takes a different form – running Academies, which are state schools controlled and run by private companies, wealthy private individuals, and religious organisations, though not on the basis of profit.