Published in Education for Liberation (Spring 2016):
We face an unprecedented attack on education.
This government’s programme represents the culmination of
nearly forty years of neoliberal education reform. If completed, it will see
the end of state education, the complete deregulation of teacher supply, teacher
qualification and teacher pay, and the replacement of education with a market
system for the production of ‘human capital’ (as the DfE calls it), based on
low-risk strategies to achieve temporary competence in a narrow range of skills
for the purpose of passing tests.
If this sounds like an exaggeration, just look at the
development of testing and charter schools in the US, or the role of
state-funded for-profit education in Chile, or the growth of low-fee
profit-making schools run by big edu-business across Africa and Asia.
