SPI Joe on Declining School Opportunities to Academy Privatisation

SPEye Joe, alias Welfarewrites, has written an extremely, and justifiably impassioned article condemning the Academy schools for denying children and their parents in Knowsley the opportunity to study for ‘A’ levels. All the schools in the area have, apparently, been taken out of the control of the local authority, and the private education corporations running these chains have decided it is not profitable or cost affective to offer ‘A’ level education in them. So, if you want to make sure your child has the opportunity to study for these qualifications, you’re either forced to find an FE college in the area, and I don’t know if there are any, or move. Naturally, SPEye Joe is absolutely furious. He writes

Education is the greatest thing we do. It is the greatest leveller. It is the largest component of our children and our children’s children getting on to have a better life that the one we had.

You can be as fit as a fiddle and lose you health. You can have millions in the bank and lose that in an instant. Yet whatever shit life throws at you, you can never lose your education is one of the old saws we all want to believe and do believe.

So when I read that Knowsley one of the 5 council areas in Merseyside now has no schools offering A level education due to education being taken out of all local authority control and passed to unaccountable businesses called Academies and is done so out directly out of Tory ideology and blind nonsensical fucking mind numbingly stupid ideology and that alone, it really is time to put the Tory Education Secretary to the firing squad in front of her entire family… or is it only acceptable for ranting wing buffoons such as Clarkson to say such things?

There are rumblings right across the media that teachers may strike and may join the junior doctors in that. If there is ever a reason for teachers to strike then surely denying children the right to education is the one issue that will engender the most public support.

The fact this is in Knowsley and close to home is not the issue. I would be in full blown rant mode if this was in Windsor or anywhere else in the UK when we have deliberate government policy of the abandonment of children’s educational life chances because of the market, which is what this is all about.

Profiteers out to make a quick buck have decided in running those excuses for educational establishments known as “Academies” that a whole generation of children living in Knowsley do not merit any chance of educational attainment.

That is a disgrace, an outrage of unbelievable proportion and quite simply fucking stinks.

He also takes good aim at the highly deceptive graphs the Torygraph has published to justify the Tory policy of privatising the education system. This, he concludes, is what Tory education policy amounts to. If the Academies believe that there is more profit to be made in writing off all the children in a particular area, and going somewhere more profitable, than that is what they will do. Leaving the children in the area to be written off as failure by prospective employers, as, through no fault of their own, they don’t have the required level education.

This is what happens when the provision of essential services are left to market forces. It’s why, before the establishment of the NHS, the poorer areas of Britain, especially the rural areas, were badly served for the provision of doctors. They preferred to go where it was more profitable, where there were large numbers of the wealthy, who could afford the costs of medical treatment. And we’re seeing very much the same situation developing now. A few years ago Private Eye reported how a set of GPs’ surgeries, which had been turned over to one of the private healthcare providers to run, had been closed down against the wishes of its patients, because the company considered them to be unprofitable.

Mike over at Vox Political and very many other bloggers have pointed out that the Academies actually perform poorly compared next to state schools. I wrote yesterday that my the logic of Adam Smith himself, the great, molten prophet of Free Market capitalism, worshipped by privatisers and profiteers, actually said that if industries, like those providing the public infrastructure, could not be run efficiently or effectively by private industry, they should be taken over by the state.

But obviously, Thicky Nikki and her masters in the Tory party and paymasters in big business, does not want that, or for anyone to believe it, as it contradicts the Thatcherite faith that private is always better, and prevents them getting hold of a potentially very lucrative service industry. And so our children are going to suffer a sub-standard schooling, which will leave thousands if not millions disadvantaged for life.

Tags: 'A' Levels, 'The Telegraph', Academy Schools, Adam Smith Free Market, Capitalism, doctors, FE Colleges, Free Market Ideology, Knowsley, Maggie Thatcher, Nikki Morgan, Private Eye, Private Healthcare Providors, Private Industry, SPEye Joe