But still nobody did anything. The TUC delayed calling a national demonstration until March the following year. The disabled, poor and vulnerably housed, with nobody to speak up for them, still hadn’t had their voices heard. Until at last, the government went too far, forgetting they were attacking a group notorious for activism – the students.

We were furious. Furious not just for ourselves but for everybody cut down by the Tory-led government. We knew they were attacking those with no voice. Well, we had a voice, and we were going to make it heard. Come November, we ran along the streets enraged. We smashed into the Tory HQ, we ripped out their pot-plants and burnt their sofas. Reporters asked me ‘Do you think the violence is justified?’ Who cares, I answered, if it’s justified – it’s inevitable.

Students didn’t ask me that. They screamed as they were batoned, and they bled freely from their heads. And they pushed back wave after wave of heavily armed police trying to reinforce those trapped between us and Millbank.

The atmosphere was incredible – fury, but most of all the possibility of fury, the meeting of so many who found that they hadn’t been the only ones shouting at the TV. I remember paraphrasing Dylan to a friend. Today, I said, you could light a cigarette on a parking meter.

The NUS panicked, and condemned it as the work of ‘anarchists’, forgetting that anarchists can be students too. Later, pictures showed how few of us were masked or carried black flags. But they didn’t support a student demonstration again.

Ministers appeared on the television, saying they would not listen to us. We didn’t care. They had to listen to us, and they knew it. And so they did the most damaging thing they could possibly do: they brought the vote forward.

Although we marched again several times, although on the day of the vote our fury at Millbank was even greater, when the vote passed through by that tiny margin, the margin that the abstaining Lib-Dems could have destroyed – that looked like the end of our movement, in truth.

I had my head bashed in that day by police who charged us when I had my back to them. I spent the evening in hospital, bleeding from the head and vomiting. The next day, I wrote my account of what happened. It ended:
‘I hear Bob Brecher has suggested the police were ordered to scare protesters into not coming back. I’m coming back. They have no idea how strong they’ve entrenched hatred in me, hatred for their actions, their facelessness, their carelessness, their inhumanity … We’re all coming back.’

But I was wrong. After that day, the energy in the protests subsided. The hate was there, true enough. But as the government so cynically calculated, they’d taken the hope out of our movement. They’d make us question the worth of protest.

The anti-EMA protests were a brief flicker of hope, but no 10.11.10. And I write this on 30 January, the day after the large anti-education cuts demos in London and Manchester.

It was dispiriting. A friend of mine remarked on the wide age range there. It’s only wide, I explained to him, because all the young people aren’t here, so they no longer make up the majority. The chants were half-hearted, the dancing to the dubstep sound systems self-conscious. I could swear the police were laughing at us. There weren’t speakers there to keep up our energy. Perhaps they felt there’s nothing to say.

The weakness in our movement last year was that although the students were militant, they had no support except verbally from a few MPs (I’m thinking mainly the human dynamo that is John McDonnell), individual trade union leaders, and of course the organised far left activists such as the SWP.
This doesn’t seem fair. When protesters broke into Millbank, they released a statement that said: ‘We stand against the cuts, in solidarity with all the poor, elderly, disabled and working people affected. We are against all cuts and the marketisation of education. We are occupying the roof of Tory HQ to show we are against the Tory system of attacking the poor and helping the rich. This is only the beginning.’
So who’s standing with us students? As the wind of hope goes out of our movement, where are the unions picking it up? Where are the strikes and blockades, where is the Labour leadership?
This article was supposed to be about the strengths and weaknesses of the student movement. But the student movement could not have been more brilliant. The weakness is that of others, not falling in step to mobilise.
We students can’t carry this movement by ourselves.

MYTH: The fee rises and public funding cuts to universities are fair – graduates should pay for their university education, not everybody else
The coalition argues that since graduates are the main beneficiaries of a degree, it is fair that they should pay for that degree. The structured repayment scheme for students has even led to claims that these plans are ‘progressive’.
However, the idea of the public ‘funding’ higher education through taxes is something of a myth. In reality, university graduates actually provide a profit for businesses and taxpayers through higher income tax contributions. Statistics from the OECD show the net profit from funding a graduate, recouped through social contributions and tax, averages £56,000 over a lifetime. It is true that under the tiered debt repayment plans people on higher incomes would pay a greater proportion of their fees than those who are poorer. But the focus on repayment plans deliberately dodges the issue that taking on up to £50,000 in debt is a massive psychological disincentive that will be felt most keenly by poor‑to-middle-income families.

MYTH: University reform will save money and balance the deficit
Many of the cuts proposed by the government are unlikely to actually save any money, and higher education is a case in point. Despite currently being funded with a comparatively very low 1.3 per cent of the governmental budget, universities employ 2.6 per cent of the country’s workforce and generate 2.3 per cent of GDP (figures from Universities UK). The cuts to universities will cause significant job losses and some institutions will go bust. These redundancies cost money in the short-term, and welfare costs will also rise.
Meanwhile, money saved in subsidising courses and research will be required to fund the massive expansion in lending. The Higher Education Policy Institute recently concluded that the government will be spending so much on increased student loans that increased fees will not save any public money.

MYTH: Student numbers are unsustainably high now, and so cannot be funded by the public any longer
Universities in the UK receive far less funding than in most OECD countries, which have higher levels of student numbers. Student numbers (currently around 36 per cent of young people) are higher than previously but similar increases have taken place across all OECD countries in recent decades. Britain has below‑average participation levels overall, ranking below Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic (Education at a Glance 2010, OECD).
Vice-chancellors have been complaining for many years about underfunding, and until recently their target was the government. This is because the government has been spending a modest 1.3 per cent of GDP on higher education. This compares with an OECD average of 1.5 per cent. The United States, despite huge contributions by individuals, spends 3.1 per cent; Canada, South Korea, France and Scandinavian countries also spend substantially larger proportions of public money on universities.
Neither student numbers nor public spending on higher education in the UK are at unsustainable levels. If anything, targets for public spending on higher education and levels of university participation should be increased.

MYTH: British universities won’t be able to compete internationally without ‘reform’
Fee rises have been introduced to substitute for massive cuts in public funding, not to improve university performance. The proposed enormous higher education budget cuts will clearly damage UK universities, not help them.
The coalition’s disregard for the well-being of educational institutions is most apparent in arts, humanities and social sciences, for which it has decided to virtually discontinue its financial support. The government’s reforms entail a shift of the burden for university funding from the public budget onto students. But British universities will continue to require financial support to maintain and increase the impact of their research, and their appeal when it comes to research contracts and international students. Students’ university fees will simply not cover the costs in some departments, irrespective of their research standing. The tripling of university fees is ‘necessary’ to safeguard standards only because of this government’s refusal to subsidise higher education as a public good.

MYTH: The proposed changes won’t affect student numbers and won’t prevent access for poorer students
The government, backed up by vice-chancellors from the 20 Russell Group universities, denies that the huge increase in fees will deter potential students from university. They claim that increases in student numbers since the 2006/7 introduction of top-up fees is evidence to the contrary.
Closer analysis of the impact of top-up fees, however, reveals a decline in participation precisely from those eligible to pay them. Poorer students (those below the median household income) paid no increase in cost or in debt levels due to the introduction of grants up to nearly £3,000 alongside more bursaries.
The numbers of students who did experience these rises in fees, those from the four higher social classes, declined from 43.8 per cent to 40.6 per cent (BIS, The Impact of Higher Education Finance on University Participation in the UK, September 2010) in the year of the increase. Even looking at families most able to pay the £1,800 increases in fees there was still a significant reduction in access, despite the doubling of available loans. Students could borrow to pay these fees, yet they were still deterred from entering higher education – this shows that fees, even in the form of debt, negatively affect access. Increases of up to £6,000 on top of these levels are therefore certain to hit participation levels very significantly.
There is no equivalent package to that introduced in 2006/7 to lessen the impact of these new changes or protect prospective students from the huge increase in debt. A tiny £150 million (coming from scrapping free school meals) will be spent on new scholarships for the very poorest.

MYTH: Top universities have been taking in more poor students, promoting social mobility
While 36 per cent of students go to university, there is vast inequality in the student population. 19 per cent of young people from the least advantaged fifth of the population go to university compared to 57 per cent from the most advantaged (Office for Fair Access, Fair Access Report, 2010).
Although this is actually a marked improvement since the 1990s, the 20 most selective institutions have not increased their percentage intake from the least advantaged areas at all over the same time period. The increases that have taken place are almost entirely in former polytechnics and others outside of the Russell Group universities.
The government’s near-privatisation of university education, and the ensuing ‘competition’ envisioned by Lord Browne, is expected to promote the expansion of some universities while allowing others to close. The institutions that will suffer the most will be those outside the core of the existing big, well-funded institutions – precisely those that young people from poorer backgrounds would attend. Moreover, the evidence shows that any system of bursaries and loans has little positive impact on the likelihood of poorer students applying to and attending more selective universities, so the new scholarships are unlikely to address any of these inequalities.
The government’s statements on higher education cuts are designed to provide bland reassurance. They mask a brutal attack on university education as a public good. We cannot allow them to be its epitaph.

We fought back hard using a variety of tactics, which escalated over the long struggle to save the sports ground. It began with the usual meetings, pickets of council meetings, letter-writing and petitions. The council was embarrassed but determined to proceed. We knew we were gathering support and in 2006 their stance against the academy played a key part in the Lib Dem win at the council elections (see box, right). The academy was withdrawn – victory.

A few months later, however, it was all back on the cards. The new consultation was even more of a con than the first one and we treated it with the contempt it deserved. Meetings were disrupted and we even took over one and ran it ourselves. We produced a number of scurrilous broadsheets – scurrilous because the truth was scurrilous! Eventually we occupied the sports ground. This started with just two of us striking up a tent and then others joined us.

The original sponsor of the proposed academy backed out – but another group stepped in: ARK, a group of multi-millionaire hedge fund speculators (leading lights are Arki Busson, Paul Marshall and Stanley Fink), who worked closely with all three main parliamentary parties to ensure that they stayed on board with their privatisation agenda.

Our occupation continued. Our protest actions included building tree houses on the site, numerous public meetings, forming an alliance with the local residents association, organising a ‘flash camp’ for a week outside the town hall, launching a legal challenge, getting thousands to sign our petition, having over 100 camping on the site overnight, and having many hundreds visiting during the day and supporting some of the fundraising events.

We left after six months when the lease on the sports ground was extended for a year. Then the council reneged on that agreement and moved to evict the people who ran the site, including a nursery. We occupied again but this time they went for court orders. The fantastic support meant even this had to be delayed. We held a rooftop protest by camping on the roof. Finally, in July 2009, after we had been evicted, another group reoccupied the site before being violently removed after a couple of weeks, when the whole sports ground was secured with guard dogs patrolling.

We held up the process for five years, which we consider a partial victory. We have to remember that we are in a war to save state education and we will not achieve complete victory in every battle. In making it increasingly difficult for the privateers, though, we start to turn the tide. Our action spawned others all over the country, including the occupation of the school roof at Lewisham Bridge, which defeated the academy proposal there, and a victorious campaign at Royal Docks school in Newham against ARK taking it over.

It is important to hang on to these facts just now, because we are facing a wall of propaganda from both media and politicians claiming the opposite is true. It is a dangerous game, as it unsettles many parents. But it has a driving purpose: to pave the way for and justify the most ideological and reckless set of ‘reform’ proposals for a generation.

No one would deny, least of all me, as the chair of two school governing bodies in inner London, that the status quo is not good enough. The gaps in attainment between the best and worst off pupils are still too great. But that is also an issue for society in general, as around 80 per cent of a child’s life chances are determined by influences outside the school. Without action on poverty, income inequality, poor housing and neighbourhood renewal, schools will still struggle with their most vulnerable, needy pupils. However, the sort of changes being set in train risk undermining the good work schools can do, and may undo much of the recent improvement.

Cuts will invariably affect the most vulnerable children because non-statutory services such as extended schools, Sure Start and parenting programmes will suffer. The shameful decision to axe the Building Schools for the Future programme, leaving 700 schools without the new buildings they had been promised, will have a similar effect.

Clear agenda

Meanwhile, the ‘review’ of school capital spending has a clear agenda: to bring as many private, and profit-making, providers into the state education system as possible; to build ‘free schools’ for individual parent groups; and to encourage a massive expansion of academies – independent state schools that are answerable directly to the secretary of state, not their local communities, via a commercial contract.

These plans risk several things. Creating surplus places in areas where they are not needed will damage existing schools, which may lose pupils (often taking the most challenging in their place) and revenue funding, which in turn usually leads to cuts in staff, difficulties in recruitment and a downward spiral. The Tories like to describe this sort of ‘competitive’ pressure as healthy because it leads either to improvement or closure. The reality is very unhealthy. Schools die slowly, and being a pupil while that process takes place is not a pleasant experience.

They will also increase the number of schools with ‘freedoms’ in areas such as admissions, special educational needs (SEN) and exclusions. There is evidence of academies already operating unofficial quotas of SEN pupils and very high exclusions. And wherever you give schools more freedom over their admissions, they inevitably find ways of admitting the children who are easier to teach and somehow lose the ones who are the hardest, usually to the local maintained community school.

Even if the new funding agreements – commercial contracts that govern academies and free schools – do include requirements to have regard to SEN legislation and the admissions code, they will be impossible to enforce with thousands of schools run from the centre and no role for local authorities.

The new proposals will lead to more profit-making companies involved in state education. Most parents won’t actually be able to set up schools on their own, which is why the New Schools Network, run by a former adviser to Michael Gove and already given £500,000 by this government, is pointing them in the direction of private ‘partners’. This fits neatly with the avowed aim of the coalition to ‘reduce the size of the state’. But the Gove plans will be divisive and create ill will in communities across the country where some parents and children will see others benefiting at their expense.

Radical reform

The risk for those who oppose the current direction, and did so when the last Labour government set it in motion, is that we will be characterised as anti-reform and anti-school improvement. We are not. There are many radical reforms that would work in favour of a high quality, equitable and democratically accountable schools system, if only politicians on our side had the courage to articulate them.

The first would be to bring all independent state schools back into the maintained system, where the rights of pupils, teachers and parents are properly protected. ‘Independence’ is not a magic bullet that will guarantee success. The patchy record of the existing academies makes that clear.

The second would be to champion the role of local authorities, not in ‘running’ schools, which they haven’t done for several decades, but in ensuring fair funding, encouraging collaboration, holding the ring when it comes to special needs, admissions and exclusions, and as providers of high quality early years provision.

Then we could promise a complete overhaul of school admissions, abolishing selection by ability and outlawing other forms of social selection that continue to discriminate against the poorest children.

Heads and teachers should have more autonomy over what and how they teach, but every child should also have an entitlement to a broad, balanced curriculum and a simplified system of qualifications, not the hotchpotch of different exams we have now.

Schools are not businesses. They have a wider function in society. Many of the things they do, like inclusion, community cohesion and looking after children with special needs, are hard to quantify and don’t lend themselves to a profit-and-loss approach.

But it is standards of teaching and leadership in schools that really matter, not structures. If there is spare cash around, it should be invested in staff, IT and the sorts of facilities that our new political leaders were able to enjoy in their elite fee-paying schools, not diverted into the pockets of private companies.

Most parents want some choice, not of schools that are radically different, but of good local schools with balanced intakes, well-resourced buildings, good behaviour, teaching and leadership. The good local school, offering a high quality education to children from all backgrounds, is a simple, powerful message. If you want to fight back on behalf of local schools, rather than new, or free ones, get in touch on truthschoolsat]googlemail.com or via my website [www.thetruthaboutourschools.com

Michael Gove’s Academies bill makes two equally regressive proposals, which, if realised, will seriously threaten comprehensive education in England. Firstly, it encourages maintained schools to convert to independent academies free from local authority control. Already head teachers from outstanding schools have been invited to apply for academy status.

Secondly, it proposes that groups of parents or teachers apply for funding to start their own free school – ‘DIY schools’. A move that would drain the existing local school of finance, resources, pupils and staff: threatening its very existence.

Grove has already vetoed Labour’s extension of the free school meals programme affectively blocking 500,000 children below the poverty line claiming a meal. This money taken from the poorest children in our society, as well as money from the Building Schools for the Future programme, will fund the free schools ‘experiment’.

As the bill is fast-tracked through parliament it raises many questions and answers few. How will new academies select their pupils? How will they ensure that children with additional needs are supported? Who are these schools accountable to? To what extent will the private sector be involved in sponsoring these schools? And, perhaps most importantly of all, will this not create a two-tier system education system? For Alasdair Smith, National Secretary of the Anti-Academies Alliance, the answer to the last question is a resounding yes, ‘… academies plans threaten to create a system of the ‘best and the rest’ … For every free school, another will have to shut’.

The Resistance

On Thursday 24 June, under the dome of Westminster Methodist Hall resistance began to be organised under the positive banner, ‘a good local school for everyone’. Over 250 attended the Anti-Academies Alliance public meeting, including teachers, head teachers, governors, parents and union members. Christine Blower, general secretary of NUT described the nationwide alliance as ‘a large coalition opposed to the government’. The hall buzzed with a heated discussion, centered around one pressing issue: the defence of state education.

Executive union representatives from education and public sector unions, education campaigners and a head teacher spoke at the meeting.
Parent campaigner Fiona Millar stressed that as funding would be diverted from maintained schools to start up free schools, communities up and down the country would be split. She went on to state: ‘Don’t believe Michael Gove when he says that academies will have fair admissions policies. It will be impossible to enforce them and academies will find ways of admitting those who are easier to teach.’

Indeed academies are well known for having stringent admission policies and only allowing those children in who are likely to boost the school’s league table results.

Maintained schools are under a duty to accept all those in their catchment area. In contrast, academies are under no such obligation and those who do not meet the standard – such as children from difficult backgrounds or vulnerable children with additional support needs -will inevitable fall through the gap. As one concerned parent put it, ‘Our kids will be fighting for their lives.’

Many parents at the meeting expressed anger at the sheer undemocratic nature of the bill. Not only were they not consulted on whether their child’s school should apply for academy status but, if made reality, the school would be accountable only to governors and the secretary of state. Parents, teachers, local councilors and thus the community at large would be excluded from any decision-making process. What appears to be freedom would be greater central control.

Paramjit Bhutta, a head teacher in Tower Hamlets, spoke of his experience working in a maintained school and an academy. He shared how under a maintained school he was accountable to a local authority whose inspectors ‘got under the very skin of the school’ to ensure assessment accuracy and openness. He argued that any school who achieves an outstanding Ofsted report does not do so in isolation but with the in-depth advice and support of the local authority, ‘In my borough 78 per cent of schools are good or better. They didn’t become so by being independent.’

Privatisation of state education

Christina McAnea from Unison highlighted the fact that free schools and academies will be allowed to enforce their own flexible pay and conditions on staff. Chartered schools in the US are a good example of this. In New Orleans, where chartered schools have sprung up in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, many request that teachers work longer and longer hours with shorter holidays. A key question facing chartered school leaders is ‘how to maintain momentum as teachers inevitably … burn out.’

Another example, this time closer to home, can be found in Crest Boys’ Academy in Brent, north-west London. This is one of the UK’s most deprived boroughs and several academy staff are facing compulsory redundancy. At the same time E-Act, the charitable trust that runs Crest Boys’ Academy pays its director general, Sir Bruce Liddington, a staggering £265,000 a year. Clearly in many academies not only are pay, conditions and standards lax but so is their conception of equity and justice.

Alasdair Smith spoke of how this was essentially the privatisation of state education. This point is perhaps one of the most worrying for anyone who maintains that ‘private profit and public service are irreconcilable’.

Grove has admitted that he has no objections to private profiteering in education. But it is simply inconceivable that we could let ex-weapons manufacturers and hedge fund managers run our children’s education.
As free schools will need advice, support, and facilities, no longer provided by the local authority, they will turn to private providers to supply the teaching and it is profit not children that motivates these companies. As Nick Grant, from the NUT, has forcibly argued:

‘Like all capitalist companies these private providers want to make profits, and they do so by shrinking each school’s pay bill. This means employing many fewer qualified teachers and using much more ICT-based and assistant-supervised rote learning.’

What to do next?

As the meeting drew to a close, Christine Blower pointed out that as the list of schools expressing interest in becoming academies will be published, it is imperative that staff and parents find out if their school is on the list.
If so, those involved with the school must urgently begin a local campaign by petitioning, public meetings, leafleting, writing to MPs and engaging with parents and governors. It is essential to demand a full and proper consultation before any resolution is reached.

Blower stressed that while strike action is always an option, it cannot be fully effective without broad support. Many at the meeting believed that if parents and the wider community knew all the facts regarding academies and free schools the majority would join the struggle.

For more info or to get involved visit: www.antiacademies.org.uk