Schools for sale: big business gets involved..
worried teacher | 09.07.2004 16:25 | Sheffield
'The entrepreneur bidding to take over the Marks & Spencer company is venturing into education, announcing plans to sponsor 50 comprehensive schools today.
Teachers and everyone else should be very worried about this kind of involvement he who pays the piper calls the tune...'
Green plans £1.25m schools sponsorship
'Charles Clarke, responded by saying: "This is a significant and exciting new partnership. "It's just the sort of relationship between schools and business that is at the heart of much of our five-year plan for education.'
This is very disturbing, business will now directly (instead of covertly)have an direct impact on education and teaching,Philip Green's Arcadia group will give around 50 schools up to £1.25m, a maximum of £25,000 each, as they seek to become specialist business and enterprise colleges. Having the power to directly appoint Governors, obviously business and commerce specialist schools(orwellian title)will have a particular ethos not conjusive to challenging the status quo.
This is serious stuff, the Jusuits once said, 'give me the child at seven and I will give you the man' and one only has to look at the City Academy sponsered by a North Eastern businesnam where creationism is taught, are we going backwards to the 19th century? However, as usual the left/anarcho, direct action scene focus on the 'sexy' issues: peace, refugees, environment (just count the posts on here)to the exclusion of such on here. One day it will be too late and we will have a nation of Thatcherite consumer aotomatons. er, I think we may already have...
I wonder if trade unions will be able to so the same?
Polly Curtis and agencies
Friday July 9, 2004
The entrepreneur bidding to take over the Marks & Spencer company is venturing into education, announcing plans to sponsor 50 comprehensive schools today.Philip Green's Arcadia group will give around 50 schools up to £1.25m, a maximum of £25,000 each, as they seek to become specialist business and enterprise colleges.
The move is part of the government's specialist schools programme, which will see every school bidding for extra funds for one subject area. Such schools are expected to use their specialist subject - sport, IT, maths or arts among others - to drive up standards across the curriculum. The programme expansion was announced yesterday as part of the government's five-year plan for education, which will also also see 200 new privately sponsored city academies set up. Mr Green, whose latest bid for Marks & Spencer was rejected by the retailer yesterday, said he would be helping to develop his future employees. "I really wanted to support the 11 to 16 age group in encouraging and developing these young people's entrepreneurial talents whilst they are still at school, as well as helping to prepare them for work by teaching them industry-related skills."
Pupils at the schools in question would get work experience and careers advice from Mr Green's empire, which would also provide governors, Arcadia said.
The education secretary, Charles Clarke, responded by saying: "This is a significant and exciting new partnership. "It's just the sort of relationship between schools and business that is at the heart of much of our five-year plan for education." The Specialist Schools Trust welcomed the announcement and said it would work with Mr Green in selecting the comprehensives to benefit from his sponsorship. Specialist schools have to raise £50,000 in sponsorship as part of their application. If schools can show that they have developed expertise in one area and are exploiting it to raise standards in other subjects, they will receive up to £600,000 extra from the government over four years.
'Charles Clarke, responded by saying: "This is a significant and exciting new partnership. "It's just the sort of relationship between schools and business that is at the heart of much of our five-year plan for education.'
This is very disturbing, business will now directly (instead of covertly)have an direct impact on education and teaching,Philip Green's Arcadia group will give around 50 schools up to £1.25m, a maximum of £25,000 each, as they seek to become specialist business and enterprise colleges. Having the power to directly appoint Governors, obviously business and commerce specialist schools(orwellian title)will have a particular ethos not conjusive to challenging the status quo.
This is serious stuff, the Jusuits once said, 'give me the child at seven and I will give you the man' and one only has to look at the City Academy sponsered by a North Eastern businesnam where creationism is taught, are we going backwards to the 19th century? However, as usual the left/anarcho, direct action scene focus on the 'sexy' issues: peace, refugees, environment (just count the posts on here)to the exclusion of such on here. One day it will be too late and we will have a nation of Thatcherite consumer aotomatons. er, I think we may already have...
I wonder if trade unions will be able to so the same?
Polly Curtis and agencies
Friday July 9, 2004
The entrepreneur bidding to take over the Marks & Spencer company is venturing into education, announcing plans to sponsor 50 comprehensive schools today.Philip Green's Arcadia group will give around 50 schools up to £1.25m, a maximum of £25,000 each, as they seek to become specialist business and enterprise colleges.
The move is part of the government's specialist schools programme, which will see every school bidding for extra funds for one subject area. Such schools are expected to use their specialist subject - sport, IT, maths or arts among others - to drive up standards across the curriculum. The programme expansion was announced yesterday as part of the government's five-year plan for education, which will also also see 200 new privately sponsored city academies set up. Mr Green, whose latest bid for Marks & Spencer was rejected by the retailer yesterday, said he would be helping to develop his future employees. "I really wanted to support the 11 to 16 age group in encouraging and developing these young people's entrepreneurial talents whilst they are still at school, as well as helping to prepare them for work by teaching them industry-related skills."
Pupils at the schools in question would get work experience and careers advice from Mr Green's empire, which would also provide governors, Arcadia said.
The education secretary, Charles Clarke, responded by saying: "This is a significant and exciting new partnership. "It's just the sort of relationship between schools and business that is at the heart of much of our five-year plan for education." The Specialist Schools Trust welcomed the announcement and said it would work with Mr Green in selecting the comprehensives to benefit from his sponsorship. Specialist schools have to raise £50,000 in sponsorship as part of their application. If schools can show that they have developed expertise in one area and are exploiting it to raise standards in other subjects, they will receive up to £600,000 extra from the government over four years.
worried teacher
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unbelievable
09.07.2004 16:54
Business class
Under Labour's plans, corporate sponsors can buy and run schools - and all for peanuts
Francis Beckett
Friday July 9, 2004
The Guardian
The government's big idea for education turns out to be the one the Conservatives invented 19 years ago, and abandoned as a failure shortly afterwards. It is even run by the same man: Cyril Taylor, the businessman appointed by the Conservatives in 1986 to create 30 city technology colleges. He is now Sir Cyril (apparently because of his services to education) and chairman of the Specialist Colleges Trust. To him fell the honour of trailing in the press the plan to create 200 city academies, on the CTC model, almost a week before it was officially announced.
It's because their most dogmatic and divisive education policies have been adopted by New Labour that Conservatives are rushing into the mythical place to the right of Thatcherism, where nought but dragons dwell.
They have learned something from the Conservative failure. In 1986, the then education secretary, Kenneth Baker, announced that business would pay "all or most" of the estimated £10m cost of a CTC. The Tories quickly found that business did not fancy paying up anything like as much, and were forced to drastically revise their expectations downwards.
Labour wants only about £2m from its sponsors. What will happen is what happens every time governments try to palm off the cost of education on to business. It's what killed CTCs, as well as David Blunkett's education action zones. Within a few months we will hear that cash isn't required - contributions in kind will do. Business contributions for Mr Blunkett's action zones included construction giants Mowlem and Laing in Newham offering to show pupils round their training centre and asking whether they fancied a career in construction. That went down as a £40,000 contribution to the zone.
For £2m, less than a fifth of the likely cost, the business owns the school and gets the right to put its name and logo on it. It gets to decide what specialism the school has and, within the limits of the national curriculum, what subjects are taught. It can even impose its own ideological slant on the teaching.
the doctor