Though Cowards Flinch

Ed Balls has become the first government minister to lay out where he thinks the cuts should be made in his department. Stressing that front-line teachers and teaching assistants would be kept, with money being saved through cutting ‘bureaucracy’, Balls has basically outlined the basis for the government’s strategy of ‘good cuts’ versus (one presumes) the Tory policy of ‘savage’ or ‘bad cuts’.

There were several proposals made. First, three hundred jobs in Whitehall will go – jobs described as “field forces…that advise schools on the curriculum”. Next, comprehensives across the country will be pushed to create ‘federations’, where a single management team of head and deputy heads will manage more than one school (a system sporadically in use at the moment). Finally, through ‘natural wastage’ some senior positions in schools – presumably deputy and assistant head positions – will be phased out.

All of this is part of a strategy to slash the education budget by £2bn. At first glance, a lot of teachers will think “phew” – except that Balls also mentions “pay restraint” (in non-Whitehal lingo that means pay rises below the rate of inflation or none at all, so essentially pay cuts). Even still, teachers are not indifferent to the plight of other government workers, and in some areas local government is slashing wages by up to a third, with workers voluntarily accepting this because the alternative is mass redundancies, so the overall response will probably still be “phew”.

A second glance is needed, however. While most teachers think that headteachers and their lackeys could maybe find their arsehole with both hands, a map, a compass and a flashlight, the scale of the cuts is likely to impact upon frontline teaching staff. The proposed saving tots up to £750 million, between sharing out headteachers and deputies over schools and not replacing retirees; I’d have to look at the figures to establish just how much of that is directly related to not having to pay salaries, pension contributions etc – but we’re talking in the region of 8000 staff.

That’s 8000 of the people responsible for supporting ‘frontline’ services. Whether it’s child safety, training for newly qualified teachers, PGCE or GTP student-teachers, best practice sharing with other primary and secondary schools, pastoral support or parent-teacher relations, heads and deputies perform an important function. That’s before we talk about even more central, if banal, activities such as funding negotiations, departmental budgets, hiring and firing and the school timetable. Cutting headteachers and deputies means cutting some of these services.

Do heads and deputies work four times as hard as the basic teacher? No, I wouldn’t say so. I think the pay disparity between the two sets is ridiculous – with teachers on around £22,000 and some heads earning around £100,000 per year. There is no skill possessed by headteachers and deputy teachers that warrants such a salary. This isn’t the tack taken by the government, however. What they are saying is that the same number of functions can be done by less people – and I don’t think that’s true on such a large scale as is suggested.

Cutting these auxiliary functions means impacting on frontline teaching (not to mention that quite a number of heads and deputy heads double as teachers in their own right), whether or not we’re laying off teachers, or even recruiting them at the current rate. It bears pointing out that if budgets are squeezed, teachers will not be replaced and class sizes will creep up. It’s also true that if admin functions are put under more pressure, it follows that those heads and deputies who teach will no longer be able to teach – increasing class sizes that way.

Further, all of this assumes that current levels of staffing are sufficient. I think there’s a fair case to make that they aren’t. The government can try and make out that by protecting the current number of teachers, a service is being done to the teaching profession – but it’s not like state education is perfect to begin with. We need more teachers, not less. We need smaller classes and more TAs, not the same number of each. Essentially the Labour Party is abandoning progress (at least temporarily) in deference to ‘the Recovery’.

One can argue for or against such a proposition, but it makes it all the harder to bear when there is still a glut of conspicuous consumption ongoing in this country and across Western Europe – on the part of politicians and business. Something this government has done nothing to arrest, even while the rest of us are being asked to tighten our belts, for Queen, Country and Lloyds Banking Group plc.

Nick Clegg doesn’t bother taking such a calm view of things, with his petty emotionalism on the Andrew Marr show; “It would be madness, absolute madness, as a society, to blight the life chances of the young as the economy comes out of recession…The people who’re least to blame for what’s happened are the very young. And if we want to make sure the shadow of this recession doesn’t hang over young people for generations to come: long term unemployment, social divisions then we need to deal with that.”

Won’t somebody think of the children? I’m sure the Opportunism Leader (er, Opposition Leader?) won’t be far behind him either. I agree that education shouldn’t suffer as a result of the recession – but that’s not to say there isn’t money to be saved in the education budget. Clegg’s is a knee-jerk reaction; whatever a Labour minister said, Nick Laurel and Vince Hardy would be all over it. The Tories, if they are smart will have a more intelligent critique to make – such as, if all this Whitehall bureaucracy is unnecessary, why wasn’t it cut years ago?

Small-staters will no doubt rejoice in the loss of three hundred Whitehall jobs ostensibly designed to support schools as part of the curriculum. After all, the national curriculum is an utter joke, oft derided and ignored in all but outline. That said, whatever we may think of bureaucracy, I don’t think these three hundred jobs should be cast away so lightly. They are there to support schools and teachers – and perhaps if teachers and parents had a say in what function these three hundred Whitehall staff performed at the heart of government, that support could prove invaluable.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be looking into exactly what that department did. I’ve already consulted a few other history teachers to ask them and none seem ever to have heard of it – but the national curriculum extends to all subjects, not just my own, and such a department may have relevance elsewhere. Primarily my interest is piqued and early warning radar set off by the manner in which Balls dismissed three hundred jobs as bureaucracy and therefore completely dispensible – hardly a credible attitude for the man in charge of the Department of Curtains and Soft Furnishings.

When it comes down to implementing all these changes, it will be the national teaching unions – including NAHT – which will set the tone of support or resistance to such changes. As I hope I have outlined, I think there is plenty of scope and reason for resistance, but what I’m most worried about is the shortsightedness of each group, the teachers, the headteachers and the ‘bureaucrats’, being a factor in frustrating co-operation in what could prove to be a serious threat to the services our schools provide.

Put in context, these cuts permit a wide-ranging debate on the future and organisation of education. A vast amount of the education budget is being spent on worthwhile programmes such as Extended Schools, which attempt to make schools a community nexus even for those whose kids aren’t attendees. For those who are, Extended Schools offer assistance with homework, healthy morning meals and other advantages. Yet around the edges of programmes like this, things are being held together with duct-tape: with already stretched staff taking on additional responsibilities for extra pay.

I think Extended Schools is something we should fight for, because it provides a physical centre for the delivery of services and a model – parent/teacher/student – of activist-led accountability in the provision of such services. Cutting back on senior staff will threaten the delivery of such services, and this should be all the motivation we need to get stuck in, our aim being both to secure the services and to redraw the relationship between ‘frontline staff’, service users and service managers – i.e. the senior staff currently in the firing line.

To protect their jobs, and prevent the overworking and understaffing of headteachers’ jobs, support will be needed from the teaching unions. Teaching unions, to do anything these days – being accused of everything short of terrorism when they go on strike – will need the support of parents. And in the delivery of services, a resource like 300 civil servants could prove invaluable – so lets all protect their jobs as well. Once the momentum has been seized from government, let’s use it to draw up the education system we deserve.

The bottom line is pretty clear; there are no such things as ‘good cuts’ when it comes to education and this is as good an opportunity as the profession is ever going to get to organize itself without being isolated by the extreme rhetoric of government, perchance to resist the oncoming bulldozer-cum-wrecking ball that is Building Schools for the Future. It’s a chance to gear up for the sort of local activism which seems to be increasingly necessary when we actually look at the agendas being proposed for local goods and services.