Socialism as an idea and as a movement has a long history. But as a consequence of Thatcher’s election in 1979, the triumph of neo-liberalism and the collapse of Communism after 1989, socialism became unpopular. Key figures in Labour politics scrambled to avoid being described as socialists and political education and discussion was deliberately suppressed. Young people with radical sympathies turned increasingly to single-issue politics. All sense of direction was lost.

Yet the idea of socialism is arguably more relevant to humanity now than at its inception. The current construction of society is clearly unsustainable. We are degrading our environment to such an extent that we are on course for the planet’s sixth mass extinction. More immediately, there is the question of our response to current political developments, nationally and globally.

Something has to be done.

The purpose of our School for Democratic Socialism is to provide an opportunity for people of all ages and backgrounds to refresh themselves, or embark on serious study for the first time of key thinkers within the socialist tradition. This is not a school for dogma and we are not interested in “history for history’s sake”. We will approach our subject’s thought, and the historical movements to which they relate, in a liberal, critical spirit. We shall seek to understand, raise problems of interpretation, be open to criticism as well as approval, and evaluate and reflect.

The School of Democratic Socialism is therefore a school for co-operative dissent. We hold that while well-informed and free enquiry about our traditions is essential and will be our object, differences may well arise. The democratic exploration of the clash of opinion is necessary in finding viable ways forward.

Community of scholars

We welcome all who are interested in participating in this project. Some will have experience of study in the subject, while others have none, but we intend to operate in the democratic spirit appropriate to a community of scholars. Young people will be particularly welcome.

This programme will be carried out during 2011-2012. The plan is to devote two sessions to each topic. The first meeting will be devoted to introducing the topic and raising key issues for interpretation and discussion. It will provide guidance on reading. After a suitable interval for the completion of reading assignments, we will reassemble for further discussion and conclusions.

The programme will be facilitated initially by John Halstead, former tutor of miners, steelworkers, railwaymen, firemen and others undertaking adult education at the University of Sheffield. John was editor of the Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, and its successor Labour History Review, for many years; is a former Chair of the Society and is now a Vice-President. He is a long-standing Labour Party member and current Secretary of the Co-operative Party in Sheffield.

A steering committee is in process of formation to support the School. In addition to the Ken Curran and John Halstead, this will include Harry Barnes, former Member of Parliament for North East Derbyshire and philosophy tutor in adult education at the University of Sheffield, and Professor Andrew Gamble, formerly Professor at the University of Sheffield, now Professor and Head of Politics at the University of Cambridge.

The curriculum will be developed as we operate, but the first programme proposed includes the following:

• Tom Paine: his views and their relevance
• Robert Owen: his views and their relevance
• Karl Marx: what to accept and what to reject?
• The necessity and possibility of democratic socialism

A preliminary meeting of those interested will be convened to discuss the programme.

The venue will be:
Scotia Works
Leadmill Road
Sheffield
S1 4SE

The dates (all Sundays) will be:
Preliminary: 18 September 2011
Tom Paine: 9 & 30 October
Robert Owen: 20 November & 11 December
Karl Marx: 8 & 29 January 2012
Necessity of democratic socialism: 19 February & 11 March.

Assemble 13.30 each Sunday to start not later than 14.00 and finish at 16.00.

This series of meetings are part of a broader programme at the Scotia Works. The broader programme will include a series of occasional lectures by invitation from prominent speakers and personalities on topics important to the labour movement. These events will include space for informal social gathering as well as the lecture discussion at the premises of the Burton Street Foundation. An annual visit to the Working Class Movement Library in Salford or the People’s History Museum at Manchester is also planned.

Anyone interested should contact John Halstead on 0114 258 2541 or john.halstead@blueyonder.co.uk

Ken Curran is chair of the Manor and Castle Development Trust, a former trade union official and Sheffield City councillor, a Labour Party member and now chair of the Sheffield Branch of the Co-operative Party.

This initiative is supported by the Co-operative Party and the Sheffield District Labour Party.

Peter Wilby’s argument has two main problems. It only makes sense if you regard education as a commodity benefiting the individual rather than as a social good. He makes no assessment of the benefits to society of a well-educated population but just looks as the effects on individuals.

And it creates a false syllogism: access to higher education has increased in recent years; we have had student fees in recent years; so more fees will increase access even more.

Beyond that, let’s take a couple of his least sensible assertions:

“The post-1960s expansion of higher education benefited the less intellectually gifted middle class children and, more laudably, middle class girls. During those years the chances of a middle class child getting to university rose faster than those of a working class child.”

Of course it did, just as the creation of grammar schools benefited a small number of working-class children (my dad was one of them). But mostly it extended free high-quality secondary education to larger (though still selected) parts of the sociological middle class. The response was the creation of comprehensive schools that tried to extend the privilege to all (with varied results).

But to argue (in his next sentence) that “the gap between the social classes increased” as a result of greater access to higher education is just daft. It depends where you draw your boundaries. It certainly “narrowed” the boundaries between those who had normally enjoyed higher education and those who were narrowly excluded. His figures in the next paragraph are dependent on the fact that deprived neighbourhoods were starting from a low base. They say nothing about the actual numbers of students who benefited.

“To describe students as facing a lifelong ‘burden’ of ‘crippling’ debt is simply bizarre, particularly for a Labour leader who wants to replace the debt with a graduate tax that the rich would avoid as smartly as they avoid all other taxes.”

This comes from a man who appears to be comfortable with his financial position and doesn’t consider the viewpoint of those who aren’t. Debt is more frightening to poorer people than to richer people, for obvious reasons. The prospect of a hypothetical debt in his youth wouldn’t be frightening to Wilby as he now knows he would easily have been able to pay it off. But he can’t transpose his experience onto an 18 year-old from a family in a difficult financial position now.

And as for the arguments that the rich would avoid a graduate tax “as smartly as they avoid all other taxes” – then let’s abandon all other progressive taxes, shall we, as we know the rich will avoid them? This is just lazy stuff. (I don’t actually agree with a graduate tax: I’d just increase taxes on high earners more generally – but that’s another story.)

Most remarkable, and something that could only come from a man convinced of his own arguments, is this:

“Most bizarre of all is the argument that, because graduates of earlier generations benefited from free university education, they should not deny it to others. Should those who went to grammar school never argue for comprehensives, and those who inherited wealth never support higher estate duties? Should those who benefited from slavery not have supported abolition?”

No, graduates who benefited from free education enjoyed excellent opportunities because the authorities saw social worth in this. His argument adds up to saying that those who benefited from (free) grammar schools should have argued that comprehensives would be a good idea as long as we had spent the 1970s abolishing free education and creating fee-paying comprehensives only.

And without wishing to get all Marxist about it, the idea that the relationship between the beneficiaries of slavery and freed slaves can be equated to the relationship between people of different social backgrounds in Britain who might or might not aspire to higher education is utterly lacking in terms of class politics, and breathtakingly absent of any moral concept of slavery.

The last three paragraphs, where he defends the EMA, are the best in the article. But even here, Wilby creates a false dichotomy. He suggests that the campaign against fees somehow harms a campaign against the abolition of EMA. But why not campaign against both, as they serve similar social ends?

And the argument about the deficit is weak here – £3 billion is being cut from university tuition; next month, banks will pay out £7bn in bonuses to their own staff. This is occurring in a semi-nationalised, government-backed industry. It is largely public money. If you want to stop subsidies to the rich, why not start here, rather than raising student fees?

Peter Wilby’s article can be read here: www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/07/ed-miliband-tuition-fees-university

If you agree that education should remain a protected public good sign our petition!

There is widespread anger over the government’s higher education reforms because they represent the final transformation of our education system from a public into a private good. What we are witnessing is just the latest and sharpest manifestation of the remorseless process of commercialisation of our lives that creates insecurity, anxiety and sheer exhaustion because it piles all the pressure of coping on us as individuals.

Since the 1980s universities and schools have been steadily marketised, and pupils and students commodified. This instrumentalism is such a narrow view of what it means to be human and to be educated. That is why campaigns like UK Uncut, which links corporate tax avoidance to the rebalancing of our depleted public finances, are critical both morally and practically.

Students don’t have to be told that we are all in it together. They know it. The students know that education maintenance allowance is critical for young people from low-income families who now attend FE colleges and that cleaners on their campuses should be paid a living wage. The political class may choose to forget, but we don’t, that it was the greed of the banks and the free market regime handed to them by our politicians that tipped the nation’s finances into crisis.

We start from the belief that education cannot just be a debt trap on a learn-to-earn treadmill that we never get off as the retirement age is extended. Education in our good society is a universal public good which all must explore to reach their fullest potential. It is about the protection and extension of a precious public realm where we know each other not as consumers and competitors but as citizens and co-operators. What is happening is wrong and we must say so in every legal and peaceful way we can – in parliament, in the media, in all sites of education and on the streets.

Sign the petition here.

First, I have to state that I am a member of Labour Party, a candidate in the upcoming local elections, a Committee member of the NUS Black Students’ Campaign and an elected representative of Kent Students’ Union. I would never act in a way to damage the reputation of any of these organisations as I am proud to contribute and participate in them and I am conscious that at this protest I represent all the students who elected me locally, nationally as well as fellow residents in my local Labour Party.

What I witnessed and experienced at Parliament Square was absolutely horrific, and the levels of police brutality and indiscriminate violence were made all the more shocking due to the fact that a very large proportion of those who attended the march from Malet Street to Parliament were young, either further education students or school students, and a very visible and large number were Black students.

The protest started absolutely peacefully, and I joined the march at Trafalgar Square and made the short journey to Parliament at around 1:30pm with other Kent students. I made my way to the front of the demonstration and as students were pushing to make their way closer to Parliament, made sure that students that wanted to move to the back were allowed to do so, as well as making sure that people were not being hurt in the push.

I think it is important that we demonstrate as close as possible to Parliament as we can, as MPs were in the Palace and hopefully would’ve been able to hear our chants calling for them to not betray students and future generations by voting for the removal of the current cap in favour of variable fees of up to £9,000 a year. The atmosphere was wholly positive, with impressively creative placards, chants and a real strength of diversity in the trade union and student union banners, from the CWU to Unite to LSE, from SOAS Unison to Manchester Met, and many others.

After more than an hour, after discussing with other friends at the demonstration it was thought that we could pop out for a bite to eat and come back to whatever action is taking place. So at around 2.30 to 3.00pm we went to leave, only to find that we had been ‘kettled’ in by the police and exits were sealed. SOAS university students quickly erected a ‘Kettle Cafe’ where those trapped could get some food and drink.

I had made it very clear to students from Kent who were going to attend the day that there was a strong likelihood that the police would use the kettling ‘tactic’, and they freely choose to come. For anyone who does not know what kettling is, it is basically where the riot police surround a group of protesters to ‘control the situation’. What is conveniently forgotten in the official description is that kettling often lasts for hours, with some school students having to endure the freezing cold for nine hours just for being there. It is a collective form of punishment, where those who are kettled, no matter how peaceful or well intentioned, are denied access to food, water, shelter, freedom to move, as well as access to clean sanitation. This tactic has come under increased scrutiny, yet it is continually used. I would argue it acts as a catalyst to anger people and does nothing to ‘control the situation’. Instead, it provokes and sets up an ‘us and them’ scenario between the police and protesters.

We were denied access to the above-mentioned rights, despite the police and media portraying that they were available for a combined total of eight hours on a chilly winter’s day. A tarpaulin was set up in the form of a cubicle so that men (not women) could urinate on the grass, turning it in to a slurry of mud and piss. I could find no portaloos, nowhere to access food and water, and the riot police were not responding to requests for these requirements to be met, nor to the basic request to leave the area. It is no wonder that people became agitated and furious with their treatment by the authorities. Calmly requesting something from a riot police officer is often as productive as drawing blood from a stone as you are deliberately ignored. Sometimes officers will suggest they cannot hear what you are saying, despite being able to have conversations freely with nearby officers.

Eventually, the exits were fully manned by riot police, with police on horses charging young students and using full riot gear, meaning truncheons (a blunt club weapon), specialist helmets and riot shields. I witnessed an officer repeatedly using his riot shield to hit a ‘Robin Hood Tax’ hard hat off the head of a protester before then hitting the unprotected protester for good measure. I also witnessed a young, smartly-dressed woman, who could have been no older than 16, being hit with a truncheon to the head, to much shock. She posed absolutely no threat, was not being verbally abusive, nor physically threatening, yet she was smashed across the head indiscriminately, her head drooped and she was taken back in to the crowd to be treated by St. John’s Ambulance staff.

At one point, many protesters broke through and made it to Whitehall, it looked like we could get out as well and during the several attempts of the crowd to push, with hands in the air the police beat us back violently holding riot shields horizontally and hitting at the crowd. It was at this point I was first hit on the back with a truncheon, having been pushed to the front with my back turned. I did not react, did not say one word of abuse, and maintained my composure. The second and third time I was hit with a truncheon across my forearm and shoulder was when I stumbled across a young man whose head had just been cracked open and was gushing with blood. His light-coloured hoody was distinctive against the vivid red of the blood coming from him. Again, I kept my composure and was then kicked with no reason, with my hands in the air, silent, and the kick was so hard that it has left an imprint of the sole of the shoe on my leg. This not only happened to me, but to many others, young people as well.

The logical question to ask is ‘how did you get to the front’? ‘Why risk being hit and injured?’ These are absolutely valid points but I will say this: I am not prepared to stand to the side and watch young students, many from ethnic minorities, and particularly young women who perhaps might have of been pushed to the front, having their heads cracked open. I would rather it was me than have to live with the thought that someone else was seriously injured when I could have taken the hit much better.

Seeing young students kettled, treated inhumanely, and stained with their own blood is an appalling sight, and something I would never wish anyone to see as it is hugely distressing. The people at that demonstration could’ve been my 19-year-old sister protesting against cuts to her EMA, or my 15-year-old cousin who dreamed of going to university but could never pay off their £9,000 a year fees. I firmly believe that older demonstrators have a duty to protect those who we have encouraged and helped mobilise to protest, and there were many more experienced activists helping younger people out. The vast and overwhelming majority of people were armed with words, not weapons, not truncheons, not riot shields, and definitely not heavy duty protective clothing and specialist helmets. The brutality of the police at this demonstration has to be exposed for what it is, absolutely despicable.

During the coming hours, students set fire to placards for warmth, and shared food and drink, as none had been provided. Later, SOAS students kindly sprayed disinfectant on my small cut from the riot shield. At around 8.30pm, after much back and forth and conflicting information from non-riot police who had entered the kettle, it was established that we would be released soon. All through this, I was polite to every single police officer and I saw none of the ordinary unarmed police officers subjected to any harassment or intimidation.

Eventually, we were allowed to leave the kettle, escorted across Westminster Bridge following a line of police who were slowly moving back until we stopped at the end of the bridge. We were anticipating that we would then be allowed to disperse in three separate directions, perhaps through a bottleneck, however were treated with silence for an hour. We had been stopped in our tracks. In the cold, dark night, thousands of protesters were held on Westminster Bridge, with no access to toilets or water and were packed like sardines with barely any space to move. It was then announced by the police that there were not enough riot police to handle the departure of those who had been trying to leave for hours. Eventually, another hour later at 10.55pm, we were allowed out, in single-file, surrounded by riot police. We were told that section 60 was in action, and that we should move continuously towards Waterloo station.

After hours upon hours of being kettled, we were finally free to make our way home. However, it is important to remember that many of us had been booked on coaches which had fixed departure times, so many had to make their own way home, potentially leaving young members vulnerable as we edged towards midnight in the capital. If students had been allowed to leave, as the vast majority had requested and many had queued up to do, then this situation could have been avoided entirely.

I wrote this to explain my experience of the demonstration and to condemn the police handling of the event. It was excessive, brutal and unnecessary. Kettling has to be stopped as it a violation of basic human rights and does nothing to control the situation, only inflames it.

I have to give special thanks to Kent union staff and leaders who managed to get our coach to wait, although it ultimately couldn’t wait long enough, as well as for their support on Twitter, via text messages and calls. They handled it all very professionally and I thank them for doing what they could in a very difficult situation.

I would also like to thank Zain Sardar, Jonathan Buckner and Andy Hewett for their company and support as we spent most of my time in the kettle together. I would especially like to thank Maham Hashmi-Khan, another Black Students’ Committee member, as she was exemplary in helping to remove hazards, helping students leave, giving advice, standing witness at the front to the violence inflicted on the demonstrators by the police, and making sure students were as safe as she could. And a further thanks to all the re-tweets, all of the messages of support and the calls from so many different people – it made a lot of difference knowing people were working on the outside to pressure the police and spread awareness of what they were doing to us.

The people on that demonstration were not violent or extremist thugs intent on hurting others, the vast majority were peaceful and youthful, yet angry at what the coalition government are doing. What kind of democracy do we live in, when young people are brutalised by the police outside Parliament, while inside a government votes through symbolically violent acts which amount to vandalism of hopes and dreams?

I will always stand side-by-side with those suffering such huge injustices and I invite you all to come to the next demonstration, which I am sure will be about saving EMA. As although we have lost the vote on raising the cap, we are in this struggle for the long haul, and it will take all of us to contribute in whatever way we can, through lobbying, industrial action, vigils, demonstrations and occupations because we have an obligation to leave a better legacy to the next generation, not a worse one.

Aaron Kiely is a Kent Union Ordinary Council Member, NUS Black Students’ Campaign Committee (Open Place), and a member of the University of Kent occupation.

This article first appeared on the Socialist Unity website.

Read Laurie Penny’s account here.

Read the Compass petition for ‘An education for people not profit’ here.

In my article, ‘Beggars Belief’, in the last edition of Democratic Socialist, I reported on the Court of Appeal case of Begum v Denbridge High School.

The court decided that the school had infringed the right of Ms Begum to wear a jilbab, which is advocated by very strict Muslims to hide the shape and form of adult women. The school had sent her home from school and refused to accept her back unless she adopted the much less strict uniform it had agreed with Muslim parents and the local mosques. The court concluded that the school could not justify this infringement of the child’s right to religious freedom because it had not followed a correct procedure. Laying down a procedure, the court proposed a long and complex series of steps which overtly related to human rights law.

Reviewing that judgement, I commented: ‘When making its decision to exclude the claimant, I suspect the school did not expressly consider its justification for limiting the claimant’s human rights because it considered that to be too controversial for the headteacher and the board of governors. Instead, it decided to restrict itself to whether or not school rules had been infringed and whether those rules were consistent with the school’s policy on multiculturalism.’

It appears that the House of Lords has taken a similar view when considering an appeal from the Court of Appeal. In fact, the view that they took is very robust indeed. By a margin of 3:2 they decided that there had been no infringement of Ms Begum’s right to religious freedom and they were unanimous in concluding that even if there had been, that infringement would have been justified.

Lord Bingham of Cornhill described the Court of Appeal’s decision as: ‘admirable guidance to a lower court or legal tribunal, but [it] cannot be required of a head teacher and governors, even with a solicitor to help them’.

Lord Hoffman was even more incisive when he commented that: ‘common civility also has a place in the religious life … [Ms Begum and her brothers] sought a confrontation and claimed that she had a right to attend the school of her own choosing in the clothes she chose to wear’.

A pawn in their game

Furthermore, Lord Scott observed that: ‘the confrontational nature of the peremptory manner in which the jilbab issue was raised with the school, a manner which is very unlikely to have been chosen by Shabina [Ms Begum], not yet 14 years of age, set the tone for how the issue then developed’.

The clear implication of these comments in their context is that it was Ms Begum’s brothers who were the main players and Ms Begum was only a pawn in their game. The key principle in this important judgement is that: ‘Freedom to manifest one’s religion does not mean that one has the right to manifest one’s religion at any time and in any place and in any manner that accords with one’s belief.’

Ms Begum could have attended two other schools where she could have worn the jilbab. The school actively sought her return or her transfer to another school to maintain her education. It was the claimant’s inflexibility, presumably under pressure from her brothers, which prevented her from agreeing to a transfer early on in the dispute. She was free, in other words, to wear the jilbab, but not to do so at that school, which had properly consulted on its school uniform with religious authorities and the community.

Even if that had not been the case, and changing schools was more disruptive and difficult than the majority accepted, as Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead and Baroness Hale of Richmond contended, then the school’s decision could be justified on the grounds that the school’s uniform policy was ‘a thoughtful and proportionate response to reconciling the complexities of the situation’. This included the fear of the majority of Muslim families that allowing the jilbab would lead to harassment towards those whose interpretation of religious tradition was less severe.

It should be noted that the position arrived at by the House of Lords is a long way away from the French attitude towards religious dress in schools. It leaves the decision up to the school after proper consultation with the community and religious authorities. If the decision falls within the possible scope of what is lawful under the Human Rights Act 1998, the state, in the form of the courts, will not interfere with a decision made by the governing body of a school. This is the polar opposite to the French position which is based on a law that emanates from the nation’s constitution and which lays down one absolute standard for everyone.

It ought to be the thing that unites us. Comprehensive education seems such a straight-forwardly progressive idea that you’d think it’d be the one area of policy the left could agree on. The notion that all children – regardless of class, background, wealth, race, religion or gender – should be taught together on equal terms appears, on the face of it, utterly uncontroversial; it’s simply what a progressive liberal society should aim to do.

So why is education so divisive? I’ve lost count of the number of fractious conversations I’ve had about education with friends and colleagues, people of otherwise impeccable progressive credentials. Labour Party members, human rights workers, charity campaigners – when it comes to education, or, more precisely, their kids’ schools, some people’s attachment to the progressive (and democratic) principles of comprehensive schooling rapidly unravels.

One former colleague told me why she was sending her eldest child to a fee-paying school some distance from her local area. Her daughter couldn’t possibly go to the nearby (successful) comprehensive because it was ‘too scary’, she said. ‘It just isn’t like the school I went to.’ Another friend explained that she was paying for her daughter’s secondary education because the local comprehensive reminded her too much of the school she had attended. ‘I want her to have better,’ she argued.

All too often these awkward conversations end with the defensive parent resorting to the ultimate jibe: ‘You can’t really talk about it if you haven’t got children of your own; you don’t understand.’ Which is a bit like saying you can’t have an opinion about foreign policy if you haven’t been a soldier.

The principles underlying our education system, and the kind of schools we send our children to, matter – and not just to parents. They should matter to the left, possibly more than any other area of social policy, for the kind of education system we have is fundamental to the kind of society we want to create.

‘The simplest and most profound way to understand the values of any society is through its education system,’ as Melissa Benn and Fiona Millar put it in their Compass pamphlet, A Comprehensive Future. ‘Is every child given an equal chance to learn, develop their skills and knowledge to the best of their proven and latent abilities? Do the nation’s schools offer all children equal access to the rich culture that defines our common humanity? Or does the education system merely confirm the existing privations and privileges of a given social background, thus inevitably offering the less well off a second-class education?

‘Education is not just an economic activity, a means of training a future workforce,’ they argue. ‘Nor is it a morally neutral activity; the nation’s schools play a vital part in creating, confirming and debating the kind of society we live in and want to live in.’

In other words, education is profoundly political. Schools not only reflect, but create, sustain and develop the culture, values and ideologies of our society; in short, they help to shape the thinking of the next generation. They do so, not only through what they teach and how it’s taught, but through the structures of the education system itself – who’s taught, where, with whom, and for what.

Comprehensive ideal

For Benn and Millar, ‘The comprehensive ideal remains the most vibrant statement possible of the sort of society many of us want to live in… Only comprehensive schools can seek to educate children of every social class, faith and ethnic background, thereby giving all children a broadly equal chance until they reach early adulthood.’

The power of the comprehensive ideal, they write, is that it challenges ‘deep and often unconsciously held notions about class background, motivation, innate ability and those who are considered to “deserve” or merit good education and those who are not…

‘The concept of an education system delivered through a network of community comprehensive schools and colleges, non-selective in character and offering good education from five to 18 for all the nation’s children … goes beyond the old Left vs new Labour argument.’

Well, it ought to. But the anger aroused by the government’s latest education bill – the one with all the controversial stuff about trust schools and parental choice – shows that this is simply not the case. Benn and Millar’s pamphlet was launched back in January at a packed meeting in a committee room of the House of Commons as part of Compass’s nationwide campaign against the government’s proposals.

It was an extraordinary occasion, oddly reminiscent of the Labour movement’s half-forgotten past, with bodies squeezed into every available seat, perched on desks and window ledges, and squatting on every unfilled patch of floor space. Among the recognisable ‘big names’ were Melissa’s father Tony Benn and Millar’s partner Alistair Campbell, plus journalists Jackie Ashley, Michael Crick and John Harris, Baroness Helena Kennedy and Open Democracy coordinator and ex-Charter88 guru, Anthony Barnett. And that was just in the audience.

The meeting attracted media coverage chiefly because of Neil Kinnock’s appearance on the platform, alongside ex-education secretary Estelle Morris. Although NUT general secretary Steve Sinnott, MP Angela Eagle, and the two authors were also speaking, it was the former Labour leader who drew all the attention. Although he was meant to be merely chairing the affair, he made the longest speech (they didn’t call him the Welsh windbag for nothing). Not that he didn’t make some important and eloquent points.

‘Division in schooling has always produced disparity in status, esteem, funding and outcomes for schools, communities and children,’ he said. ‘The result is disadvantage and continuing underperformance for society and the economy.’

Specifically, Kinnock had been prompted to break what he called his ‘easily sustained, unbreached record of loyalty’ to the government by the bill’s plans for state-financed, independently run ‘trust schools’ – the proposals to allow religious, charitable and commercial interests to own and run schools, using their own admissions criteria, all-but free from elected local authority control.

‘We have tried having businesses directly running and owning schools before,’ said Kinnock. ‘And the Victorians banned it.’ He even quoted Gramsci – citing the old ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’ line that used to get trotted out each time he led Labour to an election defeat.

There was no Marxism from Morris, however. As the minister who helped to orchestrate the move towards City Academies she clearly had trouble matching some of the oppositional tone of the meeting. ‘I’m proud of the record of this Labour government and much of what’s in the white paper,’ she said, sounding more like a young MP eyeing her way up the political ladder than a former Minister who’s sidled off to the House of Lords.

Yet even she railed against the potential inherent in the trust school idea for business partners to control schools’ governing bodies. ‘The belief that the market can deliver good public services is going too far,’ she said. ‘In education the behaviour of one school affects the ability of others. What school will want to change its admissions arrangements to take in more under-privileged, under-performing kids?’

For all their heavyweight presence, however, it was Benn and Millar who made the most coherent and insightful contributions. Their pamphlet, they stressed, was not written merely to oppose the current legislation, but to restate the case for a fully comprehensive education system and set out an alternative direction for education as a whole. Far from having failed, it argues, the comprehensive system has never been given a chance. ‘You can’t have a bit of a comprehensive system, just like you can’t be a bit pregnant,’ as Benn put it.

While the last 40 years of ‘comprehensive innovation’ has transformed our educational and social landscape, they say, the ‘system’ that’s been so pilloried over the last 20 years has never become fully ‘comprehensive’. Even now, there are still more than 150 grammar schools in England and Wales, and in some counties, such as Kent and Buckinghamshire, the 11-plus continues to rule.

‘The cancer of selection’ was never rooted out entirely, they argue, because ‘local authorities were requested rather than required to go comprehensive in 1965’. As a result the comprehensive system was still being introduced – piecemeal and not always with sufficient political zeal – when the Thatcher government began ‘unpicking it’ in the 1980s. The introduction of league tables, effectively creating an education market, and the re-introduction of tiers of secondary schools, through city technology colleges and grant maintained schools, began to reverse the process.

Yet, despite David Blunkett’s ‘read my lips’ commitment to no new selection, made in 1995, the new Labour government has repeatedly avoided tackling the existence of these selective and partially-selective schools. Not only has it failed to back the comprehensive model, but new Labour has actually opened up the Conservative’s quasi-market by placing even greater emphasis on league tables, increasing competition between schools, and pushing reforms based on the chimera of ‘choice and diversity’ rather than ‘quality and equality’.

Bog standard

Nine years on, more English children face selective school entry tests than when Labour took office in 1997. There are still fully selective schools in a fifth of all education authorities, and partial selection by ability, aptitude and faith in many others. ‘Selection is rife,’ as Benn said at the Commons meeting. ‘There’s selection by post-code, by parental occupation, by connection to the Church of England, by proficiency in music… New Labour inherited a pyramid system and the diversity and choice agenda they’re pushing entrenches the divisions.’

Since the 2001 election, the government has talked explicitly of creating a ‘post-comprehensive’ era, an idea, ironically, first given public airing by Campbell, who famously declared an end to ‘bog standard comprehensives’. There soon followed a rapid expansion of specialist schools, which can select 10 per cent of their pupils, accompanied by a huge growth in the number and type of faith schools, with their own overt and covert selection policies, and the (often forced) introduction of City Academies, state-funded schools in deprived areas that are controlled by private sponsors such as wealthy businessmen, religious groups, and corporations.  Trust schools, with the ‘freedom’ to control their own admissions, are merely the latest addition to this diversifying, or marketising, system.

‘The once almost absurd notion of a Big Mac Academy or a fundamentalist Christian group running a set of urban secondary schools, funded by taxpayers’ money, outside any local democratic framework, now seems eerily possible,’ write Benn and Millar.

The result of all this ‘diversity’ is that ‘private, selective, semi-selective, faith, specialist, foundation and secondary modern schools, city technology colleges, further education colleges and academies co-exist, often within one neighbourhood’. This ‘hotch-potch of provision’ amounts to what London Schools Commissioner Tim Brighouse calls a ‘dizzyingly steep hierarchy of institutions’, a hierarchy, say Benn and Millar, that many parents ‘instinctively grasp’.

The much-touted ‘choice’ these schools provide is, as most parents know, little more than an illusion. In reality, choice really means competition – the competition between schools feeding that between parents who use whatever means they can to get their children into the schools deemed by exam results and league tables to be the best. Yet, as the authors point out, ‘When parents or government talk about good or bad schools, they are often referring to more subtle aspects of the institution, such as pupil intake.’ Inevitably, the winners in this free-for-all are those – generally more affluent, more educated, more well-connected – who learn how to play the game.

This scramble for schools is most apparent in cities, the authors argue, especially in London which has a hugely distorting effect on national policy. ‘In urban areas, where the market in schools is most active, parents face a bewildering array of different admissions criteria, which often benefit the most knowing and affluent but are frustrating, time-consuming and opaque for the rest.’

The government is ‘beguiled by the notion of parents as consumers’ and has created a system to fit. There is now even a Good Schools Guide – just like a good pubs guide but even more subjective – that embodies the whole ‘my child first, to hell with the rest’ thinking that this competitive structure encourages.

Listing 800 independent and state schools, it tells parents how to play and beat the system. When considering a particular school, for example, it suggests they find out: ‘Who are the pupils and where do they come from, both geographically and socially? How many Brits and, in particular, how many non-Brits whose first language is not English? Too many of the latter can grind teaching to a halt,’ it says.

Among the other questions today’s school shoppers should be asking themselves, according to the guide, is: ‘Do you like the look of the parents, and are you happy for your children to mix with theirs?’ It gives advice about what to wear to interviews, how to meet admissions criteria for religious schools (go to church before you conceive, apparently), and how to judge prospective headteachers. It’s all a long way from the comprehensive ideal.

Question of class

Hovering over all this, of course, is the spectre of class. While the achievements of the comprehensive revolution have been significant – 40 per cent of children now get two or more A levels, compared to eight per cent in 1964; three-quarters are now in post-16 education, compared to 25 per cent 40 years ago – the link between attainment and class background is ‘one of the most enduring features of the British education system’.

Recent research from University College London and Kings College London shows that school league tables measure, not the best schools, but the most middle class. In short, the more middle class the pupils, the better they do; the more middle class pupils at a school, the better it does. The danger of the government’s reforms, according to UCL professor Richard Webber, is that they’ll give middle class parents and schools yet more freedom to choose each other, leaving poorer pupils stranded in an increasingly class-segregated system.

‘By giving schools more independence and creating a market in education, you run the serious risk of polarising pupils along class lines,’ Webber explained to the Guardian. ‘The best educational achievement for the largest number of pupils will be achieved by having a broad social mix of pupils in as many schools as possible.’

Yet, despite recent amendments, such as the inclusion of a tougher, mandatory admissions code, the education bill points in precisely the opposite direction. ‘We are at a critical point in the development of education policy in this country,’ write Benn and Millar. ‘If the government continues in the direction it is currently heading, we risk creating a multipartite system, a pyramid of provision, with high-achieving state schools at the top, largely drawing from better off families, down to a hard core of low achieving schools and colleges serving the poorer children.’

Alternative vision

The strength of this pamphlet, however, is that it is not just an argument against the latest phase of reform, but an argument for an alternative vision of education, one based on ‘a modernised version’ of comprehensive schooling rooted in local communities. Despite what some Labour politicians might say – including the likes of David Chaytor and Estelle Morris who supported the amended bill on its second reading – this is not just a matter of tinkering with social policy. It is, at root, an ideological question; it’s about how people see themselves and the society they live in.

For the government, education is about individual ambition and aspiration. It’s part of our consumer society where everything we buy, and buy into, is a measure of our social status. The government’s reforms usher parents, my friends included, into seeing education in the same way, believing their only obligation is to find a school that gives their kids an advantage over others, a leg up on the ladder of social success.

Benn and Millar remind us that there is an alternative. Back in 1963, Robin Pedley, one of the pioneers of comprehensive education, wrote: ‘Comprehensive education does more than open the doors of opportunity to all children. It represents a different, a larger, more generous attitude of mind … the forging of communal culture by the pursuit of quality with equality, by the education of pupils in and for democracy, and by the creation of happy, vigorous, local communities in which the school is the focus of social and educational life.’

This pamphlet has its weaknesses – it has little to say about private education, for example, or the continued dominance of the public school élite in our political, cultural and economic institutions. And it avoids the toughest question of all – how we get from where we are now, or where we’ll be when this bill becomes law, to a fully comprehensive structure.

Yet it succeeds in the task it sets itself, reiterating ‘the profound validity of the comprehensive ethos’, and the social and political potential of a truly comprehensive system.

‘By learning with other children of different backgrounds, faiths and abilities, young people learn how to operate within society,’ it says, ‘to respect both the strong and the vulnerable, and to understand and work with all the elements of a community; this gives the child the strongest moral and intellectual basis for adult citizenship. In a truly modernised, well-funded, well-supported comprehensive system, quality can co-exist with equality.’

Surely, that’s an ideal the left can agree on.

A Comprehensive Future: Quality and equality for all our children, by Melissa Benn and Fiona Millar, is £5 from Compass. More details on www.compassonline.org.uk

It could be any day in modern London. A tube pulls into King’s Cross underground station. The doors slide open and a young woman wearing a headscarfe, long skirt and woollen shawl struggles on board with a baby-shaped bundle strapped to her back in a cloth sling. A small boy sporting a tightly-plaited pig tail stumbles after her, followed by a young man with dark hair and olive coloured skin who drags a large plastic launderette bag on to the train, heaving it through the legs of London’s commuters.

Feet shuffle and newspapers rustle as the young family search desperately to catch someone’s eye. “Please, please!” whispers the woman to a middle aged man seated opposite her. But his eyes are suddenly fixed on the adverts above her head. Others gaze at the floor, or stare intently at their own reflections in the dark windows behind her.

Then the little boy hops up, plants himself in front of a beige suited woman. “Please,” he says, pointing to the tube map above his head. “Wittorie? Wittoria?” “Oh, Victoria!” she exclaims, flushed but relieved that she’s not being asked to delve deep for some spare change. “It’s three stops,” she says, holding up her fingers, pointing to a name on the blue line. The boy sits down and a shy smile creeps across his young mother’s round face. “Thank you,” her eyes say.

Just another tricky episode for one of the UK’s newest families, feeling their way through the sea of suspicion…

Marcel Malik arrived in England from the Czech Republic in October 1997. Like the family on the tube he is a Gypsy – or Roma as they are more correctly known. He fled from eastern Europe to escape regular beatings from skinheads and the police, but so far England hasn’t exactly been the haven from persecution he had hoped for.

“Marcel was sent to Rochester prison for 45 days after he arrived and has been refused asylum three times,” explained his girlfriend Suzana Gyurkovics, a 17 year-old Slovakian Gypsy who came to England to escape hostility herself nearly four years ago with her mother and two sisters. “At school in Slovakia teachers wouldn’t speak to us because we were Roma,” she says. “My mother was harassed when she was pregnant and Roma women were beaten up. It’s better here but it’s still hard.”

Marcel was attacked in a restaurant once; both of them have been threatened in the street and forced to leave shops and clubs in Folkestone, the small seaside town where they have tried to remake their lives. According to the papers Marcel and Suzana are part of the “invasion” of illegal refugees arriving at Britain’s ports over the last few years “looking for a hand out”. Those who rode the wave that brought Marcel to Dover two and a half years ago were dubbed “giro Czechs” by the papers. But the “flood” turned out to be merely 600 people, half of whom left immediately.

Those who stayed were greeted with National Front marches and media scare stories, hostilities which intensified greatly in the following months as asylum seekers from Kosovo and Albania added to Britain’s so-called ‘immigration crisis’. On the south coast, when a few lucky families found places to live, signs went up in their new neighbours’ windows saying, “No asylum seekers welcome here”. One woman even put barbed wire around her garden fence when Gypsies moved in next door.

“Some of the things people came out with was incredible,” said Charles Bourne of Kent Refugee Link, an organisation which helps immigrants with their asylum appeals and welfare advice. “Even the kids were calling them perverted, dirty thieves, scroungers, baby snatchers – all the worst prejudices about Gypsies.”

Meanwhile, in London and other cities, east European Gypsies have become the new scroungers, labelled so by press and politicians – they exploit their children for begging, we’re told, they are fraudsters, aggressive, a menace on the streets. For the family on the tube it all seems a sorry tale, a tale of our times. But for them and their Roma ancestors it’s only the latest chapter in a long, long story of persecution and discrimination.

Origins

It started over one thousand years ago on the Indian subcontinent, where the origins of all Roma people are said to lie. No-one knows quite why they began to travel, but US Romany scholar Ian Hancock suggests they came from non-Aryan tribes who were recruited as troops by Hindus to repel the threat of Muslim invasion – partly because their lives were regarded as less valuable than those of India’s Aryan rulers.

Through their military endeavours they gradually travelled through Persia and the rest of what is now the middle east, into Turkey and beyond. This is known as the first great Romany migration. The second saw them spread into Europe, which they reached in the 14th century; and in the third, after Roma slavery had been abolished in the middle of the 19th century, Roma crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. Some say the exodus of Roma people from eastern Europe since the fall of the iron curtain constitutes a fourth great migration.

Through these endless wanderings, today’s estimated 12 million Roma are dispersed throughout most countries in Asia, the middle east, Europe, and north and south America. No-one knows for sure quite how many there are because Roma are often excluded from census records and many choose to hide their background for fear of discrimination.

It’s a well-founded fear. For, despite their 600-year presence in Europe, Roma remain the least integrated and most persecuted of peoples, having suffered centuries of slavery and state-sponsored pogroms. In the 15th and 16th centuries, for example, Roma were kept as slaves in the Balkans and Spain; in the 17th and 18th centuries they were shipped by Portuguese, Spanish and English merchants to become slaves in colonies in the Caribbean, Africa, north and south America, and even India; they were made slaves of the Russian Crown under Catherine the Great in the 18th century; and were later employed “in a state of slavery” in the coal mines of Scotland. In the 20th century, 1.5 million died at the hands of the Nazis – one of the least remembered aspects of the holocaust, or Porrajmos, as it is known in Romanes, the Roma language.

Anti-Gypsy hostility in the UK is nothing new either. Roma first arrived in Britain in 1500, travelling as tradesmen, craftsmen or entertainers. In 1530 Henry VIII made it a capital offence just to be an ‘Egyptian’, as they were known (see box below), in an Act that remained on the statute book for over 300 years. More than 100 were condemned to death in York in 1596, and 13 were hanged in Bury St Edmonds in 1650. Edward VI passed a law stating that Gypsies be “branded with a V on their breast, and then enslaved for two years”. Anyone who escaped was to be branded with an S and made a slave for life.

Marginalised

Now there are more than 100,000 Gypsies in the UK, about half of whom still live a nomadic lifestyle. And although the slavery and death sentences have gone, ‘No Travellers’ signs in pubs and shops are still seen; opposition to caravan sites from local residents, press and politicians is common; and daily harassment and intimidation continue to make Romanies one of the most vulnerable and marginalised ethnic minority groups in the country.

Rachel Morris of the Traveller Law Research Unit at Cardiff University claims that Gypsies have the highest infant mortality rates of any ethnic group, the lowest life expectancy, the most appalling accommodation provision, the highest illiteracy rates, and the most racist press coverage. “Romany culture appears to be so different from the rest of society,” she says. “We live in such a controlled society, and people see Travellers as outside the norm – they find it scary.”

In fact, Romany culture is extremely diverse. Although there are attributes common to all Roma, such as loyalty to extended family and the ‘clan’; belief in God (or Del), the Devil (or Beng) and predestiny; and attachment to a code of rules on cleanliness and purity (called Marim), the standards and norms vary enormously as different tribes have adapted to changing conditions and integrated to a greater or lesser degree with different gajikane (non-Roma) societies. Some Roma are still nomadic, but not all; some speak Romanes, but not all; and some Roma groups are illiterate, but not all.

Nevertheless, like other ethnic groups, Roma have suffered from ingrained stereotypes that have been built up over centuries. “Either they are seen as a wandering, mysterious and carefree people with pretty, painted wagons,” says Morris. “Or they’re dirty, noisy thieves and baby stealers with an alien language and customs, who never do an honest day’s work.” This “good gypsy – bad gypsy” syndrome derives from a dangerous mix of fear and fascination – fear of the outsider and fascination with the romantic notion of ‘taking to the road’.

This attitude was revealed last year by the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, on a local radio station. “There are few real Romany Gypsies left who seem to mind their own business and don’t cause trouble,” said the government minister responsible for good race relations. “Then there are a lot more people who masquerade as Travellers or Gypsies … these so-called Travellers seem to think that it’s perfectly okay to cause mayhem in an area, to go burgling, thieving, breaking into vehicles, defecating in doorways, and so on”.

Romantic vision

Mary Lee was born on a Traveller site more than 60 years ago and now manages a local authority site near Widnes. “I wish Jack Straw would just come and meet some of us,” she says. “Everyone thinks the true Romany is someone who lives in a fancy horse drawn wagon. But the Gypsy that goes to work in a factory or to school, they don’t want to know about them. The romantic vision is fine but not the reality.”

When she was young, Mary used to travel extensively with her family, going from farm to farm in the Cotswolds and around Gloucestershire. “There was never the hatred against us that there is now,” she says. “They see we have cars and caravans and they think we’ve all got money. Or they think we’re all on social security and living a free life.” Mary’s father never claimed benefits, she says, and her mother didn’t take any family allowances, although she had five children.

Mary now has two children and a grandchild of her own, but she and her husband stopped travelling about 15 years ago to take on a warden’s job. “My husband used to paint barns and I would do a bit of selling door to door,” she says. “But it was hard with two kids. The way of life has completely changed now for our younger people, but then we have always changed to survive.”

They have had to. In the 20th century, as modern industrialisation grew and the need for itinerant labour decreased, many of the traditional Gypsy occupations disappeared, and land shortages reduced the number of available stopping places for caravans. The 1968 Caravan Sites Act, which made local authorities responsible for providing sites, was repealed as part of Michael Howard’s notorious 1994 Criminal Justice and Pubic Order Act, which also gave police and local authorities extra powers to remove Travellers from highways and land. Recent changes to planning laws mean that 90 per cent of planning applications made by Gypsies fail, while public money given to local authorities for house building is not available for providing Gypsy sites, forcing many young families to live in “settled” accommodation rather than caravans.

Rachel Morris estimates that councils now spend about £10 million a year evicting Travellers, and she echoes many Gypsy organisations in believing that these changes have ‘criminalised’ the Romany lifestyle. A recent report by Save the Children found that 92 per cent of Traveller families in Scotland had been forcibly moved by police and landowners, revealing a “disturbing level of institutionalised racism”. Some Gypsy groups have even taken cases to the European Court of Human Rights claiming their rights to family life and a home have been violated.

Education

Prejudice and discrimination have severely restricted Gypsies’ access to education too. According to Mary many Romany adults never went to school. “I went for six weeks but my father wouldn’t let me stay because I was called names,” she says. “My son went until he was 14, then the site we were on was closed and we had to move. My daughter left when they called her a ‘dirty Gypsy’.”

A 1996 report from OFSTED found that around 10,000 of the estimated 50,000 secondary age Gypsy children were not on school rolls, and of those that were, only one in five reached key stage three and one in 20 key stage four before dropping out. Hester Hedges is one Traveller who has bucked the trend. Now 20, she is part way through a law degree at De Montford University in Leicester, one of very few Gypsies who have ever passed A levels, never mind gone on to higher education.

“I was a lucky in a way because my parents stopped travelling when I was five so local people got used to me,” she says. “And my Mum can’t read so she was really keen on us going to school.”

Hester, who grew up in a caravan on a site near Cambridge with her parents, a brother and a sister, received help from the local Traveller education team, one of about 70 such units around the country who encourage Gypsy children to go to school, reassure their parents that education won’t dilute their own culture, and try to get schools to educate other children about Gypsy life.

“Lots of Traveller children don’t get over the initial barriers at school, which is not surprising,” says Hester. “My sister used to come back home with her lip swollen and black eyes. For some Traveller children the education was secondary – just getting there and back without being beaten up was the main thing. When you get abused as a Gypsy it carries a whole lot of meanings, it’s more than just an insult.

“I used to think I’d rather be someone else,” she adds. “It’s painful having to go through life feeling different. There are still some people who I would never tell I was from a Traveller family – you never know what their reaction might be. Even those people at school who knew would be like, ‘No, not a proper one’, or ‘But you’re not like them’.”

Certainly there are no dangly gold earings or flowery skirts on Hester, and her accent is no more mysterious than Radio 4 English. Yet, she’s acutely aware of her heritage, and is already wondering how she can use her law degree to help other Travellers. In many ways she represents the future, the hope that education can both preserve a culture and destroy a prejudice.

As Mary Lee says: “I believe in education. I want our children to be health workers, liaison officers, teachers, because I want them to be able to speak up for Romany people. But the educating has got to be done on both sides.”

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What’s in a name?

The name Romany is derived from Sanskrit for ‘the people’, whereas the term Gypsy comes from the mistaken 16th century notion that these “dark travellers” came from Egypt. Some people prefer the terms Rom and Roma, or Rrom and Rroma.

The Council of Europe has approved the term ‘Rroma (Gypsies)’ for use in its documents.

Romanies call non-Gypsy people ‘gorjer’, ‘gorgio’, or ‘gajikane’.

Language

There is a common Romany language (Romanes), with roots in ancient Punjabi or Hindi, although there are now some 100 dialects and three distinct language groups: Domari, spoken in the middle east and eastern Europe (the Dom); Lomarven, spoken in central Europe (the Lom); and Romani, in western Europe (the Rom).

Culture

Although there are still some common elements to Romany culture, it is complex. The Roma population has always been a composite of different ethnic groups brought together during the initial migration from India and fragmented by later migrations into Europe and elsewhere. Romany groups have grown differently in different places, sometimes assimilating other populations, sometimes being absorbed by them. Tribes around the world have different beliefs and tenets, but no group can claim to be the “one true” Roma.

In Britain “Romany Gypsies” were identified as an ethnic group, as defined by the Race Relations Act, in 1989.

Thomas Acton, then a student, established the first Gypsy Council caravan school in 1967 on an airfield in east London. Now Britain’s first professor of Romany Studies at Greenwich University, he has identified four groups of Gypsies in the UK: Romanichals (English Gypsies), Kale (Welsh), Nachins (Scottish) and Minceir (Irish).

Well known modern entertainers with Romany ancestry include Yul Brynner, Charlie Chaplin, Rita Hayworth, Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins and David Essex. Romany music has influenced artists such as Liszt, Bizet, Brahms, Verdi and Rachmaninov.

A spoked wheel (or chakra) was adopted as the symbol of the international Romany movement in 1971. It bears a striking resemblance to the 24-spoked Ashok Chakra found in the centre of the national flag of India.

The Romany flag is green and blue with a red chakra in the centre.

—-

Juneha Chowdhury is nearing the end of her first year as a newly qualified teacher. It hasn’t been easy but, at 27, she’s finally beginning to fulfill the promise she first made to herself as a school girl more than 10 years ago. “I remember realising quite early that I could help my friends learn,” she says. “I suppose I had a natural talent to teach.”

But Juneha’s path from school girl to school teacher has been far from smooth. She went to Mulberry girls’ school, in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets, the once struggling education authority that has recently received swathes of praise and press coverage for its vastly improved exam results and fast improving schools. She left with nine GCSEs and three A levels, but family disapproval prevented her taking up an offer from the London School of Economics to study law, which she’d applied for in secret.

Instead, aged 18, she went to Bangladesh to get married. Four years later, after struggling with the authorities to bring her husband to the UK, and with a seven month old son to look after, she eventually enrolled at East London University to study English. Despite living in a hostel, and for a time officially regarded as a homeless family, Juneha got her degree.

After that, the decision to train as a teacher was easy – made easier, indeed, thanks to Tower Hamlets council. As a resident and ex-pupil in the borough, Juneha was eligible for one of the authority’s many innovative initiatives to encourage local people to work in local schools. She received a £3000 bursary when she took her first teaching job in a Tower Hamlets school, and she’ll get a further £2000 if she stays in the borough for at least two years. It certainly helped to make up her mind.

“I had offers from schools in Wanstead and Hackney,” she says. “But the bursary helped me make the decision. It’s a great incentive.”

Now teaching English at a local secondary school, Juneha is just one of the latest among a new generation of teachers and school support staff who have emerged from Tower Hamlets’s multi-ethnic and immigrant-rich communities to help transform the borough’s schools and the academic prospects of its children. As such, she’s a symbol of the changing face and fortunes of an area that, not long ago, was synonymous with the kind of racial tension, far right activism and educational underachievement that seems to characterise those northern towns where the BNP has made such headway recently.

A decade ago this area of the east end was a main BNP target. But now, while councils in towns such as Oldham, Burnley and Bradford have been criticised for policies that encourage “community apartheid” (see box) – leading to the disturbances of 2001 and, arguably, the recent BNP election successes – Tower Hamlets has won beacon status for “community cohesion”. It wasn’t always this way.

Stephen Lawrence

Nineteen-ninety-three is etched into the minds of anti-racist campaigners as the year when Stephen Lawrence was killed. But that year also saw a number of other vicious racist attacks, notably against Bangladeshi schoolboys around Bethnal Green and Mile End. For a while, the atmosphere was tense and, at times, scary. The BNP fought street battles with anti-fascist campaigners in Brick Lane, and the Anti-Nazi League organised large, noisy protests outside Bethnal Green’s York Hall, where the BNP held a rally.

Most frightening of all, the BNP won its only council seat for many years on the Isle of Dogs, benefiting from the white community’s hostility to the council’s housing policy, a hostility fuelled, in part, by the Liberal Democrats. At the time it seemed like the thin edge of a very sharp wedge. As it happened, Derek Beackon did not last long, partly because the massed ranks of the London-based anti-racist organisations concentrated their forces on the ward, and focused on exposing the BNP’s racist underbelly. Luckily, back then BNP members were still wearing lace-up boots, black bomber jackets and short hair cuts, crassly conforming to their folk devil image and falling neatly into line for a media-led moral panic.

Of course, no-one would seriously suggest there’s no longer any racism in Tower Hamlets – the numerous incidents of abuse and harassment against ethnic minorities, Muslims in particular, in the wake of September 11, are testament to its continued existence – but there has certainly been a change in what used to be called “community relations”. What’s more, that transformation has come, partly at least, thanks to a number council initiatives, the kind of policies that just might start to make a difference in Oldham, Blackburn, Burnley, Halifax, Bradford, Stoke, and the like.

None of these seem like radically new ideas – they include, for example, housing policies designed to break up ethnically homogenous estates and spread people from different communities around the borough. There’s also a rapid reaction unit which responds to aggravation between teenage gangs – a continuing problem in the Bangladeshi community – run by the youth service, not the police. And there’s a jobs programme which has helped 1500 residents get work locally, increasing the proportion of local people employed at Canary Wharf by 50 per cent.

But the biggest difference has been made in education. Back in the early 1990s, Tower Hamlets’ schools were notorious as educational graveyards. This was an area where newly trained teachers took their first jobs because there were masses available and the authority provided cheap housing as an incentive. All too often, they survived for two years, then left to further their careers in kinder pastures. When the council took control of education from the Inner London Education Authority in 1990, only eight per cent of pupils achieved the equivalent of five or more A* to C grades at GCSE, and a fifth of all pupils left school without any qualifications. By 1998 things had improved, but only slightly, and education almost passed into the hands of private management.

Most improved

Last year, however, 44 per cent of pupils got top GCSE grades, a huge nine per cent increase on 2001, compared to a one per cent rise nationally. It was the biggest improvement in England. Only four per cent of Tower Hamlets pupils left school without qualifications in 2002, and the number going on to higher education has increased by more than 200 per cent. These results were built on the success of Tower Hamlets’ primaries, whose SATS results rose more rapidly than in any other education authority between 1998 and 2001.

Of course, exam results are a crude and distorting measure of children’s education, at best, and of the standard of schools and teachers in particular (whatever the government thinks). But such improvements do indicate that something significant has changed, especially given that, socially and culturally, the area is still characterised by the kind of deep poverty and huge ethnic diversity that’s often regarded as a barrier to educational success.

Indeed, despite being squashed between the pin-striped wealth of the City and the shiny glass glamour of Canary Wharf, Tower Hamlets is still the most deprived borough in the country – 17 of its 19 wards are among the worst five per cent in England; more than 60 per cent of households have an annual income less than £9000; and 62 per cent of pupils are entitled to free school meals (compared to 18 per cent nationally).

It’s also famous for being the first area of settlement for generations of immigrants, going back centuries. It was French Huguenots, 50,000 of them fleeing persecution at the hands of Catholics, who started the famous textile trade around Spitalfields in the early 18th century. When they moved on the area was inhabited by Jewish refugees from central Europe. There were some 150,000 by the end of the 19th century. There were Chinese seamen, abandoned at the docks a couple of miles down the Thames; Indian lascars, pitched up by the shrinking Empire; and Caribbeans enticed by post-war promises of work and welfare.

In the last two or three decades the area has become home to a largely Sylheti community from Bangladesh. Brick Lane, now known as Bangla Town, is a tourist attraction because of its lines of curry houses, and Mosques have taken their place beside the churches and synagogues, sometimes in the same place.

The present Bangladeshi community now make up more than 33 per cent of the population, according to the latest Census. This is an ethnic group consistently labelled – alongside black Caribbeans and Pakistanis – as ‘educational underachievers’. More than half of Tower Hamlets’ pupils are Bangladeshis, while another 11 per cent come from black African and Caribbean backgrounds. A total of 90 different languages are spoken in the area, and 72 per cent of pupils speak English as an ‘additional language’, another long recognised barrier to educational success.

Yet, as the latest GCSE results suggest, such barriers are being broken here with increasing ease. Last year, almost half of all Bangladeshi pupils (48 per cent) got five or more A* to C grades at GCSE, a leap of seven per cent on 2001, and higher than the proportion of white pupils (32 per cent) or black Caribbeans (31 per cent). Back in 1991, only 14 per cent of Bangladeshi pupils made such grades.

Not everything is perfect – a third of the borough’s primaries are still considered below the national average, for example – but Tower Hamlets clearly has lessons to teach other authorities about educating poor and ethnically diverse children. There have been some simple initiatives to “desegregate” schools, such as encouraging pupils from different backgrounds to sit next to each other, for example. But the main change has been in the make-up of the workforce, brought about by the council’s commitment to giving people from local communities, especially parents, opportunities to work in schools.

Sarah Gale is head of the authority’s equalities and parent partnership development unit. “We’d been encouraging parents to come and help in schools for years,” she says. “But although they’re often extremely skilled, many parents in Tower Hamlets don’t feel comfortable – because of language barriers, or low levels of literacy – so we looked at ways for them to be involved that are non-threatening and can build confidence.”

Under the council’s encouragement, some schools set up informal parents’ groups, or set aside areas where parents could meet without feeling under pressure to enter the classroom. More specifically, the council began to advertise ‘family learning courses’ at its parents’ advice centre in Mile End, so that parents who wanted to could train to become more involved in school life.

A way in

The ‘helping in schools’ programme has encouraged numerous parents to take up support staff positions as nursery nurses, classroom assistants and administrators. The council also runs access courses during work time on communication skills, GCSE maths and English, an Open University specialist teacher’s assistant certificate, and, from next year, an employment-based foundation degree for TAs. The idea is that these form steps towards becoming a teacher, for those who want to, thus increasing the authority’s stock of locally-raised, locally-trained staff.

“We realised if we were going to encourage local people to become classroom assistants and teachers, we needed to address people’s personal needs and professional abilities,” says Ms Gale, who reckons about 500 classroom assistants a year take council-funded courses. “Having children in school can act as a catalyst for parents to start learning themselves. But some parents found school an ambivalent experience, others may have had no formal education in this country, and have no knowledge of it. Our strategy allows them a way in.”

There’s also a series of financial incentives designed to entice graduate teachers like Juneha to stay local. Alongside the ‘golden hellos’ for NQTs, the unit also funds a graduate teacher programme, in which mature students do one year’s ‘on-the-job’ training in schools. Further bursaries are available to local residents for a full-time, three year undergraduate course on primary and early years teaching, based at the local professional development centre. Teaching assistants and nursery nurses can be seconded to the course on full salary.

“Our aim is to give more local people greater access to careers in schools,” says Ms Gale, who is at pains to point out that none of these initiatives are specifically aimed at particular ethnic groups, just local residents. Nevertheless, there’s little doubt they’ve already begun to change the ethnic make-up of Tower Hamlets staff rooms. Of the 57 NQTs who have taken advantage of the bursaries, for example, 61 per cent are from ethnic minorities, and 90 per cent of those are Bangladeshi. More than half the people who have taken the graduate teacher programme so far are Bangladeshi, and more than half the 47 people currently on the three year training course are from ethnic minorities.

Three years ago 14 per cent of all Tower Hamlets’ teachers were from ethnic minorities, but by spring this year that had risen to more than a fifth of teachers, (and nearly 40 per cent of support staff), compared to seven per cent of teachers nationally. Juneha, for one, has seen a major change. “When I was at school it was very rare to find Bangladeshi teachers, other than teaching Bengali,” she says. “Now, the girls I teach will see me, and realise they can do it too. For me it was a dream, like trying to reach the sky. They’ll see it can be reality.”

While she’s had to endure a degree of suspicion both from white parents and Bangladeshi girls, unused to seeing one of their own in such a position, Juneha has also seen attitudes to education changing within her community. “I do see girls in my own school still not getting the parental support they need,” she says. “But teachers like me can help them to see that being in a profession is respectable.

“Nine years ago there wasn’t a community of people going to university, so how could I possibly go? Now, my parents’ attitudes have changed. My dad was heartbroken to see the trouble I went through to bring up a child while going to university, and now my younger sister is at college studying law. The whole community is changing. I just broke the mould, and what makes me proud is that now I’m able to share it.”

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Community apartheid?

Following the ‘disturbances’ of 2001 in the cities of Oldham, Bradford and Burnley, considerable attention has been focused on the lack of contact and respect between people of different racial backgrounds in those towns. The situation in some places was described as a kind of ‘community apartheid’, and numerous reports were produced to try and uncover how such segregation had come about.

Lord Herman Ouseley, former chair of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), wrote of Bradford that: “Communities are fragmenting along racial, cultural and faith lines… Rather than seeing the emergence of a confident, multicultural district where people are respectful and have understanding and tolerance for difference, people’s attitudes appear to be hardening and intolerance towards differences is growing.”

In the UK, enforced segregation on racial grounds is unlawful under the Race Relations Act but there are all sorts of social, economic and political reasons why ‘self-segregation’, or ‘congregation’ occurs. A report into the disturbances by the CRE found that “more than half the Pakistani population [the predominant ethnic minority group] in each of the three towns was concentrated in three wards or fewer; in the case of Burnley, in just one.”

While this can partly be explained by the understandable desire of newcomers to live near people like themselves, says the report, “economic circumstances, discrimination in the housing field, ‘white flight’, and newcomers’ experiences and fears of racism, also play a significant role in polarising communities”.

In Bradford, for example, the report found that only two per cent of council housing had been allocated to Asian households. In Oldham, between 1984 and 1993, the council had been housing Asians on different estates from white people, and in lower value properties. Even after this practice was reviewed, Asian residents tended to apply for housing in areas where others from their communities lived, reinforcing congregation. Inevitably, some estates became almost entirely white, others Asian.

It wasn’t only the council, however. In 1990, three Oldham estate agents were found to have been advising white customers to buy houses in ‘white’ areas, and pointing Asians to areas with large Asian communities. In Bradford, estate agents would contact neighbours when an adjacent house was sold to an ethnic minority family, suggesting their property’s value may decline – leading to ‘white flight’ and further segregation.

Inevitably, such residential apartheid has ‘knock on’ effects on other aspects of life, notably education. In Bradford, for example, there are 14 primary schools (out of 101) where Asian pupils form between 90 and 99 per cent of the school roll, and 26 where they make up more than 70 per cent. In Oldham, Asian pupils make up 80 per cent  of the roll in 17 of its 100 primary schools, more than 95 per cent in 13 schools, and more than 99 per cent in seven. In five (of 15) secondary schools, less than five per cent are Asian, and they make up 98 per cent in one, and 77 per cent in another.

The CRE report comments that “there is considerable ethnic segregation in education in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley”. Primary schools, it says, reflect the residential segregation of their catchment areas, but secondary schools, which from their location might be expected to have diverse intakes, have “come to be seen by many people as either ‘white’ or ‘Asian’ schools”.

Since the 1996 Education Act, ‘parental choice’ takes precedence in law over the Race Relations Act, so if parents choose to send their children to schools with other children of their own ethnic origin, or avoid schools where most children are from a different ethnic background, they are entitled to do so. Then there are faith schools, of course, which are entitled to give priority to families of their faith. Four of Oldham’s 15 secondaries are church schools, three of which were reported to have “virtually excluded” children from Bangladeshi and Pakistani families.

The CRE report concluded that: “Among the underlying tensions revealed by our research into the disturbances in the North of England, the frequent lack of connectedness and mutual understanding between adjacent but different ethnic communities stands out as the greatest threat to a socially cohesive society.”

It is into this gap between communities, it seems, that the British National Party has been able to tread.

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In her book Reclaim the State (see Barry Winter’s review), Hilary Wainwright describes a number of ‘experiments in popular democracy’ from different parts of the world, attempts by local people to establish grass roots, democratic control over various aspects of their lives.

This is the story of one group of people who have been struggling to gain community control of their local school in the face of local authority  plans to close it. Their ‘experiment’ has only just begun and it is impossible to say whether it will succeed in the long term.

However, after suffering defeat at the hands of both local and national government, the people of Lowick and their supporters believe the example they will provide as the country’s first community co-operative school, will become a ‘beacon’ (to use one of the government’s favourite terms) for education in the future.

From the wooden gate at the top of the sloping tarmac playground next to Lowick primary school you can see beyond a small copse of trees and the dry stone wall that surrounds the school grounds to the green hills of Coniston and the wooded fells on the far side of Crake valley.

Inside the school building, made of the same slate grey Lakeland stone, there are two small classrooms – one for infants, one for juniors – crammed with every conceivable sign of education and youthful enterprise: large, multi-coloured alphabets decorate the walls; photos of past pupils line the small stair case; books of all sizes and shapes are stacked at angles on labelled shelves; and a giant coloured tropical fish hangs from the ceiling.

It’s July, the last week of the summer term, and the school is filled with sunlight and colour. Inside and out, it’s an idyllic scene. But for Lowick’s two teachers, 19 pupils, and numerous parents and supporters this is the end of a far from idyllic journey, and the start of whole new era – not just for them but, so their supporters claim, for schools across the country.

It may seem unlikely, but this tiny Cumbrian primary, perched on the edge of a rolling valley on the south side of the Lake District, is at the forefront of a revolution in British schooling. On 31 August Lowick School ceased to exist, ordered to close by Cumbria County Council because of ‘surplus places’ across nine schools in the area. At the beginning of September, however, Lowick New School emerged from the rubble of a three-year struggle as the first of what its friends and supporters hope will be a new kind of school – run by a local co-operative and infused with co-operative principles and values.

Although, in August, it failed at the final hurdle to win state support – either from the local authority or from the Department for Education and Science – Lowick is still being hailed as a breakthrough in public service provision by the co-operative movement, a model of how to put control of schools in the hands of the communities they serve. Mervyn Wilson is principal of the Co-operative College in Manchester and co-author of a 2003 pamphlet endorsed by Charles Clarke, called Co-operation and Learning. ‘Five years down the line, this will be seen as pioneering,’ he says. ‘Lowick is important because it is the first one that’s trying it, but others are not far behind. They are blazing a trail for others to follow.’

For headteacher Shirley Rainbow that trail has been ‘a long, hard road’, one littered with campaign meetings, hearings, appeals, and disappointing decisions. ‘We’ve been at it for two and a half years, and now we are rising from the ashes,’ she says. ‘We know we are going to be unique and that’s so exciting; there isn’t any other school like us.’

The story of Lowick’s fight against closure and battle to re-emerge in a radical form is a saga in itself, a tale of a small community in conflict with a distant and disdainful authority, complete with all the worst villains of local politics – inaccurate reports, disputed statistics,

lost papers, political interference, suspicious phone calls, conflicts of interest, and the silent hand of the church. More importantly, it’s also the story of a group of people who came together to save one of their few local assets, and grew into a community of engaged and politicised citizens who have devised a new model of democratic education and rural regeneration.

‘It’s been blood, sweat and tears,’ says Rose Bugler, parent, chair of governors at the old Lowick school, and a driving force behind the co-operative venture. ‘It’s been a white knuckle ride at times, but we genuinely think we’ve created something that is unique, and we know it can work. It’s absolutely an idea whose time has come.’

Beyond memory

Lowick school was built by public subscription in 1856 when local people raised £300 among themselves to erect the building. According to a trust deed dated 1757, the site had belonged to the community for use as a school ‘beyond the memory of man’. Not surprisingly, there’s still a strong sense locally that the school belongs to the village.

However, in the 1950s a schedule signed by the Queen transferred trusteeship to the Carlisle diocese of the Church of England, meaning any proceeds from rent or sale would go to the church. Until 31 August this year, Lowick has remained a state-run, voluntary controled, CofE primary school.

Shirley Rainbow arrived as headteacher from County Durham in 1985, and has seen Lowick follow the path of many a small rural primary, its numbers rising some years, falling others. ‘At times we’ve had 24,’ she says. ‘We’ve been up to 50, and down to 19.’ Throughout her 19 years, however, the school has remained a focal point for Lowick’s scattered 200-strong community, alongside its 17th century pub and 19th century church. During the foot and mouth crisis a few years ago it was at the school where people gathered to talk.

‘People needed a place to come and make contact with each other,’ says Shirley. ’The school became the focus for the community; it developed this lovely cross-generational pull.’

Lowick school was highly prized, and not only by the locals. It was shortlisted for the village school of the year awards and praised by Ofsted. After its last inspection in 1999, the lead inspector told staff, ‘This is a school worth fighting for.’

So, in 2001, when the education authority announced its intention to close Lowick the community rallied round. ‘There was absolute uproar,’ says Shirley. ‘At our first meeting, the school was full. We had nearly 100 people in it, including parents, past parents, parish councillors, future parents … and nobody was for it at all. But the officers took not a blind bit of notice.

‘I think they just thought the school would fizzle out. It’s happened in lots of rural schools, where people just lose hope. Well here, nothing could have been further from the truth.’

In places like Lowick a school is vital to maintaining a ‘genuine’ local community, says Shirley, it’s a reason for people live and work in the area. ‘We don’t want to become a Disney park,’ she says, gazing at the hills and valleys that attract thousands of visitors every year. Clearly, many people felt the same.

A band of 50-plus villagers, parents, governors and teachers worked tirelessly to prepare the school’s case. They took it to Cumbria County Council’s cabinet, then to its school organisation committee (on which the church, their landlord, has a powerful voice). When it turned them down they called for a judicial review, but the judge lost the papers so they went back to the SOC. Even when they seemed to be winning over some councillors the hidden hand of officers appeared – mobile phone conversations took place in toilets and opinions changed.

On each occasion the campaigners did more research and returned with fresh arguments. They learned about the minutiae of education policy, the regulations governing calculations of surplus places, the recommended maximum distances children are meant to travel to school … ‘People didn’t understand any political processes before they started this,’ says Rose. ‘No one knew who their district councillors were, who the parish councillors were. Now everyone knows who everyone is. We’ve been politicised, even the kids have.’

It was all to no avail – at least that’s how it seemed when, in September 2003, the council finally announced the school had just one more year. ‘It was if they had given up on regenerating the community,’ says John Willis, a parent and relative newcomer to the area. ‘We need to keep young people in the area to keep the local economy going. To do that we need families and to have families we need schools.’

Radical notion

By this time, however, Rose had come up with a radical notion – let them close it, and then re-open as a new school, run by and for the community. Rose works for a rural regeneration agency called Voluntary Action Cumbria, supporting social enterprise in small communities. ‘I suddenly thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could find a co-operative solution to this?”,’ she says. ‘We’d been working like a co-op anyway throughout the process, and the school had already become the hub of an energised collective spirit.’

They formed the Lowick and Blawith Educational Trust and secured a £28,000 grant from the co-op movement’s charitable foundation, Co-operative Action, to examine how a co-op school could work. They discovered there had never been a state-funded co-op school in the UK before, but that the 2002 Education Act allows ‘minority groups’ with a ‘distinctive ethos’ to propose new schools for state funding. It’s this legislation which has led to the increase in faith schools, and has recently enabled a Montessori school in Brighton to gain state funding.

‘We thought, our community co-op can be our minority group,’ explains Rose. ‘And our ethos is that of the co-operative movement – the principles and values it has built up over more than 100 years. There are other schools that apply co-operative ideas in their teaching methods, but there are no schools that apply them throughout their operation – in their curriculum development and in the management of the school itself.’

Parents, governors and villagers came together through newsletters, online chat rooms and ‘design a school’ workshops to discuss the ideas. With the help of Gareth Nash from a regeneration co-op called Co-operative and Mutual Solutions, and a firm of co-operative-friendly solicitors in Manchester, they devised a structure that, they believe, not only fits the legal requirements of the legislation, but meets many of the government’s education priorities too – on citizenship, extended schools, lifelong learning, and parental involvement, not to mention greater school independence.

As far as Rose was concerned, they had come up with a real solution, a structure that could not only save the school, but meet many other government priorities – on rural regeneration, ‘community development’ and ‘participation’. ‘People don’t know how to participate, they don’t know how to get involved, so they are not involved in democratic processes,’ she says. ‘We’ve created something that is a way of applying a lot of current government policy on active citizenship into education and through that into families and communities.’

Not that the education authorities saw it that way. On 8 July, Cumbria’s SOC rejected their plans, claiming the co-operative structure offered nothing new. The campaigners had anticipated that decision – the LEA seemed to be against them from the outset – and immediately filed a hopeful appeal to the DfES adjudicator. The bigger shock came when, just a week before the closure deadline, he turned them down too.

For Mervyn Wilson, this decision was a litmus test of the 2002 Act and the government’s intentions. ‘All we’ve seen from the Act so far is an extension of faith schools,’ he says. ‘Lowick was a test of whether it was genuinely about new models of control and diversity in education.’

Devastated but not defeated, the people of Lowick were left with little choice. Committed to their co-op, they decided to go it alone, and on 1 September the new school opened anyway, as a non-fee paying independent, financed, for the time being at least, by donations and grants.

Lowick New School is no longer CofE controlled, but a voluntary aided school run by the community co-op, what Graham Nash calls ‘a suite of organisations’, including the educational trust, which holds the lease, and an industrial and provident society for community benefit, called Community Learning Lowick, which shares the premises and overheads, and runs ‘community-led activities’.

‘Teachers, parents and community members are all members of the co-op in the same way you can be a member of a workers’ co-op or a housing co-op,’ explains Rose. ‘Governors are elected by the members but all have a say in how the school is run and how the curriculum is taught.’

The mutual ethos runs through the school’s teaching and management, she says. The democratic structure ensures the curriculum can be tailored to the co-op’s priorities. And through its community learning arm, the school will also be a focus for community activities such as adult education, IT training, health and social services advice, perhaps even a community newspaper and local transport.

Critical landmark

With the co-op as its ‘incubator’, to use Rose’s phrase, the school should be able to draw on a wide range of funding, and will also generate income by selling services and products. In fact, local co-op shops are already selling a CD recorded by a former pupil in support of the school’s fight, and the children and staff are collaborating with the nearby John Ruskin centre at Brantwood on community art and education projects. The school will also be able to draw on the range of skills and experiences of the co-operative’s members. John Willis used to run an IT business, for example, and he plans to make the school the centre of a local internet network with educational benefits for pupils and adults alike.

‘We understand that a school and a community are interdependent,’ says Rose. ‘Their development is intertwined. It’s like a tennis ball, you know, it’s made of two tongues of material, but it only bounces when you’ve got them interlocking together.

‘This doesn’t pay lip service to parental involvement. It’s way beyond that; it’s parental engagement. What we’ve created is a community learning structure that’s community-led, not agency-led.’

Lowick’s new model school has already attracted support from the co-operative movement in this country and co-operative schools abroad. It’s being held up as an example for other schools to use and adapt, not merely small rural primaries threatened with extinction, but all schools. ‘The model isn’t going to be unique to Lowick,’ says Stephen Youd-Thomas, head of strategy at Co-operative Action. ‘It’s one that we can pick up and drop almost anywhere else. There’s been lots of interest already from urban schools with active parents who realise their schools are fantastic assets for local communities.

‘People seem to have gained a sense of responsibility; they want to solve things themselves, and the co-operative structure shows them how they can do that by working together.’

Lowick’s staff and members know it’s going to be tough to survive as an independent and intend to re-apply for state funding as soon as they can. ‘They’ve really fought against massive odds,’ says Youd-Thomas. ‘It was a real David and Goliath struggle. But they’ve brought the community together, learned a lot, and that learning won’t be wasted. The community will still have a really effective school and will benefit from the co-operative structure and ethos. But it’s a loss because, as a state school, it would have taken on real beacon status.’

For Mervyn Wilson, Lowick is important because ‘it’s showing there are alternatives to the crude opposition of the state sector and the private sector’. ‘Historically, this will be seen as a critical landmark in the move towards greater diversity in education,’ he says. ‘It is pushing co-operative values into new areas.’

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Cooperatives and education

While there’s never been a state-funded co-op school in the UK, there have been schools run on co-operative lines – the trade unions funded a co-op school earlier this century. And there are many successful co-op schools in other countries, especially USA, Sweden, Canada and Spain. ‘Internationally, Lowick is not that radical and new,’ says Mervyn Wilson, whose pamphlet Co-operation and Learning outlined some of the models used elsewhere. ‘But it is part of a growing trend.’

According to Wilson, the ‘huge advantage’ of co-op schools is their ‘active engagement’ of local people, and their ‘very strong democratic ethos’. The co-op structure also means a school’s potential as a community asset can be fully realised for social enterprise and services.

When Lowick’s plans to ‘go co-op’ became public earlier this year, they attracted national media coverage – articles in the Guardian, items on Channel Four News – as well as messages of support from co-ops abroad. The headteacher of one co-op school in Canada told them, ‘We will not let Lowick fail’.

Co-operative education is catching on here too. Rose has spoken at conferences and talked to other interested primaries. One school in Wales is now consulting on whether to become a co-op, while a group of schools in Herefordshire and Worcestershire have set up a co-operative consortium to share services. In the north east there’s already a supply teachers’ co-op and a music teachers’ co-op.

The Co-operative Group, the country’s largest co-operative wholesaler, is sponsoring nine schools applying for special business and enterprise status based on co-operative principles. Five have been successful. And Trade Craft has started a ‘Young Co-operatives’ pilot in secondary schools to encourage fifth and sixth formers to set up co-operative enterprises selling Fair Trade products.

‘Lowick is an indication of a growing tide of interest in mutuals and co-operatives,’ says Stephen Youd-Thomas. ‘The government has created fertile ground and opened opportunities for us to promote co-operation and help communities work together to solve problems.’

Co-operation and Learning by Mervyn Wilson and Mick Taylor is £8.50 from the Centre for British Teachers. Tel. 0118 902 1000. marketing@cfbt.com

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Lowick New School, the tiny Lake District primary which became the first co-operative school in the country last year, has been forced to close. After a three-year fight against closure and a year of striving to survive without state support, the 16-pupil primary failed to raise enough money to stay open beyond the end of the summer term.

‘We have learned a lot, we have achieved a lot and we are absolutely sad and devastated,’ the school’s headteacher Shirley Rainbow told The Westmorland Gazette. ‘But we cannot go on because we haven’t got financial security and we haven’t been able to attract enough new children.’

The story of Lowick’s three-year battle against closure was featured in Democratic Socialist, Autumn 2004, and fills a chapter of the recent ILP pamphlet, Co-operatives and Mutuals: The new challenge.

After fighting Cumbria County Council’s School Organising Committee and being rejected by a judicial review, the teachers and parents at Lowick formed a community co-op last year to try and attract state funding as a new kind of school. They hoped the legislation which has enabled a number of faith groups to open new schools would allow them to be funded as the country’s first co-operatively-run and managed primary. Lowick argued that the values of the co-operative movement stood as its defining ethos, just as religious values are put forward by faith groups in their applications to run state-supported voluntary-aided schools.

After being rejected again by the county council last summer, they appealed to the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) to reverse the decision but lost the case in August 2004, just weeks before the new term. Undeterred, the community of Lowick decided to keep the school going as a non-fee paying independent, raising funds from the Co-operative Retail Group, sales of a charity CD, and other community initiatives to stay afloat. Lowick became a celebrated cause of the co-operative movement, but although the staff worked without pay for much of the year, it couldn’t survive.

High and dry

Ironically, while a school that attempted to establish itself on co-operative grounds has been left high and dry by both local and national governments, the number of faith-based schools continues to grow, as weekly headlines in the Times Educational Supplement testify. ‘Secular schools rush to convert’ was just one, on 15 July, the very day Lowick shut its doors. The story reported that some 45 secondaries have applied to become voluntary-aided CofE schools since 2001, including more than 20 Academies sponsored by the church. The first state-funded Hindu school will soon open in north London, adding to the 7,000 Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh schools, three quarters of which are primaries.

Defiant as ever, the Lowick co-operative is not giving up on local education. It plans to run the school buildings as an arts and educational resource centre for the local community and other schools. ‘What the caterpillar calls the end, we see as a butterfly,’ says Rose Bugler, Lowick’s chair of governors.