Ixworth Free School proposers looking for (public) money

Cllr Joanna Spicer

The Ixworth Free school proposers are looking for money. Already they have secured £1000 from local Suffolk County Councillor Joanna Spicer although it is unclear if this is a personal contribution or public funds from her "locality budget" which is County Council funds.

The proposers have now written to parish councils asking them to set money aside from their precepts next year towards their setup costs which they estimate could "exceed £20 000". The full text of this letter is available on wikisuffolk. Much of this money is likely to end up in the pockets of lawyers and expensive management consultants.

These bids have become a nice earner for some, TPP Law for example have helped 5 successful schools (and who knows how many unsuccessful bids). I am sure that they provide a good service but I seriously wonder if this is a proper use of parish council's limited budgets.

Instead of donating money towards a free school if parish councils really think they should be giving money to schools (and I am sure many think this is the job of the County and Government) then they would be much better supporting their local primary schools. £1000 pounds would go a long way in a primary school as Rachel Gooch points out on Twitter:

I know where I would put my money and I hope parish councils will reflect on what they money will be used for. 

Book Review: The Courageous State by Richard Murphy

Like many I have increasingly found the policies of all three of our main political parties to a greater or lesser extent unappealing. Frequently they seem to offer more of less the same polices perhaps presented in a slightly different way. This book explains why. They are all deeply wedded to the "neoliberal" economic consensus that has gripped us since the Thatcher/Raegan governments introduced it at the end of the 1970s.

Rather obviously and spectacularly this economic system collapsed in 2007/2008 and we are still in the midst of a major crisis as a result.

That much is clear and this book provides an excellent, clear and accessible analysis of this situation. If that were all it did it would still make a good read but what I think makes this book more important and interesting is that it does not simply explain what the problem is but actually tries to set out a solution.

One of the main ideas of the book is that governments under the neoliberal agenda have deliberately absconded from their responsibility to govern as they think that government is a bad thing and that "markets" always have better solutions. He describes this as "the cowardly state":

The economic crisis we are now facing is the legacy of Thatcher and Reagan because they introduced into government the neoliberal idea that whatever a politician does, however well-intentioned that action might be, they will always make matters worse in the economy. This is because government is never able, according to neoliberal thinking, to outperform the market, which will always, it says, allocate resources better and so increase human well-being more than government can. 

That thinking is the reason why we have ended up with cowardly government. That is why in August 2011, when we had riots on streets of London we also had Conservative politicians on holiday, reluctant to return because they were quite sure that nothing they could do and no action they could take would make any difference to the outcome of the situation. What began as an economic idea has now swept across government as a whole: we have got a class of politicians who think that the only useful function for the power that they hold is to dismantle the state they have been elected to govern while transferring as many of its functions as possible to unelected businesses that have bankrolled their path to power.

This (as the book actually mentions) was the kind of thinking that got us Suffolk County Councils' "new strategic direction" when the council planned to turn itself into "virtual" council by outsourcing pretty much all of its services. This collapsed demonstrating an interesting tension between traditional Conservative thinking, still quite prevalent in Suffolk, and neoliberalism.

What Richard Murphy calls for in the book is something he calls the "courageous state". This is characterised by a strong belief in the value of government as something good that can transform society for the public good. He describes it:

A Courageous State is populated by politicians who believe in government. They believe in the power of the office they hold. They believe that office exists for the sake of the public good. They know what that public good is. They think it is their job to help each and every person in their country to achieve their potential – something that is unique to each person and which at the same time is a characteristic we all have in common. And they believe they can command the resources to fulfil this task – whether through tax or other means – and that they should command those resources so that we as a country can each achieve, both individually and collectively.

The book contains a detailed set of practical policy suggestions that such a courageous state could follow to get us out of the mess we are currently in.

Murphy himself is an interesting person.  He runs a well known blog called Tax Research UK and his background is as a chartered accountant and economist. He has a great deal of practical real world economic experience working with companies in what he describes as the "real economy". As a consequence the book is practical in a way work by more academic economists frequently is not.

A big part of this agenda is controlling and reducing the "speculative" economy of the City and big finance which he describes as operating in a  kind of parallel universe to the real economy and frequently acts counter to the interests of that real economy.

You can read a longer extract from the start of the book on Richard's Blog. The Courageous State is available from Amazon at £7.15 for the Kindle Edition and £14.99 for the Paperback. I recommend the book highly, it is interesting, practical and an important contribution to building a new kind of politics and economics.

There is nothing "free" about free schools

Sir Bruce Liddington, Academy and Free School Boss
with 280K pay package

Michael Gove appears to have been reading George Orwell's 1984 before he came up with the "free school" name rather than his more usual Dryden. In the novel "freedom is slavery" is one of the slogans of "the Party"and things are called by deliberately mis-leading names, so the Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war and the Ministry of Plenty with poverty.

The "free school" epitaph is just as mis-leading as free schools are anything but free. To start with they cost a fortune to establish and run. Sir Bruce Liddington, the boss of Academy and Free School chain E-act is paid a total renumeration package of £280K a year. This is more than the salary of Andrea Hill the former CEO of Suffolk County Council that caused a huge outcry earlier this year across the County. And E-Act currently run just 11 schools. The incoming CEO of Suffolk has to make do with £155K.

Interestingly when challenged on his salary Liddington repeats the same excuse that Hill used to make constantly when he says:

"It's not up to me to decide what I'm paid. It's a matter for the board who invited me to show an interest in the job."

His expenses at £14,075 are higher than the annual salaries of several school staff. His personal salary making up well over half of the total budget of Stradbroke Primary School

In Suffolk there are already excess school places and opening new schools seems to make no economic sense whatsoever. They have diverted funds from much needed building projects to complete the school organisation review change to two tier and also meant that all local schools have had significant reductions to their capital funding.

And the other sense of "freedom" is even more mis-leading. Gove bills free schools as being "free" from local authority "control". It is true that they are free from any local control and accountability as they answer directly to him personally at the Department for Education in London. And many of these "free schools" billed as schools set up by "local" parents and teachers are in fact run by chains where the Headteacher is accountable to a Board of Directors that could be hundreds of miles away or even abroad.

The free school set to open in Brandon on the Breckland Middle site is currently choosing from a shortlist of three chains to actually run the school. The role of the Governing Body looks set to be more of managing a contract than actually governing the school.

Sadly parents seem to have been hoodwinked into trading local accountability for "choice" and in Suffolk for sentiment - "saving" the Middle Schools. But these schools are nothing like the Middle Schools they replace.

Compare this to local maintained schools where the Head is accountable to the local Governors of the School and to the Local Authority. Which has the most freedom in reality? In which school does the Head have the most power?

With the success of local management of schools your local school pretty much ran itself with the local authority responsible for strategic decisions and support services. Schools did not need to be "set free" from this.

Running a school should be more than managing a contract. Either inadvertently or by deliberately the proposers of these schools are complicit with a deliberate programme by the Government to privatise our schools. To remove local accountability and replace it with governance by a corporate chain with a string of highly paid executives. And this is sold as empowering local communities and giving more power to parents, teachers and the local community?

What is frightening is that so many seem to believe it.