I FIND it hard to share the current enthusiasm for more privatisation in education, though there is nothing wrong with private firms making profit out of schools. No one wants all textbooks, equipment, building work, services or materials to be provided by governments, and some of the best conferences I have attended were run by profit-making companies.
Perhaps it is my unsuccessful jousts with private outfits. I was once booked on a flight which did not exist, that heart-stopping moment when you hand in your ticket at the check-in, only to be told “Wait a minute, sir”, while some anxious-looking official phones an invisible supervisor. The non-existent flight had even been confirmed the day before by the very airline that had issued my fantasy ticket. A free plastic bun and lukewarm mug of brown water were no consolation for the long wait before a real flight.
My phone call to customer relations produced the usual public relations guff. “Hello, my name’s Darren, how can I help?”. Well you can’t, Darren, because you are a spotty youth qualified only by a two-hour PR course, you know bugger all about the business and you are paid to fob off punters like me with lies about how this has never happened before and, in any case, clause 33c(ii) on my ticket says the company can make me pedal to Siberia if it so chooses.
My callow PR friend Darren has since moved to a car hire firm that rented me a filthy sardine tin on wheels which refused to climb hills, a holiday company that booked me a room gazing on a pile driver demolishing a hillside instead of the promised sea view, and another airline which left me stranded in the wrong airport at two in the morning.
Consumers feel like Woody Allen who says that every time he gets into a lift it takes him down to the basement and beats him up. Unfortunately, I am not convinced that Councillor Scroggins would have been any more successful raising matters at Swineshire’s Education, Sewage and Mismanagement committee. Many of the true stories about private involvement in education are never told, however, or are sanitised in case they spoil the image of unqualified success.
Not much publicity was given to the tobacco firm representative sponsoring a school who, when asked what would happen if anti-smoking posters appeared on corridors, replied that they would take a dim view of it. Little publicity was accorded to the private company which refused to give the name of the person appointed to run things in one area, on the grounds that the press might badger him. Try keeping the name of a chief education officer or new headteacher secret for the same reason.
We only hear apparent success stories from the US, rarely the horrors, like the private companies that simply coached children over and over again on the very reading test that would determine their bonus (a practice known as teaching nowadays), those that exaggerated their record to secure contracts, or of the so-called not-for-profit companies that could be more accurately described as not-against-very-large-salaries-for-directors companies.
One of the worst features of mass provision by private companies of such things as inspection or the training of assessors, is the mechanical nature of it. In order to ensure consistency across hundreds of separate entrepreneurs, everything is reduced to formulae, which are then ruthlessly applied and defended. There is no appeal against an Office for Standards in Education judgment, for example, only against procedures. If an inspector says your school’s giraffes are far too small, you can only suggest that they have not looked at enough of them, not point out that they are, in fact, hamsters.
Trainers of headteachers enter rooms clutching their teddy bears: handbooks, ticklists, armfuls of OHP transparencies whacked on the screen for precisely 23 seconds each. These travesties of effective communication often allow no questions or discussion of procedures. Please park your brain outside the door in the space provided, you will not be needing it today. Clones of spotty Darrens then keep up the pretence that every private involvement in education is a stunning success.
Finally, at the end of a momentous November, which saw world events like the fall of the Taliban and Liverpool beaten at Anfield in a European match, it would be a pity not to shed a tear at the news that Chris Woodhead and the Telegraph will soon part company. So I will not. I cannot desert an old pal, however. I shall gladly purchase a copy of the Big Issue if I ever see him selling it, and I hope Darren will mark it down as another successful privatisation.
