GCSE results plummet
This year’s GCSE results are damning. The national pass rate has declined yet again, and in my region of the West Midlands, it has the lowest pass rate at a mere 63 percent!
The number of students having to resit their Maths and English GCSEs has reached its highest levels, with nearly 200,000 students projected to retake both subjects.
This has already added further pressure upon further education colleges, who will inevitably have to increase class sizes, and pay extra to hire exam halls to cope with the rising numbers of students on resits.
Yet after all that, only 16 percent of students passed their maths resits last year! And a bleak report from Exeter University predicts that fewer than 40 percent of students will get good Maths and English grades by the end of the decade.
When you’ve gutted a student’s secondary education with austerity and cuts for five years of their life, how do you expect students to pass their resits in just two months?
While schools are still crumbling from RAAC concrete, the recruitment of new teachers at an all-time-low, and experienced teachers leaving in droves, what is Starmer doing?
The £87bn he’s pledging for ‘defence’ (read: militarism and bloodshed) could be spent on fixing every school, giving free school meals nationwide, lifting the two-child benefits cap, and resolving the staffing and retention crisis.
Books not bombs! Drive capitalism out of education! Workers and students, unite and fight!
Jazir Mohammed, teaching assistant
Rigged system
Our education system is geared towards segregating students based on factors like wealth, how smart you are at a young age, the area you live in, and more. This year’s round of GCSE and A-level results in England were therefore no surprise.
48.4 percent of private school GCSE entries scored at least an A/7, compared to 19.4 percent of those from comprehensive schools. That’s a gap of 29 percentage points.
For A-levels, 49.4 percent of private school candidates scored A or above in all subjects, compared to 22.3 percent at comprehensive schools – a gap of 27 percentage points.
It’s a rigged system. We teach students that their educational outcomes are based on merit; that if they try hard enough, they can get ahead in life.
But this couldn’t be further from the truth. There is clearly a class disparity at play here, dictating how much help and what resources a student will receive to help them succeed.
Starmer’s Labour is in the process of taking away the charitable status of private schools. Instead, his government should be focusing on abolishing them.
The rich and wealthy have no interest in ensuring that our education system is the best it can be. They live in a different world from the rest of us.
All students deserve to get a good education, irrespective of their start in life. Kick capitalism out of education! Join the RCP!
Jojo Moseley-Hutchinson, Lincoln
Colleges in crisis
Congratulations to all those going into post-16 education after working hard for your GCSEs!
However, a word of warning: life is far from rosy in England’s 157 further education (FE) colleges.
While teachers in mainstream education received a 5.5 percent pay rise, there was nothing for college lecturers and staff, who have seen a significant decline in their real wages in the recent period.
This has led to FE staff turnover being the highest in the public sector, with students having multiple teachers over their two year course, or periods with no teacher at all.
A growing trend is for teachers to go part-time and top up their income by tutoring. This means that students from well-off backgrounds that can afford £40-60 per hour for tutoring have a huge advantage over working-class students.
All this is creating a stressful educational experience, far from the ‘time of your life’ that students are told it ought to be.
Jo Grady, general secretary of UCU, the main trade union in colleges, said “it was hugely disappointing” that Labour has neglected the FE sector. Indeed it is! But most members were far from surprised.
Under a UCU leadership renowned for being conciliatory, all faith was put on Sir Kid Starver to do the ‘right thing’.
At the UCU’s last FE conference, all motions for a national aggregated strike were lost, leaving us with no overall strategy. This is the reason we didn’t get anything.
Starmer wants to take the momentum out of the class struggle, by paying off all the organised militant workers – NHS staff, rail workers, and teachers – while ignoring those who have yet to mobilise.
But this is sowing the seeds for growing class anger, which will surely burst its banks, just like it has in Bangladesh. Personally, I look forward to seeing Starmer and co. flee in a helicopter!
Phil, Loughborough UCU (personal capacity)
Classroom pressures
This week, I returned to work at a sixth form college, as part of the support staff. Despite my reservations, I was excited to be back educating young people.
Less than ten minutes in, the college principal presented us with a long list of ominous changes. Firstly, there will be no pay rise for sixth form staff. And secondly, the college is now adopting an almost entirely remote IT system to ‘save costs’ and improve ‘efficiency’. I can only imagine what carnage this will cause during term time.
Last but not least, there is now evermore pressure to ‘academise’ – although the word ‘privatise’ would be far more appropriate!
It’s easy to foot the blame with college management. However, it is well understood by staff and students that the problem is far wider reaching than the college grounds.
Fourteen years of Tory attacks have undermined the entire system: from dysfunctional curriculums to crumbling walls.
Kid Starver’s announcement that things will be ‘painful’ and ‘worse before they get better’ tells us a great deal. Clearly the new PM’s honeymoon period has evaporated over the summer break.
Union members are already frustrated at the lack of progress. Talk of strikes has begun already.
Workers in education need to be united in every sector – from nurseries to sixth form. Capitalism is sucking the life out of our classrooms, exhausting the teachers and staff, whilst offering little to jaded students.
Kick capitalism out of education! Students and staff – unite!
GW, South London
Golden age of universities?
The new head of the UK’s ‘independent’ education watchdog’ – the curiously-named Office for Students – recently remarked that “the golden age of universities is over”.
I think that’s a funny way to refer to a decade in which education has been made exponentially more expensive, and working and learning conditions have plummeted.
What kind of ‘golden age’ involves industrial action running on for years and years, or students being tricked into paying universities rent so that they could study from their laptops whilst trapped inside their rooms during the COVID pandemic?
Still, maybe the Office for Students has some good suggestions for fixing the problems of universities? Of course they do… Increase tuition fees! What else?
An annoyed student
Ripped off
I work in a students’ union office and was chatting about incoming students with one of the elected officers. He is already getting messages from prospective international students about being scammed by letting agents.
These parasites are asking for £300 upfront before students have even seen the property, let alone signed a contract. And this comes on top of all the fees international students have to pay.
Aside from being disgustingly exploitative, it’s downright illegal to be asking for holding fees before a contract has been signed. But that’s what these vultures are counting on: students being unfamiliar with rental law.
Higher education is touted as a way for young people to get ahead in life. The reality is often very different indeed.
Students, domestic and international alike, are juiced for huge fees; subject to constant exploitation by universities and landlords; and then are kicked to the curb when they’re done, straight into a terrible job market where they’ll be competing for the same minimum wage jobs.
This is all capitalism can offer students: exploitation upon exploitation. We need united action between students and workers: against landlords, university bosses, and the whole system!
Jo Bunkle, Cambridge
University life
I’m a university student going into my second year. I barely survived during my first year. Two out of the 20 people on my course dropped out citing financial issues.
At my university, the University of South Wales, it feels like everyone I know is struggling. People survive by asking family members for support, or going into debt. Some students are literally skipping meals and starving themselves.
Student loans barely cover the cost of accommodation during the academic year. Therefore are forced to do any job for an income
And the jobs that are offered to university students are a joke! Zero-hour contracts, back-to-back all-day and night shifts on minimum wage. And that’s if you get hired at all!
How are we supposed to think about our courses (which we are spending hand over fist for) if we’re constantly worried about money, are working in any spare time we have, and sometimes don’t even have enough nutrition to think clearly?
Topping it all off, we’re told that we need to learn how to budget by the finances team. I can’t afford bread, let alone avocados! How can we tighten the purse strings on an empty wallet?
We are told the university managers have to make ‘harsh decisions’. Meanwhile close to £430m is invested in companies complicit in Israel’s war crimes money from using university accounts.
Marketisation has been a complete failure for working-class students. If you are able to overcome the barriers to get into university, don’t expect to receive any support. Expect to get shafted. We need to kick capitalism off campus!
Wyatt Adam Morgen Holt, Cardiff
Are you a fed-up school or university student? About to head away for university? Do you work in the education sector? We want to hear from you!
Write to us to tell us about your views and experiences of the crisis in the education system, and we may include it in upcoming issues of The Communist.
