Wilson Slashes Education

Scan page 7

Colleges of education face the prospect of deterioration and closure over the next few years. At least thirteen are now to "discontinue initial training", ", in the jargon of the DES, and many others are to be merged with other institutions.

Fewer than half can have any confidence in an independent future. And even that confidence is misplaced, for it would be mad to trust the Labour government to refrain from further more savage attacks on education.

Figures tell part of the story. The Labour government, by radically cutting earlier plans, has set a target of only 640,000 students in higher education by 1981. This will probably soon be reduced by another 15,000.

The share of the colleges of education in these targets, which will dramatically gouge staff levels and facilities in every area of education, is only 60,000 total places. It is on this basis that announcements of closures and mergers have been made.

Worse still, the DES plans for about a fifth of those to be reserved for in-service training (rather than used for new students), which means that if the Labour government's sense of "reality" prevails, several more colleges will have to close.

Savage though the Labour government's plans may be, they are not-original. Much of their substance was contained in the White Paper laughingly called "Education: a framework for expansion" (!), which Tory leader Margaret Thatcher issued Education Secretary in 1972.

In education, as elsewhere in the social services, and virtually every other area of British political life, Labour is putting into practice the policies which the Tories themselves would implement but for the Caught by both the state pay laws on the one hand, and Healey's spending cuts on the other, which are savaging the NHS, the Junior Hospital Doctors are now at the forefront of the fight against the most reactionary policies of the Wilson governm ent.

The new contract recommended by the supposedly "independent" review body on Doctors and Dentists pay is an insult which any right minded trade unionist would tear up instantly.

PROPOSALS

It proposes that on top of a isic 40 hours week, doctors shoul Work the next 4 hours for no pay at all!

Do additional hours on standby or working, at the hospital, at 30% of basic rate.

Be available on call at 10% of basic pay.

Under the previous contract, junior doctors received overtime only for hours worked in excess of 80 hours a week, so a number of doctors will receive an increase in pay even on this slave contract. But for most doctors this plainly represents a real cut in salary, as can be seen by the fact that it will cost no extra money to implement.

In real terms the contract would mean less doctors will be employed in the NHS, and forced to work hostility and organised strength of the working class.

Even the most positive point of Thatcher's plan, to develop and strengthen nursery education has been eroded to nothing by the Education Secretary Mulley our government's latest io cuts.

"OVERPRODUCTION"

One argument put forward to justify the swingeing attacks on higher education is the present "overproduction" of teachers. It is true that this year more than 5000 trained teachers have been unable to find work, a rise of over a thousand from the figures of a year ago. It is also, however, true that school classes throughout the country are too large for really effective education, and that in many areas conditions are so bad that teachers can do no more than "keep order" in the classroom, if even that.

Trained teachers are available and more trained teachers are needed, yet the government shuts down colleges. New and improved school buildings are needed, building workers are unemployed, and yet the reformists say 'make do' with what you have, however inadequate it may be: It is vital to locate these contradictions where they belong: in the nature of capitalism itself, its inexorable tendency to crisis, , and its inability further to develop productive forces.

Even in the best of times, the capitalist class is not friendly to longer hours, since it is obviously massively cheaper to employ one doctor for 120 hours than three for 40 hours. So while doctors face a worsening of their conditions standards of health care will plummet as fewer: doctors are placed under increasing physical and mental stress in a decaying Health Service.

AXE There can be no mistake -junior doctors can only win their fight through defence of the NHS against spending cuts. Already the Labour government's axe is smashing into the hospitals - Camden and Islington AHA has only a half to a third of the cash needed in the next few years. The Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Sick Children - a major paediatric centre - has ordered £70,000 in cuts by closing sections of departments, curtailing pathological services and not filling vacancies. In the W. Midlands only 10 out of 60 recommended new consultants posts are to be filled. Meanwhile 1 person in 100 (600,000) are in line in lengthening hospital waiting lists. The system faces collapse if there is not an immediate injection of cash - ad in the wreckage would vanish all prospect of secure or satisfying employment for junior doctors.

REACTIONARIES

Yet the reactionaries who lead BMA, and their allies leading Junior Hospital Doctors Assocstate spending on social services. Every advance in support of education, medical care, and other aspects of welfare has been won either by the direct action of the working class or through fear of their strength and militancy.

But now in deepest recession, in the midst of the crisis of capitalist profits, the employing class oppose state spending as part of their fight to survive, carried on the backs of the workers. Whether supported by taxation or by credit, state spending eats away at the rate of profit, and as part of their mortal struggle to drive up that rate, the capitalists must attack it.

The Labour government is their willing instrument. It will continue to respond to the bayings of the Tories to cut the "social wage" just as it has responded by imposing state control of wages while inflation and redundancies continue to rip.

Who will defend the education system? Certainly not local governments or LEA's, who with furrowed brows and rapid pencils draw up "contingency plans" of capitulation.

ABANDON

The Warwickshire County Council, for example, has recently prepared a scheme to "trim" its annual spending by £6.39 million (about 14% of the total budget) in case of further calls for reduction by the government, and over half of this is in education. It would involve dismissing more than 250 full-time and part-time teachers, the closing of schools and libraries and the abandonment of a number of programmes.

Oxfordshire Education Committee predict that their recent decision to cancel their 'rising fives policy whereby children enter primary school before theit fifth birthday, will result in more teacher unemployment and in empty classCastle - destroying Health Service iation show no interest in defence of the NHS. While the BMA refuses to lift a finger to defend the junior doctors, they threaten sanctions to preserve private practice. And the JHDA leaders follow on in support of pay beds and the profits of the drug monopolies only lead to the majority bring denied medical treatment while a handful of consultants grew fat on the proceeds.

For junior doctors the fight must now be with the labour movement in defence of the NHS. To do this they must organise outside the BMA and JHDA - join the doctors union MPU-ASTMS, which supports the junior doctors action and fights for a 40-hour contract together with a sliding scale of NHS expenditure and an immediate £1,000m injection of state cash. In line with the policy fight of the WSL, MPU-ASTMS is also pledged to fight t both inside Service. In OIs must implement * Full ort to rooms which they may then offer to groups of parents to run voluntary playgroups!

The trade union bureaucracy have, for the most part, rallied to the government's call for support, divorcing specific issues from the general problem and discouraging their members from effective action.

Groups such as Rank and File (IS) have tended to attack the problems of teachers and the education system piecemeal, substituting militancy over individual issues for a general and politically conscious struggle.

They are at the root of the proposal of the Extra Metropolitan Association of the NUT that teachers should refuse to take the classes of colleagues who are absent for more than three days. Such fights are right and necessary, and we support them. But they cannot replace the need to struggle to show teachers the need for a thoroughgoing socialist programme to ensure an adequate education system and full employment.

We must campaign in the teacher training colleges for full union rights for unemployed teachers, fighting here as elsewhere against the disorganisation and demoralisation of those on the dole. The "second-class citizenship" of trainee teachers in the union must be ended.

There must be no closures of colleges. Students and staff, both academic and non-academic, must prepare co-ordinated campaigns to occupy buildings in the event that threats of closure are carried out.

Jobs must be guaranteed to all trained teachers, and sackings must be fought tooth and nail. Our demand • is for improved, not worsened classroom conditions and staff-student ratios. In no .. case should increases in work load be accepted, and attempts to cut back supply teaching must be resisted.

While building workers are ou of work, school building pro grammes must be carried forwar to improve conditions in thi schools.

We oppose all collaboration with government wage cuts beginning with the TUC's £6 limit A fight must be waged in thr unions to force its rejection and tr call for a sliding scale of wages tr rise in pace with inflation, a determined by elected committee of trade unionists.

Those union bureaucrats whe prefer class collaboration to thr protection of their members' job and living standards, must b kicked out and replaced by : leadership willing to fight.

These demands require al increase in government spending not a reduction; we must struggl for a sliding scale of educatio expenditure, hedged agains inflation. As part of this struggle we call for the opening of the council's books to committees ol trade unionists, in order mon effectively to resist future plan to attack education.

SUPPLIERS A major problem in the budget of all institutions has been th violent increase in the price o educational supplies, amounting ti about 50% over the last two year! The books of the supply indur tries must be forced open as well If their price rises are divertin funds from education, then it i time to nationalise them withou compensation.

"Open the books" committee: in which representatives from al unions involved should play a part and students' representatives a well - are the place to begin th defence of the education system These committees should also linl up with bodies fighting cuts i other areas of the social service to construct a workers plan fa their defence and expansion and tr campaign throughout the labou movement for its implementation