IN The Politics of Britain’s Economic Crisis, John Foster details the debate which took place within the Conservative Party and the state apparatus in the 1970s about the future of Britain’s economy and the maintenance of capitalist rule.

Faced with a struggling productive economy, weakened by lack of investment and the diversion of capital overseas, and an increasingly militant trade union movement, which had swung to the left under pressure from the shop stewards’ movement, there were calls from within the ruling class for a decisive break with Keynesianism.

An opportunity presented itself with the discovery of the extent of North Sea oil in 1971 and the possibility of using oil revenues to drastically reorient the British economy.

Backed by US-influenced think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and by the Institute of Directors, a section of the Conservative Party led by Keith Joseph and Margaret Thatcher began to argue for a change of direction towards the monetarist policies of the new right economists in the US.

According to Milton Friedman, one of the most influential members of this group, the only solution to labour militancy was economic “shock treatment,” triggered by drastic deflation, mass unemployment and the selling off of all public assets.

The intention in Britain was the re-establishment of the City of London as a world banking centre at the expense of the struggling manufacturing sector and the rapid revaluation of sterling as a petro-currency.

Joseph and Thatcher were successful in their battle within the Conservative Party and, when the IMF intervened in 1976, destabilising the Labour government and enforcing monetarist policies, the new neoliberal direction was fixed.

It would remain fundamentally the same for the next 40 years.

At the same time a political crisis had developed in education. Throughout the 1970s, there was a growing right-wing backlash, primarily in response to comprehensivisation, which was exaggerated by the media to epic proportions.

The response of the Labour leadership was to shift to the right and James Callaghan’s 1976 Ruskin speech marked the breakdown of the prevailing consensus on education and the start of what Professor Stephen Ball of the Institute of Education refers to as the “discourse of derision” about teachers and teaching.

It was against this backdrop that the Thatcher government came to power and began the radical restructuring of Britain’s education system, embedding the key elements of what has become known as the Global Education Reform Movement (Germ) which has dominated our education system ever since.

The initial point of attack was around the question of parental choice and the 1980 Education Act contained some measures designed to extend choice and thereby competition.

The Tories appealed to a popular base and throughout the 1980s and ’90s — and to a certain extent even to this day — managed to successfully portray the views of parents as a single homogeneous group, broadly supportive of neoliberal reform.

However, the key shift came with the pivotal 1988 Education Reform Act (ERA).

This developed the mantra of choice and competition, while increasing diversity of provision through the introduction of grant maintained schools and city technology colleges.

The explicit intention of this was increased market competition. Kenneth Baker set this out for the North of England Conference in 1988 when he said: “Parents should not have to accept second best within a local authority monopoly of free education.

“If the product is not all it should be, parents should not be put in the position of having to like it or lump it.”

However, choice, diversity and competition alone do not make a market. In order for “consumer” decisions to affect “producers,” there has to be an element of financial exchange.

The 1988 ERA introduced local management of schools and per-capita funding. Now every school would be responsible for its own budget and the funding formula would be based on the number of “customers” it could attract.

Again, Thatcher was clear about the purpose of this change. As she told the Daily Mail, the intention was that “money will flow to the good schools and good headmasters.”

Underlying these reforms was a new understanding of the purpose of education. Throughout the 1970s, criticisms had developed that education paid too much attention to preparing students to play a constructive role in society and not enough to preparing them for the “world of work.”

This provided the basis for the neoliberal reconceptualisation of education as the production of “human capital.”

This has remained a key concept throughout the process of “reform.”

As a 1996 Department for Education paper argued: “Investment in learning in the 21st century is the equivalent of investment in the machinery and technical innovation that was essential during the industrial revolution. Then it was capital, now it is human capital.”

If education is simply the production of human capital, then efficiency becomes key.

This means focusing on low-risk strategies for the transmission of core knowledge and skills.

In order to ensure that we are constantly improving the efficiency of education, we have to be able to measure the value it adds to human capital.

This leads to standardised tesing, which reinforces the restriction of education to low-risk methods and narrow core curriculums.

The 1988 ERA introduced the first national curriculum and standardised tests at ages seven, 11 and 14.

This all sits very well with the market model of education. The data from standardised testing begins to act as performance indicators by which consumers can judge the quality of different products.

Hence the development of league tables of results and the ubiquity of Ofsted summaries for informing school choice.

These changes, taken together, necessitate a fundamental renegotiation of the roles of students, parents and teachers.

For students and parents, this is a shift from the framework of citizen rights to the fundamentally different framework of consumer rights, with all the attendant increases in inequality.

The changing role of teachers was clearly and succinctly put by Joseph in his 1985 speech to the North of England Conference.

He began by saying: “Today I shall speak mostly about teachers, the main agents for the delivery of the curriculum.”

He went on to outline a programme of action relating to teacher appraisal, management and training, emphasising his view that teacher appraisal should be linked to performance and subject to assessment.

This instrumental understanding of teaching finds its ultimate expression in the view that, while every aspect of teachers’ work must be subjected to detailed scrutiny to ensure efficiency, it is so devoid of any deeper pedagogy that a teaching qualification is unnecessary.

The scale of the change brought about by the 1988 ERA was vast and yet it stopped short of actual privatisation of the education service.

It seems to have been acknowledged that, in order to fully embed neoliberal change in the education system, it was more important to embark on the long road of cultural change within education than to rely on the immediate effects of the Act.

As educationalist Brian Simon wrote in 1987 when the legislation was being presented to Parliament, the ERA comprised “a subtle set oflinked measures are to be relied upon to have the desired effect — that is to push the whole system towards a degree, at least, of privatisation, establishing a base which could be further exploited later.”

This “subtle set of linked measures” changed the nature of education fundamentally and, in spite of a slowing of the process, first under the Major government then under new Labour, the fundamental direction of travel has not been challenged by any successive government.

Indeed, it is arguably new Labour, with the creation of academies and further undermining of local authorities, which created the platform on which the past five years’ race to achieve the “1988 project” occurred.

The outcome of the 2010 election provided the opportunity to reignite the urgency of the original privatisation project.

In both speed and scale, the educational changes of the past five years have been qualitatively different from anything experienced since the battles of the 1980s.

Indeed, at times Michael Gove and the DfE have seemed possessed by an imperative to complete Thatcher’s vision in a single term.

And yet the pace of academy conversion has slowed. The forces ranged against the government have grown in number, in strength and in political awareness.

If the last five years have left us with a weak and fragmented education system, they have also left us with an ever more united and determined opposition, clear that there is an alternative vision of education to the one that has maintained its stranglehold for the past 40 years.

Gawain Little is a member of the NUT national executive.