Here is a story long overdue for the telling. It is the story of the half hearted attempt to set up a comprehensive education system in Britain and the subsequent, never-ending endeavours to undermine and destabilise that which was achieved. The work by Melissa Benn is a meticulous but at the same time a very readable one, and she should be highly commended for her efforts. While we have all had our eyes and efforts focused on defending the National Health Service, our partially constructed national education service has been allowed to fall into disrepair. So bad have things become that one wonders whether it is already too late to save the half built crumbling ruin.

Selection is now the order of the day, and masquerading under the fig leaf of choice, comes a tidal wave of privatisation and profit taking. Add to that, a nasty increase in religious schools and religious separatism and you have all the ingredients of a right wing, corporatist takeover of English schooling – all the better to facilitate the economic corporate takeover of the British economy.

Benn explains from the very outset the war that has been rumbling on for decades over the direction of our education institutions, a war that has really hotted up since the current coalition government crawled its way into Downing Street. Benn writes: The current clashes over government plans represent the intensification of a struggle that has been going on, in different forms, for nearly fifty years. There has been a long and harsh battle between supporters of comprehensive schools and those who want to retain selection in some form, whether through the restitution of the grammar schools or through more subtle means. Pxix

Then in a sharp synopsis of the entire story Benn adds: Part of this political story inevitably involves a parallel and broader struggle over whether our public services are to be run by a democratic, devolved state, or whether they are to be put out to tender. Pxx

That’s it in a nutshell. Social provision democratically controlled at the local level or private provision controlled in the boardrooms of large unaccountable corporations. But this is not some dire warning of what might happen. It is happening right now as we happily blog away. The worst scenario is coming to pass at a school near you! Or as Benn puts it more poetically, Behind the glitzy shop-window dressing of the Coalition’s school plans, with their relentless harping on novelty and freedom, there was a deeper and darker agenda. P13 Of that you can be absolutely sure. Not surprising to learn by the way that a certain Mr Gove is a member of the Atlantic Bridge that shadowy right wing organisation at the heart of the Liam Fox scandal. Democracy? Don’t make me laugh.

Just in case any of her readers are in any doubt as to where all this freedom and choice is leading to, Benn spells it out in crystal clear terms: Probably the most significant development in the new schools revolution is the massively expanded role it will give to the private sector, a path partially cleared under New Labour with its city academy programme, encouraging private sponsors and charitable bodies into state education. Several companies already run schools in England, and many more provide important services to them. With the new free-schools and academies, the door is wide open to the expansion of the market. P24

But the follow up lines are even more revealing:

Yet one would scarcely know it from public debate on education. Unsurprisingly, little reference is made by any of the new school celebrities or politicians to the growing private control of public education, or to the cost of this to the tax-payer who is, in effect, underwriting the latest round of privatisation of state education. P24

Having laid out the corporate foundations of the education counter-revolution Benn then proceeds to trace back the origins of the incomplete attempt to construct a comprehensive education system that we often forget was quite radical in its aims. It is well worth reminding ourselves just how revolutionary the education system, that was envisaged and partly constructed after the horrors and carnage of the two world wars, was. Benn does remind us and does so in inspiring terms:

For to make real sense of the intense opposition that the comprehensive ideal provoked, we have to acknowledge the radicalism inherent in the idea of universal education; the idea that every child, of whatever background, is deserving of a serious education; that all the nation’s children might learn from a broadly common syllabus, enjoying matching resources and similarly high expectations; and possibly the most threatening idea of all, the suggestion that at some points, in some places, the nation’s children Muslim, Christian. Or Jewish, upper-class or impoverished, girl or boy, black or white might actually be educated in the same classrooms together. P37

I have taught in such classrooms and it was a wonderfully liberating experience. I have also witnessed the opposite and it is a woefully dispiriting experience. In London in particular, you can travel no more than a few hundred yards and experience schools so deformed by class privilege that you wonder if the comprehensive schools programme was ever begun. I know of two schools that literally abut each other, each one serving a different class with virtually no interaction at any level between the two. This, in this so-called liberal global capital that we so love to laud. On this point Benn writes:

As a nation, we are more connected to our pre- World War II and indeed nineteenth century assumptions, prejudices and modes of social organisation, than perhaps we realise. Class stratification remains the default position, even in the 21st century. P38

Having dared to dream the dream, politicians of all persuasions immediately started to back-track, fearing the egalitarian implications of what was on offer. Old class prejudices came quickly to the fore just like they did in response to the NHS. Benn sums it up this way:

Having equivocated over early comprehensive reform, and still afraid of its potentially radical implications, governments of both right and left facilitated a return to selection, albeit by covert means: a war of attrition that was indirect, complex and continual. At the same time, under cover of the language of choice, diversity and freedom, government reasserted its grip from the centre. Local government, whether proudly independent or weakly ineffectual, was perceived to be as great, if not more of an enemy, than the comprehensive ideal. P61

In those few lines, Benn is able to set out the wider class struggle that was taking place in every local borough, county and shire a struggle for and against local democracy and accountability. It wasn’t always clear at the time but looking back it now seems obvious that even ineffectual local government is preferable to unaccountable Tory central government. Now it is almost too late. Our schools are rapidly being enticed and bribed out of local control and into the realm of a central government that is wedded to the corporate fix. Possibly the only thing standing between a total loss of local control of our schools and the corporate beast is Melissa Benn’s book. This may seem a far-fetched exaggeration but just watch the speed and subtlety of the corporate takeover and you might just concede my point. Benn sums up the situation thus:

And yet, the attempts by one government after another to lure local schools away from local authorities, through bribery or brow-beating, have never been as successful as their instigators hoped. The original conception of education as a national service, locally administered clung through the Thatcher years and halfway through New Labour but, as so many predicted when they were first introduced, the move towards city academies paved the way for potential private control of large numbers of our schools, with consequences we are only just now beginning to grasp. P62

Benn does a magnificent job in spelling out how the reintroduction of selection, that always favours the better off sections of society, has slowly but surely undermined the comprehensive ideal. She has also done a sterling job of exposing how close we have come to seeing our education structures fall to privatisation in the same way that our utilities and transport networks have done. The only unknown is whether it will be health or education that will be the next to succumb. Benn gloomily predicts:

Once again we will revert to the old pattern in English education, in which all are encouraged to know their place.. With the establishment of more and more federations and school chains, certain primaries will become known as feeders for particular secondary schools and the battle of school choice will begin in earnest at nursery. Get on the wrong conveyor belt, and you could lose your child a chance of winning a place at one of the most prized schools in the area. P165

In her concluding chapter entitled Go public: A new School model I find Benn a little tame and a little conciliatory in places. Take for example the following passage:

The private sector will always have an important voice in the national dialogue about education. But there is no reason why it should be granted such a privileged place and controlling one in the management of schools. Quite simply, education is not its business. P200

The question is; why should the private sector have any voice in the education of our children when their only interest can only ever be the maximisation of profit? Don’t have any illusions about the fundamental essence of capitalism. It may put on a human face when needed but its rationale is deeply embedded in its DNA. Benn and other campaigners against the privatisation of education would do well to remember that.

Notwithstanding this small but vital note of warning, Benn has produced a classic defence of the comprehensive ideal. Her concluding chapter is a stirring call to arms that should shake us all out of our slumbers. But for me, her piece-de-resistance comes when she quotes a certain Richard Pring a distinguished philosopher of education, who defined the underlying principle of a comprehensive education as follows:

What is it that makes us human? How did we become so? And how might we become more so? P180

For me, that quote really hits the button.