The New Serfdom

by Angela Eagle

  More of us work, more of us work harder and more of us are suffering noticeable increases in stress as a result, which, to make matters even worse, is having a negative effect on our health. A study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology by researchers at Manchester University followed people returning to work after the recession. They took blood tests, asked questions and had health practitioners assess the health of the workers. The study found that people moving into low-pay, low-autonomy and low-security work had the highest levels of chronic stress – more so than those who remained unemployed. This stress manifests physically as well as mentally. Their long-term glucose levels were worse, their ‘bad fat’ levels were worse, and proteins in the bloodstream related to illness were higher. In short, bad work is making us ill – more so even than unemployment.

  This is a startling indictment of work in Britain today. And it’s affecting us all. More of us are working, we’re doing so harder and longer, pay is stagnating, and yet our work is becoming less pleasurable. Work isn’t giving us the security, satisfaction and pride that it should. And despite employers squeezing employees until their pips squeak, there is no evidence at all that it is improving productivity. In fact, British productivity is way behind our European neighbours. In the time a British worker makes £1 of value, a German worker makes £1.35, according to the ONS. We’re behind the US, France and Italy too.

  Part of the problem, as most people who work will recognise, is that in a system that necessarily privileges employers over employees, capital over labour, certain dynamics emerge. First, as we have said, labour is squeezed to work harder in the hope this will increase productivity, which only serves to increase stress levels, unhappiness and physical illness. An alienated worker works less efficiently, less passionately and therefore less effectively than a motivated and mentally positive worker. A further damaging effect of this misalignment is that workers are treated more like subordinates and less like partners in the workplace, which again damages productivity.

  In Germany, workers and employers have much more effective relations. The German practice of Mitbestimmung sees workers’ representatives on company boards, allowing them to have a voice on important issues, including human resources and corporate strategy. That means they have better industrial relations, with few strikes. This underpins the high-productivity, high-innovation culture there. If you want to make a quality product, you listen to your workers. You respect experience forged through practice. You increase institutional knowledge retention by having happy, motivated workers. That leads to more efficiency and more innovation.

  Or, of course, you can do it Hayek’s way and end up with a workforce that is squeezed for short-term gain and now – overworked, stressed and alienated – is falling further and further behind the rest of the world.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  IGNORANCE

  By the time William Beveridge published Social Insurance and Allied Services in 1942, successive governments had already made considerable movement towards a coherent, universal educational system. A series of Acts of Parliament, starting in the mid-nineteenth century, had raised the school leaving age and extended both the provision and funding of schools. Victorian educationalists started to develop recognisable theories of pedagogy and the purpose of education.

  The historian G. A. N. Lowndes, in his 1937 book, The Silent Social Revolution, which examined the changes in the education system over the previous few decades, stated:

  The contribution which a sound and universal system of public education can make to the sobriety, orderliness and stability of a population is perhaps the most patent of its benefits. What other gains can be placed to its credit? … Can it be claimed that the widening of educational opportunity in the long run repays that cost to the community by a commensurate increase in the national wealth and prosperity? Or can it be claimed that it is making the population happier, better able to utilise its leisure, more adaptable?

  Anyone who knows how the schools have come to life in the past decade, anyone who is in a position to take a wide view of the social condition of the people and compare conditions to-day with those forty years ago, will have no hesitation in answering these questions in the affirmative.

  Similarly, William Beveridge saw education as an essential part of the means by which we preserve the order, integrity and success of our nation, especially by comparison with the totalitarian states with whom we were at war. In his 1944 book, Full Employment in a Free Society, he pointedly noted: ‘Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their dupes, but which no democracy can afford among its citizens.’ His book melded Fabian democratic socialist statism with Keynesian economics, arguing that government must both create demand for goods and services (as it had during the war) and ease unemployment by bringing industry to places where there was spare labour and also by making it as easy as possible for unemployed people to find labour. Education played a huge role, then, in maximising employment and ensuring the labour force’s skills married up with the nation’s needs. But Beveridge did take a more expansive view of education. In notes for his addresses to incoming students for 1924–26 at the London School of Economics, where he was the director, he wrote:

  The School … is not a place of technical education fitting you for one and only one profession. It makes you better for every occupation, it does help you get on in life … But you will lose most of the value of the School if you regard it solely as a means of getting on in life. Regard it as a means of learning, to advance science and civilisation.

  By the time Beveridge had published Full Employment in a Free Society, the wartime coalition government had already promulgated the 1944 Education Act, the basis for our modern universal education system. Richard Austen ‘Rab’ Butler was the Conservative politician who created the post-war education system, working with politicians from all parties. The Act guaranteed free education for every child in England and Wales, divided schools into primaries and secondaries and set the aim of increasing the school leaving age from fourteen to sixteen. The 1944 Act created the Tripartite System, which consisted of three types of secondary school: grammar schools, secondary technical schools and secondary modern schools. While little-known now, the Act also created comprehensive schools and direct grant schools, which allowed independent schools to receive state funding in exchange for ‘free places’ for some students. It also introduced the eleven-plus exam, which streamed children to schools deemed appropriate to their skills, and it provided free milk for children.

  Since then, the specific provisions of the 1944 Education Act have been replaced or repealed. A series of Acts of Parliament by hyperactive governments changed the implementation and funding of the education system repeatedly over the following decades but it never eliminated the educational segregation which was such a feature of the 1944 Act, even though its final formal provisions were repealed in 1996. Famously, Margaret Thatcher, ‘the Milk Snatcher’, took away free milk for children between seven and eleven. The pace of change has been such that few in politics ever really remember when things changed and why. One of the most common complaints, for example, of the Tory right is that Labour turned the polytechnics into universities, which they claim ‘dumbed them down’. In fact, this change was carried out in the Tories’ Further and Higher Education Act of 1992.

  The reason for the hyperactivity around education is perhaps explained by the economic motives for ensuring the wider spread of knowledge and skills. Knowledge is recognised as the key driver of productivity and economic growth in Western countries, which is why we have focused so much as a nation on the role of information, technology and learning in economic performance. That was just as true when we were leading the world in industrial productivity as it is today in the digital economy.

  Britain’s education system comprises four parts. The first is the formal schooling of children. The second is higher education in universities. The third is further education, which is any study after
secondary education that is not part of higher education (i.e. part of a degree). And the fourth is apprenticeships, which combine on-the-job training with accompanying study. In theory, all four should combine seamlessly to provide each individual with a cogent pathway to enlightenment and equip them with the skills they need and want to fulfil their aspirations in life. However, a combination of insufficiency of provision and barriers to access, like fees, means that isn’t true for many British people.

  If we start with schools – the one experience all British people share – generally speaking the thing that politicians and policy-makers use to assess progress is league tables that gauge pupil performance. There is a lot of excitement, for example, around the publication of the OECD’s PISA rankings (Programme for International Student Assessment). This triennial survey assesses education systems based on international tests taken by a sample of fifteen-year-olds in maths, reading and science. The UK is generally a mid-table performer, with Asian education systems ranking at the top. Perhaps more useful than the relative rankings (which delight journalists, who love breathless but useless headlines on how we have fallen behind [insert relatively poor country] in [insert subject]) are the scores. Our scores were stable despite all the changes in the structure of our educational system in the past two or three decades. However, they did decline between 2012 and 2015 (the last tranche). This is almost certainly a reflection of the decline in the number of teachers. The BBC reported:

  The OECD education chief highlighted concerns about the impact of teacher shortages – saying that an education system could never exceed the quality of its teachers.

  ‘There is clearly a perceived shortage,’ he said, warning that head teachers saw a teacher shortage as ‘a major bottleneck’ to raising standards.

  Similarly, the National Union of Teachers said the survey showed that ‘the government is failing in one of its key responsibilities – to ensure that there are enough teachers in the system.’ This failure underlies findings by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) that a significantly growing number of young people have been leaving school under this government with the lowest levels of literacy and numeracy. Not just that, but unlike almost every other developed country, older people in Britain have higher literacy and numeracy scores than young people: a shocking symptom of a failure to drive improvement across the entire system of which we should be deeply ashamed. The JRF explained the kind of social exclusion this can cause:

  It means [the 5 million adults lacking basic reading, writing and numeracy skills] may struggle to carry out a number of basic tasks, ranging from writing short messages, using a cashpoint to withdraw money, being able to understand price labels on food or pay household bills.

  A further 12.6 million adults lack basic digital skills – meaning they struggle to carry out tasks such as sending emails or filling out online job application forms.

  A good school education requires three things: high-quality school leadership; high-quality teaching; and engaged and supportive parents. And, as with almost every public service, you get what you pay for. Singapore, the top-ranked country in PISA tables, invested heavily in the quality of its teachers. They focused on the prestige and status of teaching, recruiting its teachers from the top 5 per cent of graduates. In addition, all teachers are trained in the National Institute of Education (admittedly only possible in a city-state like Singapore). Finland, another very highly rated education system, also treats teaching as a high-status profession, and they also give teachers extensive training. All teachers take a five-year master’s degree in which they are given the chance to test their skills in classrooms which act as laboratories – almost like university teaching hospitals for medical students, after which they are given huge autonomy – liberated from the inspection, testing and government control that bedevils teaching in the UK. Here, the Conservative government allowed non-qualified teachers to teach in free schools and academies, letting them compete for jobs with fully qualified teachers. As Tristram Hunt, then shadow Education Secretary, told Michael Gove when this change was first introduced in 2013: ‘You need more qualifications to get a job in a burger bar than you do to teach in an English school.’

  For all teachers, however, their one overriding aim is to improve the life chances of the children under their care, and to bring out their potential. In researching this book, we heard testimony from teachers – near tears – describing how they were simply incapable in the time available to provide the support required. In September 2017, 4,000 headteachers across England wrote to parents to warn that budgets face a real-terms cut of 4.6 per cent by 2020. According to the teaching unions, a typical primary school will be worse off annually by £52,546 and a typical secondary school will have lost £178,000 each year since 2015. Added to this are deep regional inequalities in the funding provided to schools. The Social Market Foundation explained in 2016 that

  how much money a child’s parents earn, which region they live in and their ethnicity are all very significant factors in how successful they are at school. Where someone comes from can still matter much more in determining where they end up in life than their talents or efforts. This is the reality that should be weighed against political discussions of Britain as a meritocracy.

  London had the highest spend by school per pupil in Department for Education figures published in 2014/15. In inner London, an average of nearly £6,000 was spent on each student. Unsurprisingly, therefore, over 70 per cent of students in London got five or more A*–C grades in their GCSEs that year. Compare that to Yorkshire and the Humber, where spending was £4,198 in that year, and only 63 per cent of students reached the same grades. Family income has long been recognised as a key influence of academic outcome. The reason for this is multi-factorial but predictable: parents who are working longer hours to compensate for low wages can give less time to their children for additional learning, helping with homework, etc. According to Ofcom figures for 2017, roughly 20 per cent of UK adults – one fifth of the country – don’t have broadband access at home. Unsurprisingly, poorer households are less likely to have broadband than richer households. All this compounds the disadvantages suffered by poorer children.

  A combination of hyperactive policy-making, systematic and regional underfunding and the inevitable consequences of economic inequality mean that we are simply not doing right by our children. Policy-making needs to be evidence-driven; not motivated by ideological programmes such as grammar schools, which are superficial at best, atavistic and counter-productive at worst. The Sutton Trust, for example, has identified the sorts of changes that would work for the better:

  The two factors with the strongest evidence of improving pupil attainment are:

  Teachers’ content knowledge, including their ability to understand how students think about a subject and identify common misconceptions;

  Quality of instruction, which includes using strategies like effective questioning and the use of assessment.

  Specific practices which have good evidence of improving attainment include:

  Challenging students to identify the reason why an activity is taking place in the lesson;

  Asking a large number of questions and checking the responses of all students;

  Spacing out study or practice on a given topic, with gaps in between for forgetting;

  Making students take tests or generate answers, even before they have been taught the material.

  Common practices which are not supported by evidence include:

  Using praise lavishly;

  Allowing learners to discover key ideas by themselves;

  Grouping students by ability;

  Presenting information to students based on their ‘preferred learning style’.

  Michael Gove used to boast that the pace of his change was ‘fast’ and the reaction of teachers ‘furious’ – as if that was something to be proud of. What he actually did was introduce an avalanche of ideological structural changes to the education system at the sam
e time as stripping back one of the most important of the last Labour government’s educational policies: SureStart, which was designed to bring help where it would be most effective – the early years. It’s worth considering this for a moment. Before coming to power in 1997, Labour had considered a raft of research showing that one of the best ways to improve educational outcomes was to give kids access to pre-infant intellectual enrichment classes and activities. Hence, the introduction of SureStart, which also had the knock-on effect of bringing mums and dads together to listen to and share advice on parenting. The Tory government cut the budgets to local authorities, who administered SureStart, and then blamed the inevitable cuts to SureStart provision – resisted at first and then acceded to as inevitable in the worst-hit authorities – on the councils themselves. It was such an abrogation of duty by a government that claimed to care about education.

  When it comes to universities, the media and some politicians often make the same mistake we do with schools in obsessing over rankings – domestic and international. Both writers were the first in their families to go to university: Angela to Oxford; Imran to Cambridge. University can be the most extraordinary experience for a young person. It is terrifying, thrilling, occasionally turgid and truly life-changing. Yes, employability and future earnings are important for students, but higher education should be valued for those reasons Beveridge once described. Education equips young people with skills in advanced critical thinking to help them navigate a complicated world; it gives them the technical skills to contribute to society; and it also exposes them to people they might never have met otherwise. University teaches you how to live, not just make a living.