Although it doesn’t really make the press, the biggest issue facing the education sector and indeed all public service sectors at the moment is the World Trade Organisations’ GATS (General Agreement on Trade in Services) agreement. Until now, protests and dissent against GATS have been confined to what Tony Blair has called a ‘travelling circus’ of protesters seen at EU and G7 summits, but their work has finally pushed the subject into mainstream politics with the NUT and even NUS coming out against the proposals.
Basically, what GATS will mean is the deregulation of service markets. It is billed as an all-encompassing Free Trade Agreement to open up markets to competition. In the most simple terms, it’s the privatisation of everything. Yes everything, because although these weren’t the original definitions of ‘services’ when they were drawn up, under GATS a service could be; education, healthcare, water, air traffic control, roads, nuclear fuel, national parks- any service market there is, basically anything in which there isn’t full competition already.
The World Trade Organisation reckons that something like say, the National Health Service is uncompetitive, because Government intervention in the ‘health market’ is a barrier to entry into that market. As such any Government policy which financially supports a service will not be allowed under GATS. The basis behind this is to get all public sector services into the private sector. We’ve already seen the start of this as nationalised industries have been privatised and other services such as schools and hospitals are sold to or run by the private sector. Basically what you are talking about is the final move from mixed economies to free market economies worldwide. What is driving this is the need for profit, and the need for companies to make increasing profits year on year. Getting into service industries which people cannot do without will basically give the companies that get in a licence to print money.
As far as education is concerned, you can forget grants. You can expect tuition fees to go up- the current £1075 is only one quarter of the average cost of tuition. Under GATS, you would pay the full cost of your course, so God knows how much it would be for high cost courses such as medicine or law. It would mean an end to the ability of the Government to regulate Quality Assesement of teaching provision, but that won’t matter as they’re already getting rid of it. The pro-camp state that GATS demands that member states ease restrictions on the ability of their students to study abroad and of foreign students to enter the countries to study and will give equal treatment to foreign teachers. It is suggested that a growing number of private providers might be able to demonstrate that they can provide higher education of the requisite quality but at lower cost, which was the original argument in all the failed privatisations so far. It isn’t all doom and gloom though. Although GATS is a legally binding contract, it is up to individual Governments to make bargaining stances on specific ‘markets’ within it. So far Australia, USA, Japan and New Zealand have all made proposals to water down the effect of GATS in those countries.
A spokesman from the French ATTAC group, reckons these will be the consequences;
1. First, it leads the economy to place even stronger demands on the school system and the system of vocational education and training (initial and post-school) in order to produce a future workforce incorporating the type of human capital required.
2. Secondly, it imposes in the name of efficiency an economic managerialist model of control of the school system and the education and training system as a whole.
3. Thirdly, the economy is driven to find new potential markets, and the public sector – including education – is regarded as one of the few areas still to be colonised.
4. And finally popular education in its broad sense (including out-of-school provision) is no longer considered from the point of view of its contribution to the construction of autonomy and solidarity among people, but from the point of view of the sole criterion of market profitability. Bringing education into conformity with the new expectations of business and industry will increase social inequalities in access to knowledge.
Among Universities opinion is split, not surprisingly more or less right down the middle with rich Universities that already have big business links being for the proposals, and the rest against. Andrew Hamnett, Principal of the University of Strathclyde told the THES his concerns;
“In its simplest form, “higher education services” refers to the delivery of educational courses at a level defined as higher, but this is only one part of the purpose of universities. Dearing [in the 1997 Dearing Report] identified four purposes [of universities]: inspiring and enabling individuals to develop their capacities to the highest level; increasing knowledge and understanding; serving the needs of the economy; and shaping a democratic and civilised society. One thing Dearing did not suggest was that universities exist Primarily as profit-making organisations dedicated to the enrichment of shareholders; indeed, the report emphasised the importance of maintaining universities’ independence from political and commercial interests.”
TBC
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