A few years ago I completed an MA degree in Ideology and Discourse Analysis at the University of Essex. Since then I have been working as a teaching assistant in primary schools in Bristol, particularly with special needs students. The course I was on and the environment I work in now are certainly two very different worlds, but they contribute far more to one another than I expected when I started teaching.

During my course we learned several definitions of “ideology”. The most commonly used, and the one I will make use of here, is simply the notion of false or illusory belief or “false consciousness”, in which the causes of social conflict are misidentified by their sufferers. This basic definition of ideology comes from Marx, who said that powerful political forces encourage us to fight false enemies rather than those who control how society is organised; the ‘owners of the means of production’ as he put it. This understanding was later developed by Antonio Gramsci, who said that dominant or ‘hegemonic’ political forces retain their power not only by owning the material means of production, but by exercising control over political language, or discourse: the way we talk about our grievances and the frameworks we share to discuss our struggles.

The clearest example of false ideological belief in practice may be Germany during the Nazi regime. It went through massive systemic economic failure during the Weimar years and the Nazis falsely attributed the responsibility for this systemic failure to particular sections of the population. Sadly, this strategy proved popular. This is ideology in practice. The consequences of ideology are not always as violent and reprehensible as they were in the 1940s, but they are often just as disconnected from the real causes of complex social problems.

I am often reminded by the government, in the media, and in the schools I work in of the apparent ‘highly likely’ threat of a terror attack in the UK. The fear of terrorism and radicalization is not without good cause — we all know the devastation that extremists can cause. But the success of the attack is, to a large degree, dependent on the severity of our response and the extent to which we allow our society to be changed by terror.

In my experience it is not the teachers, staff or parents who exaggerate the chances of terrorism and play down the effects of government policy. More often than not, those who are telling us to prepare for imminent terrorism are those in the government and the media, whereas those discussing the harm being done to students and teachers as a consequence of government policy — and their fears of what’s coming next — are the people who work in schools and sent their children to them. There are many government education policies which cause varying degrees of harm to the education system and its students. Later I will discuss two of the most detrimental policies: austerity and academisation.

What we are told to fear.

Our society has changed in recent years in response to the fear of terrorism; and so has the education system. School children are being read stories to prepare them to ‘run, hide, tell and treat’ if their school is attacked; many schools now have semi-regular terror drills while teachers are informed of new duties and briefed on how to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks. Meanwhile, the Department of Education is being pressured to enforce standardised policies including lock-down procedures and other measures. I have been asked to do the controversial ‘Prevent’ course four times at different schools. I’ve worked in a school where large metal security doors broke a child’s arm (but didn’t stop any terrorists).

The climate of suspicion these changes cause among staff can create a paranoid atmosphere in which teachers, students and parents are all seen as potential perpetrators of terror. This atmosphere of anxiety and suspicion is certainly not a healthy environment to educate children in, particularly those most likely to be profiled as potentially radicalised.

Police respond to the Manchester Arena bombing in May, 2017.

Ultimately, it is a sad truth that anywhere could be a potential target for an attack, however unlikely. Manchester was a tragic reminder of that. But if anywhere is a potential target, it seems that the government will have to implement preventive and preemptive policies everywhere. They will have to prepare everyone, young and old, for an attack from an unknown person by unknown means in an unknown location at an unknown time. I, for one, would rather live with a 1 in 2.2 million chance of dying in such an attack than have the whole country monitored and controlled on an ongoing basis “just in case”. After all, the likelihood of being involved in an attack is far lower now than it was throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s in the UK. Look at this chart to see how much less at risk you are now than 30 years ago.

In my experience, the atmosphere of danger is not generally propagated by my colleagues in schools, but by the institutions which govern them. The media also has a great deal of responsibility in stoking the population’s fears, but I want to especially emphasise the role that management and government play in the process, particularly in schools.

I have often been struck by the heart-warming sense of unity and lack of irrational panic in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. It’s a reminder that our war-time British motto, “Keep Calm And Carry On”, is as prevalent today as it was during Word War II. But you wouldn’t realise that if you only looked at the government, media and managements’ responses to these tragedies. People do, of course, worry about terrorism but there is a feeling, in my experience, that there are far more pressing issues to deal with. People don’t have time to preoccupy themselves with extremely unlikely possibilities when real harm is being done to children every day because of the misguided policies and severe lack of funding from the UK government.

Austerity.

The most direct and tangible harm being done to teachers and students in schools today is by austerity policies; the collapse in funding makes resolving other problems unachievable and is pushing schools to the brink of collapse.

The average primary school will lose two full-time teachers by the end of the decade and secondary schools will lose 6, even as the number of students is set to soar. In some places primary schools have been forced to accommodate up to 64 students in a class, and secondary schools have had up to 100. One in 6 schools have asked parents for money for basic school resources like exercise books. Even UK universities have dropped in the league tables, with 57 out of the 76 universities receiving a lower rating than last year, a continuing trend over the past few years. As most readers will know, these facts barely scratch the surface of the crisis.

A school in Bristol I worked in for a year ended the employment of myself and 9 other staff members on a single day in July last year. All of us worked in early-years and SEN positions. The boy I worked with had his support cut by three quarters, going from full-time one-to-one support to having one-to-two support for only half the day, 4 days a week (on Thursdays he has no support whatsoever). A few weeks later I came back to see the class play and was told that at least 3 more members of staff had been axed. At least one of them was given only 2 days notice. These kinds of severe and sudden cuts in staffing are happening across the UK at all levels of schooling.

Bristol protest against education cuts 2017.

By 2020 schools will have been forced to make cuts totalling £3 billion. The National Audit Office claims that about half of these savings — £1.7 billion — will be made through ‘using their staff more effectively’. This will almost certainly mean more job losses, but will also mean asking teachers to do more unpaid work and take on more and more unmanageable workloads. I know from experience that schools in the UK cannot withstand another £3 billion in cuts; schools are on their last legs as it is. Pressures reached a peak when the entire team of teaching staff walked out of a primary school in Bristol last year, a clear sign that this is a problem of national urgency. Children are often too young to understand the drastic changes happening to their schools, but they are all too aware of the effects.

Academisation.

The massive expansion of academies across the country is a risky experiment which hands a large portion of school funding and managerial powers over to private sponsors or “trusts”. We don’t know all the long term effects of academisation yet, but it’s a little too late to turn the policy around now, with about 20% of primary schools now being academies, and over a third of secondary schools. We do know, however, that academies have shown ‘no substantial difference’ in performance from so called ‘maintained schools’. Furthermore, 60% of both academies and maintained schools overspend, making academies no better at fiscal policy.

The problem isn’t only their ineffectiveness. Last year Wakefield City Academy Trust transferred millions of pounds of school funding into private accounts before the Trust collapsed. Much of this money was raised by the community themselves through Christmas markets and other school events. It is estimated that 40,000 pupils are studying in so-called ‘Zombie Academies’ where the sponsors have abandoned schools, leaving them with no funding secured.

But academisation is not the final goal for the political interests that change the way education is funded and run. It seems inevitable that more privatisation policies will be in the pipeline, and that these policies will push the UK towards profit-driven education. The former Department of Education Permanent Secretary, Sir David Bell, has said he ‘can’t see a real ideological reason not to let schools make a profit “where all other options have failed”’.

Sir David Bell. DoE Permanent Secretary 2006–2012.

It’s the same trick every time: strip funding, assets and powers from local authorities due to their “inefficiency”, then respond to the ensuing dysfunction by transferring those powers to private interests. The profit motive encourages the private interests to strip away whatever doesn’t make a profit, and the institution becomes increasingly dysfunctional, leading to more privatisation to allow the “invisible hand” of the market to take control. Austerity policies and academisation are two sides of the same coin, leading public institutions into crisis so that the private sector can broaden its influence over untapped markets. Jon Quiggin has accurately described the attempts to privatise public services over the past 30 years as ‘a string of failed experiments’. Not only is privatisation counter-productive, it hands over the power to make education work to private interests which are bound to be dominated by narrow and impersonal financial goals.

What we should fear.

It is worth considering the juxtaposition between the fear of terror (which is emphasised by the government, policy coordinators and managerial staff) and the fear of a collapsing education system, felt by staff, parents and students.

Perhaps it is not always true that people are resilient to the threat of terrorism. I am sure some staff members do have reactionary and unsavoury opinions. But in my experience the overwhelming majority of teachers are doing their very best to give students guidance and opportunities under conditions which are becoming increasingly unmanageable, just as health service workers struggle with similarly unmanageable conditions in the NHS.

The system which causes these turbulent conditions tells us to prepare for terror, diverting our eyes from the ongoing regression of an education system which is in desperate need of funding and reform. That same system tell us to fear the possibility of being harmed by unknown individuals rather than inevitably being harmed by our own governing institutions.

Most of us cannot do much to stop the possibility of terrorism, but we can resist and mobilize against the “false consciousness” touted by our own government which keeps us from seeing the ongoing damage they cause.