School Students Union: Stand together and organise!

Everywhere we see workers and young
people beginning to move against the capitalist crisis. In the past year
we have seen revolutions throughout the Arab world; uprising and
countless general strikes in Greece; the movement of the Indignados in
Spain and now the movement of the Spanish miners. Last autumn we saw in
New York city – the belly of the beast – the Occupy movement begin,
quickly spreading to cities throughout the world and proclaiming: “we
are the 99%”.

School students must stand together and organise!

Build for October 20th!

In all these movements the youth have been at the forefront. This was
also the case in Britain, where the student movement in the autumn of
2010 was an anticipation of the movement of the British workers. This
started in March 2011 with 750,000 workers taking to the streets of
London to protest the era of austerity ushered in by the Tory-led
government of big business.

The movement of British students was not a one-off, but part of a
general process taking place everywhere. The common cause is the
contradictions of a system that runs on profit. Like any company, when
profit margins take a hit, cut backs and sackings quickly follow. This
nasty process has now become generalised throughout the capitalist
system itself. The conquests of the working class such as the NHS; a
decent pension upon retirement; free access to a decent education beyond
the age of 16 – all these achievements are now deemed intolerable and
are being taken back.

The most militant section of the student movement in 2010 was
undoubtedly the school students, who had the most to lose through cuts
to the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and £9,000 university fees
looming on the horizon. Yet part of the reason the school student
movement dissipated in 2010 was because the students were not organised,
and did not establish lasting links with the university students and
the labour movement. This is the same reason for the ebbing away of the
youth movement in general.

School Students

The problem of school students is becoming harder and harder to
ignore. School students are the largest section of the student movement,
with the deepest roots in the working class. The cut to EMA is the most
obvious thing effecting school students at the moment, but it is this
in combination with the cuts to school funding that is really
detrimental.

Some of the departments most deeply feeling these cuts are arts
departments (a similar process is taking place in the universities),
where seemingly simple things like providing your own equipment impacts
on what choices you make for your A-levels. For example, I take AS
photography and in our course we mainly use analogue (film) process
which requires a lot of equipment. The school can lend us a camera, but
we have to pay for film and paper. This adds up. An average pack of film
paper is £25 and you can get through two or three a term. This means a
student could be paying around £150 a year on paper alone!

Why can’t the school pay for it? Because the art department budget
has been cut so severely it simply can’t afford to even provide paper
for some of the students. And why is the departmental budget being cut?
Because the Tories are determined to pay for the huge hole that was left
in the state finances following the bailing out of the banks through
the sacrifices of ordinary people. People who had no hand in the
capitalist crisis but are being asked to pick up the bill. This means
that in a state-funded school, students have to consider if they can
afford to take a course. This just screams out that something is deeply
wrong! The principle of free education itself is being compromised, yet
this isn’t reported in the press. This is on top of a cornucopia of
other issues.

School students now have another spanner thrown into the works in the
form of having to choose whether or not going to university is worth
being saddled with a lifetime of debt. Whether they even get into
university is a whole other issue. Universities are hugely
oversubscribed, so needing a re-mark (if the student can afford this) or
missing a grade will often sacrifice someone’s place at university.
However, when the privately-run exam boards are so incompetent and
varied in quality and respectability, students no longer feel confident
that their efforts will be fairly reflected in the grades they are
given. Examiners are paid poorly for each paper they mark which means
they are disgruntled and overworked, this leads to poorly marked papers
therefore not giving the student the best chance to get a good grade.

Union

So what is the solution to these problems? For school students to
stand together and organise. It’s only by acting as a group, not
individuals, and putting forward our demands that we can prevent the
butchering of the education system, making it better and fairer for all.

However, we cannot stand together just as school students. That is
only the first step. We must make links with the Higher Education
students in the colleges, the university students, and – most
importantly – forge links and seek the support of the labour movement,
locally and nationally, beginning with the teachers and staff in our
schools. Economically, students have very little clout. But not a light
bulb shines, not a telephone rings, not a wheel turns without the kind
permission of the working class.

On Saturday October 20th the TUC (Trades Union Congress) has called
for a national demonstration against austerity and for a future that
works. The School Student Union should aim to make this demonstration as
widely known as possible among students and teachers, and give support
to our teachers on picket lines in future disputes.

We stand against cuts to school funding, against course closures,
against private profit being made out of our education! For the full
reinstatement of EMA! For one publicly-owned exam board! For reduced
class sizes! For free, universal access to education!

Join the SSU today. As individuals we are weak, organised we are strong.

School Student Union:
ruth.osullivan252@googlemail.com Tel: Shaista 07446371039