by Clare Doyle, Hackney Socialist Party
Teachers in the National Education Union (NEU) at ‘BSix’ college in Hackney have had enough! They are on all-out strike from Thursday 12 June until 30 June or “as long as it takes” for the management to drop its vicious restructuring plan.
Anger has been accumulating since the sixth form college was taken over last year by Hackney City Colleges (HCC). It has been treated more like a business venture than an opportunity to give students a chance of achieving things in life that even they did not think were possible.
It was clear, at a packed meeting on 5 June, that the staff of BSix have widespread support from students, parents and the local population. Speaker after speaker spoke of the tremendous encouragement students have had to study and go on to higher education and fulfilling careers.
The new managers are operating the college “like a boot camp,” one speaker said. They want to cut over 40 staff, delete A-level courses, and reduce safeguarding roles and vital support services for students. They plan to scrap things like their ‘Turing Scheme Trips’ and other projects that stimulate the students’ thirst for knowledge of the world around them.
Recently the HCC management cancelled a Black history conference that teachers had been putting considerable effort into. Knowing how important this issue is in an area with a large Black and Asian population, the teachers defiantly went ahead and held the event in a location they organised themselves!
One young Black speaker at the meeting said she had been getting nowhere in the local academy. History there was “Cold War, Cold War and more Cold War!” When she got into BSix, history was “colonialism, reparations and things that actually made me interested in politics”. She left BSix with three A-Levels, got an apprenticeship at the BBC, a degree at Cambridge, and is now studying to be a lawyer!
As one young speaker put it, “Through learning you experience a kind of ‘liberation’, ‘emancipation’”. Yet HCC is running BSix like a business — regimenting and disciplining for its own interests and not those of the students.
Kevin Courtney — local parent and one-time general secretary of the NEU — recalled hearing Tony Benn speak powerfully about what’s needed in education, and more recently local MP Jeremy Corbyn. Socialist Party members spoke about the totally inadequate approach of the present Labour government, acting as it does in the interests of big companies and not workers and their children.
Long may BSix maintain its reputation for enthusing as well as educating young people! For a full and rapid victory in the strike!