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You may have seen adverts for those very exclusive sounding little "tutorial colleges", private cramming colleges, places which seek to guarantee urgently needed A-level or O-level results in a hurry, in return for a suitable fee. All very discreet and polite, very popular perhaps with young students whose parents have got a few quid to spare and who forgot, during their two years of working for A-levels, that that was what they were doing. No Arthur Daleys here, you might think. This is the world of education, and the people who run these colleges must be fine pillars of the educational establishment, devoted to enhancing the cultural tone of life in the 'eighties and getting those diligent pupils through such very noble examinations.
Well, don't you believe it. Having just been employed by a private tutorial college for the past year. 1 can assure you that such colleges measure their so-called educational achievements in pounds and pence from start to finish. Let us start by looking at the glossy prospectus which publicises the college. We are dealing here with a business, a company, an enterprise. The fact that it is supposed to be a question of learning means nothing. Education, like every other human activity, has to be debased by capitalism into a crude transaction, an exchange fraught with fraudulence. The prospectus is distributed mainly in Hong Kong, parts of Africa and the Middle East, as British universities are popular with students from those areas, and to be eligible to take A-levels in local authority colleges you need to have lived in Britain for some time. The prospectus displays an attractive photograph of the London University Senate Building (which, incidentally, was taken over by the government during the second world war for use by the BBC misinformation service. George Orwell worked there and used it as the model for the Ministry of Truth building which he describes in 1984). In very small print it is stated that the college which the prospectus is advertising is round the corner from this imposing building.
Union organisation among the teachers in these colleges is (so far) virtually unheard of. although facilities and conditions for the teaching staff are in many ways particularly poor. The teachers' unions negotiate nationally with the association uniting local authority employers, whose agreements are not binding on this private sector. Pay is strictly by the hour. There is no pay at all during any holidays, bank holidays, absence (even through illness) and so on. Students pay approximately £600 for every O-level they are taking, and £800 for every A-level. Courses in English as a Foreign Language often cost well over £1.000. The college I have been working for has over 300 students registered. I had the opportunity on one occasion to see a note in which the owner has been totting up the accumulated income from these students, which ran into hundreds of thousands of pounds.
Towards the end of the year, some students were complaining that they had not been warned against being over-ambitious in taking on too many subjects at A-level at the start. Standards of teaching are not properly monitored, with teachers being pressurised into teaching subjects which they may not be properly qualified for, rather than turn away potential fee-payers for a possible course. Some teachers, anxious to save some money for the holiday periods when their pay will abruptly cease, take on so many hours of teaching that they cannot possibly hope to prepare all their lessons properly. All of this, combined with the fact that a majority of students have been thrust too rapidly into writing exam papers in English even though it is not their first language, leads to a very poor level of results in many cases. The owner confided to me in an oddly candid moment that an appalling set of results has become the annual expectation. This situation is tolerated as long as it does not form into such a widespread bad reputation that there are no further queues of candidates.
Finally, the payment of teachers is carried out with a penny-pinching obsession which defies comprehension. I have personally kept (and framed) pay-slips which include deductions for "lateness" measured minute by minute, penny by penny. "Teaching" is regarded as a mechanical process, and if a moment passes when that process is not "happening" then the teacher must not be paid for that moment. The terms of the contract of employment are quite draconian: "a teacher who fails to attend any class . . . is liable to instant dismissal. Breach of College Regulations renders the teacher liable to instant dismissal" and so on.
No doubt Kenneth Baker would find all this very inspiring. After all. even the state education system is dominated by commercial considerations, ranging from the poor provision of facilities, understaffing and the present conflict over pay, to the underlying aim of turning out model wage-slaves (who should be expertly adaptable to the art of dealing with the DHSS for long periods). In either case, it is safe to assume that real education. the free process of social learning, has hardly begun.
Clifford Slapper
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