All power to the pupils!

Dover Christchurch Academy was rocked this week by a school strike.

On Monday morning pupils were handed an amended timetable which both shortened and split lunch break; meaning that they would have a staggered timetable in which some groups would take a measly half hour break while others were in class.

Faced with this dictation of how, when and with whom they could socialise during the school day, around 300 pupils walked out of classrooms and congregated in the playground, demanding the restoration of their lunch break. The school staff responded to the situation by calling police, who arrested two pupils on suspicion of criminal damage and public order offences and forced the crowd to disperse.

First of all, I’d like to say hats off to the pupils in this case. Unlike workers engaged in struggle with employers, a pupil’s right to strike is often simply laughed away as ‘a good way to get out of school’.

In fact school walkouts have a long and radical history, having been used as a tactic in struggles against South African apartheid, the Vietnam war,  American racial segregation and yes, even in support of teacher’s pay and conditions. I know from my own experience organising a school walkout to protest the invasion of Iraq way back in 2003, that any attempt to do something like this is often met with a certain patronising hostility by older people. If you’re too young to vote, the logic runs, you’re too young to care about or be affected by politics. Bollocks. Whether or not you think the right to eat lunch with your friends is important- personally I think it’s very important- the pupils at this school showed that they were prepared to stand up to authority figures trying to impose rubbish conditions and generally make their daily lives shitter. Maybe that’s a better preparation for life under capitalism than most of the things I learned at school.

Scottish school students striking against the Iraq war

A second important point to note is that these timetable changes occurred as part of the School’s transition from a normal, state-run school to an ‘academy school’; i.e. one that receives partial state funding topped up with private investment, and where administrative decisions and curricula are handled by staff rather than a local authority. Introduced by Labour under Blair and championed and expanded by the Tories under Cameron, academy schools are one of those issues that illicit a depressingly monotone approach from across the Westminster spectrum.

What this highlights is that for for all the rhetoric about ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’ in education that politicians from every major party bandy around, the people most directly effected by the education system are disempowered and expected to conform with whatever conditions are imposed on their daily environment.

I certainly know that, in a pupils position, I wouldn’t exercise my freedom of choice to ‘give heads and teachers tough new powers of discipline’ or to repeal the rules against teachers making physical contact with pupils.