Challenging the Global Market in Education Conference, 9 May 2009
Themes and outcomes from the Workshop discussions

The six workshops covered similar grounds and identified a number of themes and potential ways forward which this paper attempts to summarise.
1.	Challenging the neo-liberal agenda

Participants were clear about the need to fight the impact of globalisation and its use as a rationale to shape the curriculum and research across the board to a narrow employer instrumentalist agenda. They commented on the insidious nature of marketisation in the context of globalisation. There was discussion of various ways in which the global marketisation of education was affecting participants in the conference, from the privatisation of funding streams in Further Education to the increasing international competition which has the potential to drive down wages and conditions for many staff. 
There was agreement on the need for unions to present alternative views and visions to current government policies and ideology that uses globalisation and the need to be competitive for permanent change across education. In particular it was seen to be important to draws attention to the high failure rate, and the poor returns of international market ventures in higher education.  It was noted that the economic crisis was accelerating these problems, since the national rhetoric about moves toward social democratic policies was in contradiction with the reality of the greater marketisation and privatisation of public services. It was noted that education institutions were likely to press on with more private sector partnerships and more aggressive international strategies in a less secure funding environment. Participants were also conscious of the underlying historic context, and the negative features of globalization, particularly in the exploitation often associated with migrations, including indentured and slave labour and other forms of coercion, which continue to this day.

But ‘ideology begins in the mind’: the trade unions in the higher education sector should not accept the presumptions of the neo-liberal agenda regarding higher education. Globalisation, its accompanying marketising strategies, burgeoning infrastructure and supportive ideology were all cited as urgent reasons for unions to develop an alternative vision to that offered by current government policies, that builds on a vision of tertiary education based on public funding, academic freedom, widening participation and improving pay and conditions. Such a vision must also promote public understanding that academic freedom is not about ‘selfish academics pursuing esoteric knowledge’ but a necessary resource and pre-condition to protect and develop collective intelligence in society, science and culture.  A key feature must be the fight for democratic structures, quality, inclusivity, and access and against the narrowing of higher education’s curricula, research base and aspirations. As part of this process we should explore a range of models – including from Cuba, Venezuela, as well as more positive models in Europe (e.g. Scandinavia).
The process of marketisation and privatisation of education is having an impact in England, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, France; while these trends are at different stages of development, there is a converging agenda in which the nature of education itself is under threat. Individual academic staff may not always recognise the link between international market forces and their day-to-day impact on working lives. These need to be identified in terms of individual experience, for example of de-skilling, job control, contract type and rates of pay.

2.	Specific campaigning areas
The workshops identified a number of specific elements which the fight might include:

•	Successful international strategies and sharing information on global companies (e.g. the   Navitas campaign and the research blog mentioned by Susan Robertson during the morning session). Local activists would welcome more information about successful international resistance strategies (e.g. current university strikes in France) as well as sharing information on global companies (e.g. Navitas) and the implications for staff of overseas working (e.g. equality issues, academic freedom). 
•	Making globalisation and marketisation a recurrent item on UCU branch agendas to illustrate how they impact on local pay and conditions
•	Using an amended version of Jane Kelsey’s ‘Seven Cs’ as a template for branches to address local impacts of globalisation and marketisation.
•	The success of Danish colleagues’ national critique of OECD,UNESCO and Bologna Charter agendas which initiated branch level discussion that fed back positively into national union work.
•	Some good examples from Australia on how they have made international solidarity work eg around pay and conditions in a Philippine campus of an Australian university; and in relation to Australian HE contacts with Fiji.  
•	The workshop explored the issue of international students, including their relationship to the commodification of education and the rise of immigration controls.  
•	It is important to recognise the international and commercialisation agenda at work throughout an institution’s activities, stretching beyond academic work to for example, the sourcing of goods and support services.
•	 The unions must be proactive in defence of academic values and professionalism, possibly through an International Manifesto for Education. This might draw on the UNESCO 1997 statement, which should not be re-opened or re-negotiated, but ways should be found of popularising it,  distilling key elements in particular around
•	Academic freedom
•	Academic standards
•	Governance
•	Unions in the sector could focus their campaigning on a ‘day in defence of academic freedom’ which might make use of the existing World Teachers’ Day, 6 October.
•	Unions must make international issues resonate to ‘ordinary’ members.

3.	Building effective networks
We must build more systematic means of using solidarity networks, including an urgent action network, protests campaigns, information sharing, and in particular ensure that branches are aware of these tools and encouraged to use them. Working more closely with other education trade union colleagues, both ‘para-academic’ or academic-related (particularly learning technologists) and school colleagues, to focus on both of Jane Kelsey’s endogenous (privatisation of institutions) and exogenous (privatisation of processes) categories of privatisation.  For example, continuing to oppose the drive towards Academy schools but also identifying and campaigning against privatising processes, e.g. private, particularly on-line, providers of Initial Teacher Education/Training and ancillary professional support staff (student services, e.g.). Post-school education unions must work with unions across all education sectors and with parallel sectors facing similar threats, notably with the health sector. Also, bearing in mind Jane Kelsey’s account of the successful campaign against Navitas - where a major global broadcast media corporation was the ‘carrier’ of on-line, globalised education operations - contacting and working with broadcast media and cultural and creative industries trade unions will be essential.

There needs to be a coordinated approach building links between the institutional, national, regional (European) and global levels – work at each level is not an alternative to work across all. The trade unions must work both within international institutions of the EU, the Bologna Process, ILO and OECD, and outside, in criticism of them where necessary.

4.	Early steps in operationalising the agreement:
It was generally agreed that the biggest obstacle to progress with the agreements was likely to be a lack of understanding and engagement with them at local level among hard-pressed activists.
•	Aggressive publicising of the agreements with members inside the unions in the sector, with the wider trade union movement and with decisionmakers at every level in the sector
•	A coordinated international day of action in defence of public education
•	Work with the signatories to the agreement to achieve common employment frameworks and an Overseas Working guide
•	Developing twinning arrangements between branches around concrete campaigns, such as those around transnational private providers like Navitas
•	Building on the agreements to develop a positive international ‘vision’ of public education which could be used to mobilise members to campaign across borders.