Last week it was reported that the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bath lives a life of extreme luxury. She earns £451,000 per year and is the highest paid Vice-Chancellor in the country. She lives for free in a five-bedroom Georgian apartment, provided by the university, where the university pays for her housekeeper who does the washing and ironing. Bath Uni shelled out £8,224 just on the laundry bill, and almost £19,000 in total for living expenses.
For students at the University of Bath – racking up debt, living in cramped accommodation, and surviving on baked beans – this seems like some kind of sick joke.
Sicker still is that this story was reported on the same page of the Metro newspaper as a piece titled “6,700 breakfast clubs face closure”. Funding cuts mean that 200,000 pupils will lose their breakfasts as 75% of secondary school breakfast clubs will be cut, according to a poll of teachers.
Somehow, in our education system, there’s money to pay the four-figure laundry bill of one bureaucrat earning almost half a million a year, but there isn’t money to give underprivileged kids a proper breakfast.
This is where austerity and marketisation in education leads. If we leave education in the hands of people who support profit-making and capitalism this is what happens. Get these management parasites out of universities and schools. Let students, staff and parents run education democratically for themselves. And get these Tory criminals out of government. Get Corbyn in and together we’ll take the fight to the rich and powerful who are literally taking food out of our mouths to fund their luxurious lifestyles.
