The St Athan Defence Training Academy: the future of British education?

latest SGR Newsletter : Autumn *2008*

The St Athan Defence Training Academy: the future of
British education?

Stuart Tannock discusses the disturbing implications
of the Ministry of Defence's new multi-billion pound
training academy.

Britain's largest education and technology investment
project in recent memory has been developing quietly
under the public's radar. It is time we paid attention.
In January 2007, the Ministry of Defence awarded an £11
billion contract to the private Metrix Consortium
(see Box) to build a massive new training centre for the
British armed forces at the village of
St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales.

St Athan, which is expected to become one of the world's
biggest military training establishments when it opens
 in 2013, will provide specialist training in engineering,
communications and information systems technology
to all three services of the British military. For the
first time, it will centralise in one location military
training that is currently done in sites
across the country.

Supporters of St Athan emphasise that the Academy will
use state-of-the-art technology and training methods
such as neurolinguistic programming, e-learning technologies,
computer-based training, computer-aided instruction,
emulation, simulation and Web-based systems. St Athan, they
claim, "breathes life into the classroom of the future
model which for many years now has been anticipated by
futurologists and thought leaders in the education community."
St Athan represents a "model for training in this
country" that will enable Britain to realise Lord Leitch's
vision of gaining "world leadership in skills."

Why should any of this worry us? There is the fundamental
question of why we should support such a massive outlay of
taxpayer money on a military that is still involved in
fighting an illegal war in Iraq – and in a country,
Britain, that already boasts the world's second-largest
military budget.Beyond this, St Athan represents three
developments which should be attracting extended public
and political debate, but which instead have
received little attention, beyond a small, local campaign
against the Academy that sprung up in Wales after the
project was first announced.

First, St Athan is part of a political project of
privatising the British armed forces, and turns over
responsibility for military training to a private, for-profit
consortium. At a time when, across the Atlantic, US Congress
is holding investigations into abuses perpetrated by private
military companies such as Blackwater in Iraq, Britain is
rushing headlong down the same path of military privatisation
that the USA has gone down before. This privatisation,
moreover, makes the British government a direct
partner of one of the world's largest and most controversial
arms dealers,Raytheon, which is a core member of the St
Athan Metrix Consortium.

Second, St Athan represents a major leap forward in Britain's
participation in the global arms trade. The Metrix business
model for maximising profits at St Athan is to maximise the
amount of training it provides, through serving not just the
British military but militaries from around the world.
Between 2002 and 2005, the Ministry of Defence provided
military training to more than 12,000 personnel from 137
countries, many with poor human rights records.  With
St Athan, this trade promises only to increase.

Third, St Athan represents another step up in the ongoing
militarisation of British education. The Open University –
whose Vice-Chancellor, Brenda Gourley, claims that
universities should be "beacons that reflect the very
best of which the human spirit is capable"  – is a
direct partner in the Metrix Consortium. Schools around
the Vale of Glamorgan are making plans to train local
youth for jobs at the St Athan Academy, while colleges and
universities across South Wales, which have already
been extensively militarised over the past decade,
are exploring new Academy contract tie-ins. 

Indeed, one reason why we shouldn't expect Cardiff
University, the premier institution of research and
learning in the region, to lead any critical investigation
into the St Athan project is that, in 2005, it signed
a long-term strategic research partnership with QinetiQ,
another core member of the Metrix Consortium.

Promoters of the St Athan Defence Training Academy
claim that it represents the future of education
in Britain. Without public investigation, debate and
critique of St Athan and other military research
and education projects across the country, there is
a strong possibility that this will come true.
If it does, it will not be for the better of Britain
or anywhere else in the world.

Mark Thomas & St Athan debate film banned

OU bans film!

OUBUCU Ethics Group The Group was established by the Branch Executive in February 2007 to promote discussion and debate on the application of ethical guidelines to the University's partnership activities. It campaigns for the application of ethical guidelines to partnerships because: -

• the University should be committed to social justice in practice
• it enhances the reputation of the OU brand
• it makes long-term business sense
• societal and organisational awareness of ethical, environmental and corporate responsibility is spiralling upwards
• it's just plain right !

Does it matter from the Open University's Income comes from? So they organised a meeting to discuss this and following it
The campaign went to Milton Keynes as guests of UCU and had an opportunity to speak to the audience after Mark Thomas who was talking more generally about the arms trade. The custom is that the event is filmed and made available to staff and union members who where elsewhere at the time however the OU have apparently stopped and banned the film from been shown anywhere - so sensitive they are to criticism or discussion on the issue. Derek Prior - with the grand title of director of communications - was seen lurking in the background - the OU very own speech police (pr/spin person) ! I don't think he liked his letter being quoted!

What did the Vice Chancellor Prof Brenda Gourley have to say in March 2007 at the opening of the ou posh new offices in Cardiff??
"we are proud to have contributed to Wales’ latest success, one of the biggest ever investments it has attracted. Earlier this year the UK Government announced their decision to site a new defence training academy at St Athan here in the Vale of Glamorgan. As a long-term partner in the successful Metrix consortium, we are already hard at work with our partners to turn the MoD’s vision into the reality of a military training centre of excellence. The initiative is expected to create around 5,000 jobs and bring around £58m to the economy annually - a massive boost for Wales and a perfect example of what partnership working can deliver."...whoops!

The Open University branch of the University and College UnionAddress: OUBUCU The Open University Room 015, Wilson C Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, Tel: Email: 01908 653069 ucu@open.ac.uk ...

Ethics and partnerships, where is the OU ethical policy?

From Society Matters
Ethics and partnerships: the OU and the St Athan Military Academy
The Open University now boasts a Centre for Ethics and includes ethical teaching in its curriculum, but it does not yet have an ethical policy guiding its corporate partnerships. The recent link between the OU and the Metrix
consortium has led to protests in Wales and may result in far wider ramifications for the institution
I too believe that universities and their staff should aim to encourage students to ‘think ethically’ and equip them to
confront the great dilemmas and paradoxes of our time. Vice Chancellor Brenda Gourley Independent Open Eye, 1 July 2008

Life at the OU in Wales took a new turn recently, with demonstrations against the University’s involvement in a military training consortium taking place outside our building. Over the past year, the ‘Stop the St Athan Military Academy Campaign’ has been publicizing and attacking the OU’s involvement in the Metrix consortium, which followed its success in being awarded a government contract to run a training agency for all of the British armed forces at St Athan in South Glamorgan.
The OU is a member of the consortium, along with some major arms manufacturers, including QinetiQ and Raytheon. Raytheon
manufactures Tomohawk and Patriot missiles, and missiles capable of carrying cluster bombs; QinetiQ hit the headlines with
criticisms by the National Audit Office of the process whereby, in the privatization of DERA, the responsible civil servants became
multi-millionaires overnight.
Thousands of training jobs from around the UK will be moved to St Athan, just outside Cardiff, where up to 5,500 jobs will be
created. This figure is one that fluctuates and is contested, but it is claimed that the St Athan Military Academy, costing £15 billion,
will be the largest ever public-sector project in Wales. The project is welcomed by local MPs and Welsh Assembly
Members, by the Welsh Assembly Government and by all of the major political parties in Wales. Nonetheless, several Plaid Cymru
members of the National Assembly for Wales have spoken against it, and there are a small but vociferous number of people in Wales opposed to the militarization of the economy. Anti-militarism has been a core element of the nationalist struggle since its inception, and is a perspective shared by many key figures in public life.
Does this new partnership fit with the mission of the OU – to create and enhance life opportunities? There are concerns about any
institution’s associations with the arms trade. Jennie Lee, one of the main founders of the OU, was firm in her stand against arms, in that she was against the UK acquiring a nuclear deterrent.
Various UK universities (including St Andrews and several Cambridge colleges) have adopted ethical investment policies.
University College London, under pressure from students and alumni, is among those that are considering doing so. The School of
Oriental and African Studies and Goldsmiths, University of London and Bangor University have withdrawn investment from arms
companies. The OU has still to decide on whether it needs to devise clear and fully transparent ethical guidelines to steer its business partnerships.
Other institutions have been more forthright. The Norwegian state pension fund, which includes its petroleum fund, and Liverpool City Council are among the bodies that have disinvested from Raytheon, on the basis of its implication in war crimes and killing civilians in Iraq and Lebanon.
Of course, military technology and the armed forces are involved in defence as well as attack, and there are plenty of us who subscribe to notions of ‘just wars’. But the plan is to train not just British troops, but armed forces from around the world. The idea of training troops for the Burmese government is more controversial than training British troops.
Others do not share this political or moral concern, but object on pragmatic grounds: that the OU risks tainting its brand. In a sense,
the greatest asset of the OU is its brand. The brand isn’t just a logo but is a reputation, and the reputations of organizations increasingly are linked to their ethical and environmental policies and practices.
We only have to look to Nike, McDonald’s, Tesco, the Body Shop and the Co-operative Bank to see the centrality of ‘the brand’ to
business performance. Across the economy and around the world there is a huge growth in the ‘corporate social responsibility’ agenda. In one sense, this is recognized by the OU, which recently launched a Level 1 course on Ethics in Real Life and takes very seriously its commitment to development in Africa. At the same time, it is in partnership with the World Bank to develop a private university in Pakistan, in collaboration with Tesco regarding using clubcard points to pay course fees (see Society Matters No.10), and is now linked with the Metrix consortium.

This suggests the need for an ethical, environmental and corporate esponsibility framework for the OU’s relationships with other
organizations. With its deservedly high standing, the OU brand is of enormous benefit to us all. The good reputation of the OU is an asset and needs to be defended actively.
In response to the University’s involvement in the Metrix consortium, the Open University Branch of the University and
College Union (OUBUCU) has formulated a set of ethical guidelines to be applied to the future selection of its strategic partnerships with external organizations. The guidelines set out criteria regarding the arms trade, ecological sustainability, animal welfare and corporate responsibility to ‘filter’ out partnerships which may commercially damage the University’s brand. At the time of going to press, a paper setting out the arguments for their implementation has been presented to the Vice-Chancellor and the Branch awaits a response to its suggestion that a forum be established between union and management to discuss the guidelines. The union believes the University cannot be financially successful in the future unless it is committed to an ethical approach to partnerships.

http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/about-the-faculty/society-matters/society-matters.php

Brenda Gourley - Blood on her hands

Vice Chancellor of the OU Brenda Gourley loves Metrix - Raytheon arms dealers...

Metrix - The consortium includes a subsidiary of the US company Raytheon(‘customer success is our mission’) which makes cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions, supplies electronic guidance equipment for the British nuclear weapons system Trident and is a favoured US government supplier of arms to Israel.

The St Athan military academy will train armed forces from anywhere willing to pay for the privilege.

Brenda Gourley OU Vice Chancellor "More recently, we are proud to have contributed to Wales’ latest success, one of the biggest ever investments it has attracted. Earlier this year the UK Government announced their decision to site a new defence training academy at St Athan here in the Vale of Glamorgan. As a long-term partner in the successful Metrix consortium, we are already hard at work with our partners to turn the MoD’s vision into the reality of a military training centre of excellence. The initiative is expected to create around 5,000 jobs and bring around £58m to the economy annually -
a massive boost for Wales and a perfect example of what partnership working can deliver."
What would Jenny Lee have supported this? NO NO NO...

Jennie Lee played a key role in the formation of the Open University
She was a left-winger, and this brought her sometimes into opposition with even her own husband, left-wing Welsh Labour MP Aneurin Bevan with whom she usually agreed politically. Lee was critical of Bevan for his support of the UK acquiring a nuclear deterrent, something she did not support.

Note now half the package has been abandoned and the number of jobs that Metrix claims that will be created is now 3,ooo according to John Smith MP who has spent his time primarily promoting the academy but much less if you take away the transfered in jobs - training forces jobs that required specialist knowledge -then you are left with the low pay jobs ..cleaning, working in the self contained mega barracks shops and cafes, laundry, .......

Rob Humphries Director of the OU in Cardiff is also happy to work with Metrix

More info
No to St Athan Military Academy on Facebook
http://www.no2militaryacademy.com/
Metrix McMercenaries
or http://www.cynefinywerin.org.uk/
http://www.no2metrix.com/2008/02/ou-partnership-with-arms-dealers.html
Facebook No2 O.U. workng with arms companies

Food for thought
Using Public Procurement to Stimulate Innovation
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTMLProfessor Caroline Gipps • Professor Brenda Gourley • Olivia Grant • Sir Anthony ..... in particular from the insights offered by the Raytheon Corporation. ...www.cihe-uk.com/docs/PUBS/0711Publicpro.pdf -