Popular press, visible value : how debates on exams and student debt have unmasked the commodity relations of the ‘learning age’

Why should we, as Marxist educators, expend energy examining the news media’s construction of education issues? In the UK vast quantities of education coverage emerge each year. Stories include hardy annuals, such as the predictable August uproar over exam results, perennials, such as the relative performance of boys and girls, and sudden sproutings of concern over, say, the fall in the numbers of undergraduates studying sciences or modern languages. Despite this, the body of academic literature exploring the relationship between the UK’s education sector and news media processes is fairly modest. This is unsurprising. As with other public services, relationships between the education sector and a largely right-wing news media remain fractious; the quality of education news coverage is generally held in low regard by educationalists. It is important, though, that our wariness of the media should not lead us to ignore the role of news coverage within the contemporary education settlement. This chapter examines the ways in which reporting of education news expresses and reinforces the contradictory social drives that characterise education under capitalism. Its particular concern is the news media’s depiction of the ‘value’ of proliferating educational qualifications. Discussion focuses on the years 2002-03 when media panic over post-16 qualifications reached unprecedented levels of intensity, impacting upon public debate and government policy. These panics were expressed in a set of related news narratives painfully familiar to educationalists in the UK: rising exam pass rates, the unstable value of A-Levels and degrees and the cost of widening participation in higher education. These particular news issues exist in close proximity. Firstly, they invariably provide headline stories in the weeks immediately following the publication of A-Level exam results each August. Secondly, over recent years they have been increasingly bound together by a meta-narrative of ‘falling standards’, in which A-Level exams are derided as becoming progressively easier and the worth of post-compulsory qualifications is questioned. The critique offered here is predicated upon the view that the news media are a significant shaping factor within the political economy of education and that the discourse which the media produce and inhabit is a material force within the social universe (as opposed to existing in the parallel universe of ‘discourse’ routinely proposed by postmodernists). Print and broadcast media have, in the current decade, played a key part in intensifying debates around exams, credentialisation and mass access to post-compulsory education. However, while these populist education debates are often decked out in the language of educational ‘standards’ or ‘quality’, it is anxiety over fluctuations in the use-value and exchange-value of qualifications that remains the news media’s unspoken concern: the poltergeist in the basement