The Downing Street Years, 1979-1990

by Margaret Thatcher

  The vested interests working against the success of GM schools were strong. The DES, reluctant to endorse a reform that did not extend central control, would have liked to impose all manner of checks and controls on their operation. Local authority officials sometimes campaigned fiercely to prevent opting out by particular schools. And, unexpectedly, the churches also mounted an opposition. In the face of so much hostility I had the Grant-Maintained Schools Trust set up to publicize the GM scheme and advise those interested in making use of it. In fact, GM schools proved increasingly popular, not least with head teachers who were now, in consultation with the governors, able to set their own priorities.

  THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM

  The decentralizing features of our policy — open enrolment, per capita funding, City Technology Colleges, Local Management of Schools and above all grant-maintained schools — were extraordinarily successful. By contrast, the national curriculum — the most important centralizing measure — soon ran into difficulties. I never envisaged that we would end up with the bureaucracy and the thicket of prescriptive measures which eventually emerged. I wanted the DES to concentrate on establishing a basic syllabus for English, Mathematics and Science with simple tests to show what pupils knew. It always seemed to me that a small committee of good teachers ought to be able to pool their experience and write down a list of the topics and sources to be covered without too much difficulty. There ought then to be plenty of scope left for the individual teacher to concentrate with children on the particular aspects of the subject in which he or she felt a special enthusiasm or interest. I had no wish to put good teachers in a strait jacket. As for testing, I always recognized that no snapshot of a child’s, a class’s or a school’s performance on a particular day was going to tell the whole truth. But tests did provide an independent outside check on what was happening. Nor did it seem to me that the fact that some children would know more than others was something to be shied away from. Of course, not every child had the same potential and certainly not in every subject. But the purpose of testing was not to measure merit but knowledge and the capacity to apply it. Unfortunately, my philosophy turned out to be different from that of those to whom Ken Baker entrusted the drawing-up of the national curriculum and the formulation of the tests alongside it.

  There was a basic dilemma. As Ken emphasized in our meetings, it was necessary to take as many as possible of the teachers and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) with us in the reforms we were making. After all, it was teachers not politicians who would be implementing them. On the other hand, the educational establishment’s terms for accepting the national curriculum and testing could well prove unacceptable. For them, the new national curriculum would be expected to give legitimacy and universal application to the changes which had been made over the last twenty years or so in the content and methods of teaching. Similarly, testing should in their eyes be ‘diagnostic’ rather than ‘summative’ — and this was only the tip of the jargon iceberg — and should be heavily weighted towards assessment by teachers themselves, rather than by objective outsiders. So by mid-July the papers I was receiving from the DES were proposing a national curriculum of ten subjects which would account for 80–90 per cent of school time. They wanted different ‘attainment targets’, stressing that assessments should not denote ‘passing’ or ‘failing’: much of this assessment would be internal to the school. Two new bodies — the National Curriculum Council and the Schools Examination and Assessment Council — were to be set up. In fact, the original simplicity of the scheme had been lost and the influence of HMI and the teachers’ unions was manifest.

  All this was bad enough. But then in September I received a further proposal from Ken Baker for comprehensive monitoring of the national curriculum by the recruitment of 800 extra LEA Inspectors, who themselves would be monitored and controlled by the HMI, which would doubtless have to be expanded as well. I noted: ‘it is utterly ridiculous. The results will come through in the tests and exams.’ I stressed to the DES that all of these proposals would alienate teachers, hold back individual initiative at school level and centralize education to an unacceptable degree. The Cabinet sub-committee which I chaired to oversee the education reforms decided that all of the core and foundation subjects taken together should absorb no more than 70 per cent of the curriculum. But, at Ken Baker’s insistence, I agreed that this figure should not be publicly released — presumably it would have caused offence with the education bureaucrats who were by now ambitiously planning how each hour of school time should properly be spent.

  The next problem arose from the report by the ‘Task Group on Assessment and Testing’ which we had established in July 1987 to advise on the practical considerations which would govern assessment, including testing, within the national curriculum. Ken Baker warmly welcomed the report. Whether he had read it properly I do not know: if he had it says much for his stamina. Certainly I had no opportunity to do so before agreeing to its publication, having simply been presented with this weighty, jargon-filled document in my overnight box with a deadline for publication the following day. The fact that it was then welcomed by the Labour Party, the National Union of Teachers and the Times Educational Supplement was enough to confirm for me that its approach was suspect. It proposed an elaborate and complex system of assessment — teacher-dominated and uncosted. It adopted the ‘diagnostic’ view of tests, placed the emphasis on teachers doing their own assessment and was written in an inpenetrable educationalist jargon. I minuted out my concerns to Ken Baker but by now, of course, it had been published and was already the subject of consultation.

  In July 1988 I received the Mathematics National Curriculum papers. It was a small mountain. A complicated array of ‘levels’, ‘attainment targets’ and ‘profile components’ based on ‘tasks’ which pupils were expected to perform was surely not what teachers required. In commenting, I stressed the need for greater clarity, simplicity and a more practical approach.

  Then in October I read the first report of the National Curriculum English Working Group. This too I found disappointing, as I had the earlier Kingman Committee Report on the teaching of English language — and for the same reasons. Although there was acceptance of a place for Standard English, the traditional learning of grammar and learning by heart, which I considered vital for memory training, seemed to find no favour. Unsatisfactory as all this seemed to me, the fact that many critics considered the direction of these recommendations to be controversial demonstrated just how far things had deteriorated in many classrooms. Moreover, the final report of the English Working Group responded to the criticism made of its first report and gave at least some more emphasis to grammar and spelling.

  Perhaps the hardest battle I fought on the national curriculum was about history. Though not an historian myself, I had a very clear — and I had naively imagined uncontroversial — idea of what history was. History is an account of what happened in the past. Learning history, therefore, requires knowledge of events. It is impossible to make sense of such events without absorbing sufficient factual information and without being able to place matters in a clear chronological framework — which means knowing dates. No amount of imaginative sympathy for historical characters or situations can be a substitute for the initially tedious but ultimately rewarding business of memorizing what actually happened. I was, therefore, very concerned when in December 1988 I received Ken Baker’s written proposals for the teaching of history and the composition of the History Working Group on the curriculum. The guidance offered was not rigorous enough. There was also too much emphasis given to ‘cross-curricular’ learning: I felt that history must be taught as a separate subject. Nor was I happy at the list of people Ken Baker was suggesting. His initial names contained no major historian of repute but included the author of the definitive work on the ‘New History’ which, with its emphasis on concepts rather than chronology and empathy rather than facts, was at the root of so much that was going wrong. Ken saw my point and mad
e some changes. But this was only the beginning of the argument.

  In July 1989 the History Working Group produced its interim report. I was appalled. It put the emphasis on interpretation and enquiry as against content and knowledge. There was insufficient weight given to British history. There was not enough emphasis on history as chronological study. Ken Baker wanted to give the report a general welcome while urging its chairman to make the attainment targets specify more clearly factual knowledge and increasing the British history content. But this did not in my view go far enough. I considered the document comprehensively flawed and told Ken that there must be major, not just minor, changes. In particular, I wanted to see a clearly set out chronological framework for the whole history curriculum. But the test would of course be the final report.

  By the time this arrived in March 1990 John MacGregor had gone to Education. I thought that he would prove more effective than Ken Baker in keeping a grip on how our education reform proposals were implemented, though I knew that he did not have Ken’s special talent for putting our case in public. On this occasion, however, John MacGregor was far more inclined to welcome the report than I had expected. It did now put greater emphasis on British history. But the attainment targets it set out did not specifically include knowledge of historical facts, which seemed to me extraordinary. However, the coverage of some subjects — for example twentieth-century British history — was too skewed to social, religious, cultural and aesthetic matters rather than political events. The detail of the history curriculum would impose too inflexible a framework on teachers. I raised these points at a meeting with John on the afternoon of Monday 19 March. He defended the report’s proposals. But I insisted that it would not be right to impose the sort of approach which it contained. It should go out to consultation but no guidance should at present be issued.

  By now I had become thoroughly exasperated with the way in which the national curriculum proposals were being diverted from their original purpose. I made my reservations known in an interview I gave to the Sunday Telegraph in early April. In this I defended the principles of the national curriculum but criticized the detailed prescription in other than core subjects which had now become its least agreeable feature. My comments were greeted with consternation by the DES.

  There was no need for the national curriculum proposals and the testing which accompanied them to have developed as they did. Ken Baker paid too much attention to the DES, the HMI and progressive educational theorists in his appointments and early decisions; and once the bureaucratic momentum had begun it was difficult to stop. John MacGregor, under constant pressure from me, did what he could. He made changes to the history curriculum which reinforced the position of British history and reduced some of the unnecessary interference. He insisted that the sciences could be taught separately, not just as one integrated subject. He stipulated that at least 30 per cent of GCSE English should be tested by written examination. Yet the whole system was very different from that which I originally envisaged. By the time I left office I was convinced that there would have to be a new drive to simplify the national curriculum and testing.

  THE NEXT WAVE OF EDUCATION REFORM

  Education policy was one of the areas in which my Policy Unit and I had begun radical thinking about proposals for the next election manifesto — some of which we envisaged announcing in advance, perhaps at the March 1991 Central Council meeting. Brian Griffiths and I were concentrating on three questions at the time I left office.

  First, there was the need to go much further with ‘opting out’ of LEA control. I authorized John MacGregor to announce to the October 1990 Party Conference the extension of the GM schools scheme to cover smaller primary schools as well. But I had much more radical options in mind. Brian Griffiths had written me a paper which envisaged the transfer of many more schools to GM status and the transfer of other schools — which were not yet ready to assume the full responsibility — to the management of special trusts, set up for the purpose. Essentially, this would have meant the unbundling of many of the LEAs’ powers, leaving them with a monitoring and advisory role — perhaps in the long term not even that. It would have been a way to ease the state still further out of education, thus reversing the worst aspects of post-war education policy.

  Second, there was the need radically to improve teacher training. Unusually, I had sent a personal minute to Ken Baker in November 1988 expressing my concerns. I said we must go much further in this area and asked him to bring forward proposals. The background to this was that Keith Joseph had set up the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (CATE) in 1984 to approve teacher-training courses. But the position had barely improved. There was still too little emphasis on factual knowledge of the subjects teachers needed to teach, too little practical classroom experience acquired and too much stress on the sociological and psychological aspects. For example, I could barely believe the contents of one of the B.Ed, courses — duly approved by CATE — at Brighton Polytechnic about which one concerned Tory supporter sent in details. Entitled ‘Contexts for learning’, this course claimed to be enabling teachers to come to terms with such challenging questions as ‘To what extent do schools reinforce gender stereotypes?’ It continued: ‘students are then introduced to the debate between protagonists [sic] of education and those who advocate anti-racist education.’ I felt that the ‘protagonists’ of education had a better case.

  The effective monopoly exercised by the existing teacher-training routes had to be broken. Ken Baker devised two schemes — that of ‘licensed teachers’ to attract those who wished to enter teaching as a second career and that of ‘articled teachers’ which was essentially an apprenticeship scheme of ‘on the job’ training for younger graduates. These were good proposals. But there was no evidence that there would be a large enough inflow of teachers from these sources significantly to change the ethos and raise the standards of the profession. So I had Brian Griffiths begin work on how to increase the numbers: we wanted to see at least half of the new teachers come through these or similar schemes, as opposed to teacher-training institutions.

  The third educational policy issue on which work was being done was the universities. By exerting financial pressure we had increased administrative efficiency and provoked overdue rationalization. Universities were developing closer links with business and becoming more entrepreneurial. Student loans (which topped up grants) had also been introduced: these would make students more discriminating about the courses they chose. A shift of support from university grants to the payment of tuition fees would lead in the same direction of greater sensitivity to the market. Limits placed on the security of tenure enjoyed by university staff also encouraged dons to pay closer attention to satisfying the teaching requirements made of them. All this encountered strong political opposition from within the universities. Some of it was predictable. But undoubtedly other critics were genuinely concerned about the future autonomy and academic integrity of universities.

  I had to concede that these critics had a stronger case than I would have liked. It made me concerned that many distinguished academics thought that Thatcherism in education meant a philistine subordination of scholarship to the immediate requirements of vocational training. That was certainly no part of my kind of Thatcherism.[76] That was why before I left office Brian Griffiths, with my encouragement, had started working on a scheme to give the leading universities much more independence. The idea was to allow them to opt out of Treasury financial rules and raise and keep capital, owning their assets as a trust. It would have represented a radical decentralization of the whole system.

  IMPLEMENTING THE HOUSING REFORMS

  Of the three major social services — Education, the Health Service and Housing — it was, in my view, over the last of these that the most significant question mark hung. By the mid-1980s everything in housing pointed to the need to roll back the existing activities of government. Although the country’s housing stock needed refurbishment and adap
tation, there was no pressing need now — as arguably there had been after the war — for massive new house building by the state. Furthermore, rising incomes and capital ownership were placing more and more people in the position to buy their homes with a mortgage.

  State intervention to control rents and give tenants security of tenure in the private rented sector had been disastrous in reducing the supply of rented properties. The state in the form of local authorities had frequently proved an insensitive, incompetent and corrupt landlord. And insofar as there were shortages in specific categories of housing, these were in the private rented sector where rent control and security of tenure had reduced the supply. Moreover, new forms of housing had emerged. Housing Associations and the Housing Corporation which financed them — though they could be all too wasteful and bureaucratic on occasion — offered alternative ways of providing ‘social housing’ without the state as landlord. Similarly, tenant involvement in the form of co-operatives and the different kinds of trusts being pioneered in the United States offered new ways of pulling government out of housing management. I believed that the state must continue to provide mortgage tax relief in order to encourage home ownership, which was socially desirable. (Far better and cheaper to help people to help themselves than to provide housing for them.) The state also had to provide assistance for poorer people with housing costs through housing benefit. But as regards the traditional post-war role of government in housing — that is building, ownership, management, and regulation — the state should be withdrawn from these areas just as far and as fast as possible.