GRAMMATICALLY INCORRECT
On that first day at the department I brought with me a list of about fifteen points for action which I had written down over the weekend at Lamberhurst in an old exercise book. After enlarging upon them, I tore out the pages and gave them to Bill Pile. The most immediate action point was the withdrawal of Tony Crosland’s Circular 10/65, under which local authorities were required to submit plans for reorganizing secondary education on completely comprehensive lines, and Circular 10/66, issued the following year, which withheld capital funding from local education authorities that refused to go comprehensive.
The department must have known that this was in our manifesto — they always scrutinize the Opposition parties’ policies during an election campaign. But apparently they thought that the policy could be watered down, or at least its implementation postponed. I, for my part, knew that the pledge to stop pressuring local authorities to go comprehensive was of great importance to our supporters, that any delay would be taken as a sign of weakness, and that it was important to act speedily in order to end uncertainty. Consequently, even before I had given Bill Pile my fifteen points, I had told the press that I would immediately withdraw Labour’s Circulars. I even indicated that this would have happened by the time of the Queen’s Speech. The alarm this provoked seems to have made its way to No. 10, for I was reminded that I should have Cabinet’s agreement to the policy, though of course this was only a formality.
More seriously, I had not understood that the withdrawal of one Circular requires the issue of another. This was a technicality, but it was one which those who disagreed with the-policy inside and outside the department used to maximum effect. My civil servants made no secret of the fact that they considered that a Circular should contain a good deal of material setting out the department’s views on its preferred shape for secondary education in the country as a whole. This might take for ever, and in any event I did not see things that way. The essence of our policy was to encourage variety and choice rather than ‘plan’ the system. Moreover, to the extent that it was necessary to lay down from the centre the criteria by which local authorities’ reorganization proposals would be judged, this could be done now in general terms, with any further elaboration taking place later. It was immensely difficult to persuade them that I was serious. I eventually succeeded by doing an initial draft myself: they quickly decided that cooperation was the better part of valour. And in the end a very short Circular — referred to as Circular 10/70 — was issued on Tuesday 30 June in good time for the Education Debate on the Queen’s Speech on Wednesday 8 July.
I now came under fierce attack from the educational establishment because I had failed to engage in the ‘normal consultation’ which took place before a Circular was issued. I felt no need to apologize. As I put it in my speech in the House, we had after all ‘just completed the biggest consultation of all’, that is a general election. But this carried little weight with those who had spent the last twenty-five years convinced that they knew best. Ted Short, Labour’s Education spokesman, himself a former schoolmaster, even went so far as to suggest that, in protest, teachers should refuse to mark 11-Plus exam papers. A delegation from the NUT came to see me to complain about what I. had done. Significantly, the brunt of their criticism was that I had ‘resigned responsibility for giving shape to education’. If indeed that had been my responsibility, I do not think the NUT would have liked the shape I would have given it.
In fact, the policy which I now pursued was more nuanced than the caricatures it attracted — though a good deal could have been said for the positions caricatured. Circular 10/70 withdrew the relevant Labour Government Circulars and then went on: ‘The Secretary of State will expect educational considerations in general, local needs and wishes in particular and the wise use of resources to be the main principles determining the local pattern.’ It also made it clear that the presumption was basically against upheaval: ‘where a particular pattern of organization is working well and commands general support the Secretary of State does not wish to cause further change without good reason’.
Strange though it may seem, although local education authorities had been used to sending in general plans for reorganization of all the schools under their control, neither these nor the Secretary of State’s comments on them had any legal standing. The law only entered the picture when the notices were issued under Section 13 of the 1944 Education Act. This required local education authorities to give public notice — and notice to the department — of their intention to close or open a school, significantly alter its character, or change the age range of its pupils. Locally, this gave concerned parents, school governors and residents two months in which to object. Nationally, it gave me, as Secretary of State, the opportunity to intervene. It read: ‘Any proposals submitted to the Secretary of State under this section may be approved by him after making such modifications therein, if any, as appear to him desirable.’
The use of these powers to protect particular good schools against sweeping reorganization was not only a departure from Labour policy; it was also a conscious departure from the line taken by Edward Boyle, who had described Section 13 as ‘reserve powers’. But as a lawyer myself and as someone who believed that decisions about changing and closing schools should be sensitive to local opinion, I thought it best to base my policy on the Section 13 powers rather than on exhortation through Circulars. This may sound arbitrary, but in fact I was very conscious that my actions were subject to the scrutiny of the courts and that the grounds on which I could intervene were limited. And by the time I made my speech in the debate I was in a position to spell out more clearly how this general approach would be implemented.
My policy had a further advantage, though it was not one that it would have been politically prudent to expound. At a time when even Conservative education authorities were bitten with the bug of comprehensivization, it offered the best chance of saving good local grammar schools. The administrative disadvantage was that close scrutiny of large numbers of individual proposals meant delays in giving the department’s response. Inevitably, I was attacked on the grounds that I was holding back in order to defer the closure of more grammar schools. But in this the critics were unjust. I took a close interest in speeding up the responses. It was just that we were deluged.
A further point I dealt with in that first Commons debate as Education Secretary was the argument, constantly advanced by the proponents of wholesale comprehensivization, that it was impossible to have a ‘mixed’ system of both comprehensive and grammar schools. Although, in truth, this was just a more sophisticated version of the argument that the egalitarian educationalist knows best, it was superficially persuasive. It is, after all, impossible in theory to divide a given group of children between grammars and secondary moderns and to mix them all together in one comprehensive school. Either the children will not be selected or they will not be mixed. But this theoretical argument ignored the fact that, given a large enough ‘catchment’ area, it was possible to have selective schools and schools with the full range of ability in operation at the same time. As I pointed out in answer to Ted Short in the debate:
Certainly, with a small rural area, I do not believe that it would be possible to have a comprehensive school and a grammar school, but in some of the very large urban areas it is possible, because the grammar school and direct grant school have quite different catchment areas from the comprehensive school. [Hon. Members: ‘Impossible.’] It is of little avail for Hon. Gentlemen opposite to say that this is impossible, because it happens now. Some of the best comprehensive schools are in areas where there are very good selective schools.
For all the political noise which arose from this change of policy, its practical effects were limited. During the whole of my time as Education Secretary we considered some 3,600 proposals for reorganization — the great majority of them proposals for comprehensivization — of which I rejected only 325, or about 9 per cent. In the summer of 19
70 it had seemed possible that many more authorities might decide to reverse or halt their plans. For example, Conservative-controlled Birmingham was one of the first education authorities to welcome Circular 10/70. A bitter fight had been carried on to save the city’s thirty-six grammar schools. But in 1972 Labour took control and put forward its own plans for comprehensivization. I rejected sixty of the council’s 112 proposals in June 1973, saving eighteen of the city’s grammar schools.
Similarly, Richmond Council in Surrey had refused to come forward with a scheme under the Labour Government’s Circular 10/65, but in September 1970 voted by a large majority to end selection. I had no choice but to give my approval to the change the following year.
Perhaps the most awkward decisions I had to make related to Barnet, which included my own constituency. The Conservative-controlled Barnet Council decided to go comprehensive in October 1970, having conducted a survey of parents in which 79 per cent apparently favoured ending selection. (In fact, other national opinion polls showed a great deal of confusion on the issue, with a majority of people favouring both comprehensive education and the retention of grammar schools.) There was fierce opposition to Barnet’s scheme, and in January 1971 I received 5,400 letters of protest. The following month I approved a scheme which ended two grammar schools, but I saved a third on the grounds that the proposed merger would lead to an inconvenient divided-site school. In April I saved another grammar school and in June blocked two more schemes, thus saving a good secondary modern and another grammar school. The Conservative Party locally was split and I was censured by the local council. Most of the borough’s secondary schools in fact went comprehensive that September. The local authority kept reformulating its plans. Christ’s College and Woodhouse Grammar Schools were the main bones of contention. They were still grammar schools when I became Leader of the Opposition in 1975; they only became part of a comprehensive system (in Woodhouse’s case, a sixth-form college) in 1978 after Labour’s 1976 Education Act scrapped Section 13 and attempted to impose a comprehensive system from the centre on England and Wales.
In retrospect, it is clear that a near obsessive concern with educational structures characterized the 1960s and seventies. It is not that structures — either at the level of administration or at the level of schools — are unimportant. But educational theorists manifest a self-confidence which events have done nothing to justify when they claim that there is one system which in all circumstances and for all individuals is better than another. During my time at the DES I came across this attitude above all when dealing with plans for secondary school reorganization, in the prejudice against grammar schools: they even wanted to eliminate streaming by ability within schools. I tried to convince Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Schools (HMI) that whatever their theories might suggest, they should at least recognize that there were large numbers of excellent teachers in grammar schools doing a first-class job, and that they were having the heart taken out of them by the tone of so many HMI Reports.
The view that a Utopian, monolithic structure could be devised and implemented without trauma was also exploded time and again as I heard the experience of individual parents. People living in a crime-ridden council estate with a comprehensive ‘community school’, to which their catchment area under local authority regulation required them to send their children, were often desperate to get out. The lucky few who had a direct grant school in the vicinity might be able to do so. But some socialist local education authorities refused to take up places allocated to them at direct grant schools because they objected to independent schools on doctrinaire grounds. I had to intervene to ensure that these places were filled. But in any case only a limited number of parents and children could escape from bad conditions in this way. I found it heartbreaking to tell mothers that there was little or nothing I could do under the present system.
Only later — first with the Assisted Places Scheme and then with grant-maintained schools — could I, as Prime Minister, do something substantial to help.[16] Not that this situation, which continues today, is entirely satisfactory. We need to make it easier to start up new schools so as to widen parental choice. And the argument for education vouchers becomes stronger every day. They would finally bridge the gap between the independent and state sectors.
There is a further consideration which I have only come to appreciate in recent years. In defending grammar schools, Con servatives were rightly defending an existing institution that provided a fine education for children of all backgrounds. But we were also defending a principle — namely, that the state should select children by the single criterion of ability and direct them to one of only two sorts of school — that is far more consonant with socialism and collectivism than with the spontaneous social order associated with liberalism and conservatism. State selection by ability is, after all, a form of manpower planning. And variety and excellence in education are far more securely founded, and far more politically defensible, when parental choice rather than state selection of children by ability is their justification.
Be that as it may, by the end of 1970 it was already becoming clear that there would be no swing away from comprehensive education.
SCIENCE AND TEACHER TRAINING
I arrived at the Department of Education with a strong personal interest in science, and the science responsibilities of the DES were mine alone. At that time a block sum was allocated on the advice of scientists between five research councils — covering science and engineering, medicine, agriculture, the environment and social science. But discussion of science policy was soon dominated by the Central Policy Review Staff (CPRS or ‘think tank’) Report which formed the basis of the White Paper of July 1972, A Framework for Government Research and Development. Its central recommendation was that a proportion of this money should henceforth be allocated to the relevant Government department so that it could decide the projects to be financed by its own council — the so-called ‘customer-contractor’ principle. Although I did not oppose the principle, I was worried that it would reduce the amount of money at the direct disposal of the research councils — unless there was an increase in the total science budget.
All this may seem of limited importance. And indeed in terms of overall science policy it was. That was part of the problem. Arguments about the precise relations between departments and research councils were irrelevant to the wider and crucially impor tant question of the Government’s strategic role in scientific research. Ted’s view was that pure research was not really work for Government-funded research and development, though he recognized that in any research establishment there was bound to be some proportion of pure or basic research. My view was precisely the opposite. It was only years later, when I was Prime Minister, that I was able to formulate my own answer to the problem, which was that Government should concentrate on funding basic science and leave its application and development to the private sector. But I already felt deeply uneasy about any policy that threatened to starve pure science of funds.
In one particular instance, I was involved directly in supporting a large and expensive project on the frontiers of science. This was the decision to join in European plans for a giant proton accelerator, or ‘atom smasher’, to elucidate the ultimate structure of matter, a project from which the previous Labour Government had withdrawn in 1968. As part of the Government’s early spending curbs we too had drawn back from this project, which some people considered too expensive, given its theoretical nature. But I was haunted by the knowledge that if Britain had not pressed ahead with some nuclear research even in the cash-strapped thirties, Britain and America would not have developed the atomic bomb which first secured victory in the Second World War and later protected Western Europe against Stalin. It was a vital lesson. So in September 1970 I went with Sir Brian Flowers, Chairman of the Science and Engineering Research Council, to the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva to see for myself what was envisaged and learn more about the science and its pos
sibilities. I came back convinced that if we could ensure sound financial control the twelve-nation project was worth backing, and managed to convince my colleagues to this effect.
Generally, though, I did not feel that the Government’s approach to science was radical or imaginative enough. I suspect that many scientists — and not just those with a professional axe to grind — thought so too. On Tuesday 26 June 1973 Ted held a dinner at No. 10 for British Nobel Prize winners in science — among them my old Oxford tutor, Dorothy Hodgkin. Naturally, I attended as well. For several reasons it was an illuminating occasion. Ted set the discussion against the background of Britain’s entry into the European Community, which he thought historians would conclude was the greatest achievement of his administration. He presented science as something to be applied so as to allow British industry to take advantage of access to the European market. There was some support for this view, but there were also some criticisms which represented my own standpoint. Essentially, this was that government should fund pure science, rather than organizing Europe’s scientists together in vast projects to make European economies technologically more competitive. Science was already international; the expansion of the European Community would not make a good deal of difference; and international science depended upon a number of people working separately in different countries. Arguably the less they were officially organized, the better the results would be. A commonsense exception to this rule was when the investment required was so costly that no one nation could afford it — hence my support for CERN.
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