So I was somewhat sceptical about the science policy that I as minister had to implement. But the policy never amounted to much. Science is less amenable to political direction than politicians like to think. Indeed, the history of science is in many ways more similar to the history of imaginative art than to economic history. The great scientific advances have not come from ‘practical’ plans for research and development but from creative scientific minds — the sort of minds which were around the dinner table that evening with Ted and me — people who by pushing outward at the frontiers of knowledge unlock the secrets of the universe. Politicians are reluctant to accept this; they want a quick technological fix and a quick pay-off into the bargain. Scientists rightly take a longer view. When Gladstone met Michael Faraday, he asked him whether his work on electricity would be of any use. ‘Yes, sir,’ remarked Faraday with prescience. ‘One day you will tax it.’
My second area of frustration was that of teacher training. As I have already mentioned, the manifesto had committed us to set up an inquiry into it. This was one of the points which figured large on the list I handed to Bill Pile on my first day in the department. I already held strong views on the subject. It seemed to me that the large increase in the number of teachers had to some extent been at the expense of quality. Although there were continuing difficulties about finding enough student teachers wanting to go into mathematics and sciences, there was not much substance to the complaints about ‘teacher shortages’. The real shortage was in the number of good teachers. Changing the salary structure of the profession would help by rewarding and encouraging long-serving and senior teachers, though the NUT was very wary of increased differentials. But teacher training was the key.
I wanted a serious investigation into whether trainee teachers were being taught the right subjects in the right way and at the right level. So I appointed Lord James of Rusholme, a former Headmaster of Manchester Grammar School, one of the country’s great schools, as Chairman of an inquiry into teacher training. I insisted that those who served with him should work virtually fulltime and that their report be completed within a year; it was duly published in January 1972. The report was workmanlike and made a number of sensible suggestions. It placed the greater emphasis I wanted on in-service training so that teachers really knew how to cope with a class full of children. Second, it proposed a new, two-year Diploma in Higher Education — for which I had also pressed — in which future teachers would study side by side with others who intended going into industry or the professions. But the fact that it confined itself to the structure rather than the curriculum content of teacher training limited its value. In effect, I got nowhere in my attempts to get the curriculum of the teacher training institutions discussed within the planned inquiry. It was still regarded as taboo for politicians to become involved in such matters. Fifteen years later the situation had not materially improved. As Prime Minister, I would still be puzzling about how to raise the quality of the teaching profession.
Still, although I was very critical of the outlook of many teacher trade unionists (who were in some cases more trade unionists than teachers), my final impression gained from my years at the DES was of the sincerity and commitment of most teachers. Sometimes teachers from the most difficult schools dealing with ‘problem’ children (who could usually be traced back to ‘problem’ parents) would come in to the department to tell me of their experience. On other occasions, I would talk to them in their schools and see something of what they had to cope with in their classrooms.
The teacher can never be a sufficient substitute for the family: yet a good teacher cannot ignore what happens to the child when he or she goes home, perhaps to be ill-treated. On one occasion, someone put the dilemma to me:
At 4 o’clock on a Friday afternoon when the other children have gone home, one child clings to you and begs not to leave. You feel sure — but you cannot prove — that something is seriously wrong. Perhaps there is violence or neglect, or just deep unhappiness from one source or another. Do you walk the child home and tell his parents that he seems a bit off-colour; saying, of course, that he has not complained or been a nuisance; but gently enquiring if anything is wrong? You don’t know whether the child may be beaten as soon as you leave. Do you alert the authorities? That may have even more traumatic consequences. Or do you do nothing and hope that it’s just a temporary problem which will sort itself out? Well, Mrs Thatcher, what would you do?
There is no single good answer to this question. And despite our agonizings over such cases, we have still not found a solution that is right for all circumstances. We need teachers, social workers and policemen who are trained to recognize the symptoms of abuse, while remembering the commonsense reality that most parents love their children. Of the three, teachers are by far the most important because they know the child personally and see him or her almost every day. If they are to carry out this delicate and important task they can do so only if their authority is fully restored, not only over the child but also in the eyes of the parent. And when that happens, the bad parent is more likely to be held in check.
MILKING PUBLICITY
In one respect at least, the Department of Education was an excellent preparation for the premiership. I came under savage and unremitting attack that was only distantly related to my crimes.
But it did not begin like that. I have described the arguments about grammar schools and comprehensives. Yet these caused me only limited trouble, partly because many people — and not just Conservatives — agreed with me and partly because I was the bringer of good tidings in other matters. For example, I was hailed in a modest way as the saviour of the Open University. In Opposition both Iain Macleod and Edward Boyle, who thought that there were educational priorities more deserving of Government help, had committed themselves in public against it. And although its abolition was not in the manifesto, many people expected it to perish. But I was genuinely attracted to the concept of a ‘University of the Airwaves’, as it was often called, because I thought that it was an inexpensive way of giving wider access to higher education, because I thought that trainee teachers in particular would benefit from it, because I was alert to the opportunities offered by technology to bring the best teaching to schoolchildren and students, and above all because it gave people a second chance in life. In any case, the university was due to take its first students that autumn, and cancellation would have been both expensive and a blow to many hopes. On condition that I agreed to reduce the immediate intake of students and find other savings, my Cabinet colleagues allowed the Open University to go ahead.
There were more discussions of public expenditure that autumn of 1970. The Treasury had its little list of savings for the education budget — including charges for libraries, museums, school meals and school milk. I knew from my own experience in Grantham how vital it was to have access to books. So I persuaded the Cabinet to drop the proposed library charges, while reluctantly accepting entry charges for museums and galleries. (We kept one free day.) But pressure for more cuts was maintained, and I had to come up with a list of priority targets.
Savings on school meals and school milk were, I had to admit, an obvious candidate. There seemed no reason why families who could afford to do so should not make a larger contribution to the cost of school meals. I thought that I could defend such cuts if I could demonstrate that some of the money saved would go towards meeting the priority which we had set, namely the primary school building programme. And within the Department of Education budget it seemed logical that spending on education should come before ‘welfare’ spending, which should in principle fall to Keith Joseph’s department, Social Services.
As for milk, there were already mixed views on health grounds about the advantage of providing it. When I was at Huntingtower Road Primary School my parents paid 2½d a week for my school milk: and there were no complaints. By 1970 very few children were so deprived that school milk was essential for their nourishment. Tony Barber, who became C
hancellor in July 1970, after the death of Iain Macleod, wanted me to abolish free school milk altogether. But I was more cautious, both on political and on welfare grounds. I managed to hold the line at an increased price for school meals and the withdrawal of free milk from primary school children over the age of seven. These modest changes came with safeguards: children in need of milk for medical reasons continued to receive it until they went to secondary school. All in all, I had defended the education budget effectively.
Nor was this lost on the press. The Daily Mail said that I had emerged as a ‘new heroine’. The Daily Telegraph drew attention to my plans to improve 460 of the oldest primary schools. The Guardian noted: ‘School meals and milk were the main casualties in a remarkably light raid on the education budget. Mrs Thatcher has won her battle to preserve a high school-building programme and turn it to the replacement of old primary schools.’
It was pleasant while it lasted.
The trouble was, it didn’t last long. Six months later we had to introduce a Bill to remove the legal duty for local education authorities to provide free milk and allow them discretion to make it available for a small charge. This gave Labour the parliamentary opportunity to cause havoc.
Even before that, however, the newspapers had unearthed the potential in stories about school meals. One report claimed that some local education authorities were going to charge children who brought sandwiches to school for their lunch. ‘Sandwich Kids In “Fines” Storm’ was how the Sun put it. Labour provided a parliamentary chorus. I introduced a circular to prevent the practice. But that story in turn restored attention to the increase in school meal charges. Overnight the number of children eating such meals became a politically sensitive indicator. The old arguments about the ‘stigma’ of means-tested benefits, which I had come to know so well as a Parliamentary Secretary in the 1960s, surfaced again. It was said that children from families poor enough to be entitled to free school meals would be humiliated when better-off classmates paid for their own. Probably unwisely, I came up with a suggestion in a television programme that this could be avoided if mothers sent dinner money to schools in envelopes. The teachers could put the change back in the envelope. A poor child entitled to free meals would bring an envelope with coins that would just be put back again by the teacher. This, of course, just added a new twist to the story.
In any case, it was not long before the great ‘milk row’ dwarfed debate about meals. Newspapers which had congratulated me on my success in protecting the education budget at the expense of cuts in milk and meals suddenly changed their tune. The Guardian described the Education (Milk) Bill as ‘a vindictive measure which should never have been laid before Parliament’. The Daily Mail told me to ‘think again’. The Sun demanded to know: ‘Is Mrs Thatcher Human?’ But it was a speaker at the Labour Party Conference who seems to have suggested to the press the catchy title ‘Mrs Thatcher, milk snatcher’.
When the press discover a rich vein they naturally exhaust it. After all, editors and journalists have a living to earn, and politicians are fair game. So it seemed as if every day some variant of the theme would emerge. For example, a Labour council was discovered to be considering buying its own herd of cows to provide milk for its children. Local education authorities sought to evade the legislation by serving up milky drinks but not milk. Councils which were not education authorities took steps to provide free milk for children aged seven to eleven under powers contained in the Local Government Act 1963. Only in Scotland and Wales did the action of councils involve a breach of the law, and it was for my Cabinet colleagues in the Scottish and Welsh departments to deal with the consequences of that rather than for me. But there was no doubt where the blame for it all was felt to lie. The campaign against me reached something of a climax in November 1971 when the Sun voted me ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’.
Perhaps I had been naive in thinking that doing what was generally agreed to be best for education was likely to count in argument about the sacrifices required. The local authorities, for blatantly political reasons, were unwilling to sell milk to the children, and it was almost impossible to force them to do so. I learned a valuable lesson. I had incurred the maximum of political odium for the minimum of political benefit. I and my colleagues were caught up in battles with local authorities for months, during which we suffered constant sniping in the media, all for a saving of £9 million which could have been cut from the capital budget with scarcely a ripple. I resolved not to make the same mistake again. In future if I were to be hanged, it would be for a sheep, not a lamb, still less a cow.
By now I was hurt and upset, somewhat sadder but considerably wiser. It is probably true that a woman — even a woman who has lived a professional life in a man’s world — is more emotionally vulnerable to personal abuse than most men. The image which my opponents and the press had painted of me as callously attacking the welfare of young children was one which, as someone who was never happier than in children’s company, I found deeply wounding. But any politician who wants to hold high office must be prepared to go through something like this. Some are broken by it, others strengthened. Denis, always the essence of commonsense, came through magnificently. If I survived, it was due to his love and support. I later developed the habit of not poring over articles and profiles in the newspapers about myself. I came to rely instead on briefings and summaries. If what the press wrote was false, I could ignore it; and if it was true, I already knew it.
Throughout 1971 as the assault on me was being mounted over the issue of school milk, I was locked in battle within the Cabinet on public spending. It was politically vital to my argument about school meals and milk that the primary school building programme — crucial to the emphasis our policy placed on primary education generally — should go ahead as envisaged. So within the department I rejected early suggestions of compromise with the Treasury budget cutters. In a note to Bill Pile in April 1971 I laid down our last-ditch position: ‘We cannot settle for less than last year in real terms.’
This was more than political realism. I felt that other colleagues, who had not delivered the painful savings I had made, had been allowed to get away with it. In return for the cuts in meals and milk I had obtained agreement on the size of the school building programme for just one year ahead. But since it takes several years to plan and build a school, the promise had implications for future years. Others had won agreement for continuing expenditure over the whole five-year period of our public expenditure planning, the so-called Public Expenditure Survey Committee (PESC) system. Moreover, my department was now offering savings of over £100 million on higher education to the Treasury, while huge sums were still being paid out in industrial subsidies.
I could not reach agreement with Maurice Macmillan, then Chief Secretary, and so appealed, as any Cabinet minister has a right to do, to Cabinet. But I was then irritated to learn that No. 10 had decided that I would not be allowed to put in a paper. I wrote a sharply worded letter to Ted pointing out the pressures I was under to announce the 1973/74 school building programme. The letter concluded:
You are constantly urging us to improve departmental administration. At present I am being prevented from doing just that on the capital building side.
I urgently need a good 73/74 programme which takes into account my last year’s extensive cuts. The third, fourth and fifth years can be left to the PESC meetings but I hope to agree them then.
I’m afraid this letter sounds terse, but you would be critical if it were long. May I see you when you return from Paris?
I won his agreement to put in my paper in June 1971 — and I got my way. At Cabinet later that month I succeeded in obtaining almost everything that I wanted for the school building programme. It was just in time to announce to the annual conference of the Association of Education Committees in Eastbourne and prompted such headlines as ‘Record Programme to Improve Old Primary Schools’.
On my arrival at the DES, that really had been the pr
iority for me. Because of it, as I have just explained, I had to make (or at least accept) spending decisions which made life extraordinarily difficult. I felt that in the 1970s it was wrong for schools still to have leaky roofs, primitive equipment and outside lavatories. Moreover, now that the demographic ‘bulge’ of primary-school-age children had more or less been accommodated — the peak was in 1973 — there was some financial leeway to improve the quality of the often very old and gloomy schools which had been kept in use.
It was, however, graphically demonstrated to me when I visited a new school in south London that there was a lot more to improving education than bricks and mortar. The teachers who showed me round were obviously members of the academic awkward squad. One of them told me that the children at this school were upset that some of their friends had to go to an old school in the neighbourhood. And indeed most of the children had clearly been well coached to support this view. But one of them spoke up, to the teachers’ evident embarrassment, to challenge this, saying: ‘Oh, I am not sure that’s right. Before I came here I went to a school which was older than this and smaller; but it was cosier, more friendly, and we knew where we were.’ As time went by, I too felt increasingly strongly about the importance of smaller schools. I also came to consider in later years that we had all of us been too interested in the ‘inputs’ (new buildings, expensive equipment and, above all, more and more teachers) rather than the ‘outputs’ (quality of teaching, levels of achievement and standards of behaviour).
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