Margaret Thatcher: The Autobiography (97 page)

The governors of a GM school were empowered to manage its budget (receiving their money directly without a service charge deducted by the LEA). They appointed the staff including the head teacher, agreed policy as regards admissions with the Secretary of State, decided the curriculum (subject to the core requirements) and owned the school and its assets. The schools most likely to opt out of LEA control and become GM schools were those which had a distinctive identity, which wished to specialize in some particular subject or which wanted to escape from the clutches of some left-wing local authority keen to impose its own ideological priorities.

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 decentralizing features of our policy were extraordinarily successful. By contrast, the national curriculum – the most important centralizing measure – soon ran into difficulties. 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. 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. 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 planning how each hour of school time should properly be spent.

Perhaps the hardest battle I fought on the national curriculum was about history. 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 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. There was 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 made 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. 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. 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. John 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.

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 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.

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 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. 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 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 to significantly 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. 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.

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.

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 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. 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 as far and as fast as possible.