end they came reluctantly to regard her as one of the best of recent Secretaries of State. In fact, once they had explained to her the constraints of her office, Mrs Thatcher was in some ways the civil servant’s ideal minister: hard-working and demanding, but a good advocate for the Department, with no educational agenda of her own.
That is not to say that she did not have strong views, only that she had no power to impose them. Her attitude to education was simple, prescriptive and defiantly old-fashioned: she saw it not as a process of awakening or intellectual stimulation but as a body of knowledge, skills and values to be imparted by the teacher to the taught. (‘Mrs Gradgrind Thatcher’, one profile not unfairly called her.)3 She deplored the new child-centred teaching which held that everything was relative and value-free.
As Secretary of State she took great pride in her own (very slight) experience of teaching. In her first Oxford summer vacation she had taught maths and science for six weeks at a Grantham boys’ school. She used to recall this brief exposure to the chalkface to establish her credentials. At the same time she recognised that teaching was ‘a vocation which most people just do not have’.4 Teachers, of course, regarded such pieties as simply an excuse for underpaying them. In principle she did value good teachers – it was the teaching unions she blamed for protecting bad teachers while imposing a left-wing political orthodoxy of underachievement. But in 1970 the Secretary of State had very little power to affect either the quality or the content of education.
Ironically, it was her very success as a departmental minister, winning resources for policies she did not in her heart approve, which retrospectively poisoned her memory of the DES. From the perspective of the 1980s her record as a high-spending minister with the reputation of having ‘gone native’, who had tamely followed the departmental line and failed to halt the spread of comprehensivisation, was an embarrassment to her which never ceased to rankle. Stuart Sexton, a special adviser to successive Education Secretaries in the 1980s, felt that the Prime Minister ‘hated the Department of Education, because I think she realised they had taken her for a ride’.5 The fact is, however, that she did not hate them all at the time; nor did all of them hate her.
She certainly had her difficulties, beginning with the Permanent Secretary, Sir William Pile. Newly appointed in June 1970, Pile was an old DES hand who had spent most of his career in the Department, now coming back as its head after a spell in the Home Office as Director of Prisons. Described by the Whitehall historian Peter Hennessy as ‘a genial, quiet, pipe-smoking official who… liked to look on the bright side’,6 he was at the same time ‘a doughty defender’ of the DES line who ‘liked to stick to his guns’.7 So did Mrs Thatcher. Generally, however, Mrs Thatcher and Pile got along. Other senior officials in the Department saw nothing wrong with their relationship, and feel that reports of their hostility were greatly overdone.
Mrs Thatcher arrived at the DES on Monday morning 22 June determined to show that she was the boss. She marched in, with no conversational preliminaries, and presented Pile with a list of points for immediate action written on a page torn out of an exercise book. Number one was the immediate withdrawal of Short’s circular requiring local authorities to prepare schemes for comprehensivisation. But she had no positive agenda. She was committed by the Tory manifesto to a number of broad objectives all of which, apart from the slowing down of comprehensivisation and more Government support for direct grant schools, were uncontroversial, even consensual. Her main priority was switching more resources into primary education, with an ambitious new school building programme. ‘This’, she told the party conference revealingly in October, ‘is the thing the Government controls.’8 The Government was committed to raising the school-leaving age to sixteen – a long- planned change postponed by Labour in 1966 – and to continuing the expansion of higher education. The manifesto also promised an inquiry into teacher training. All this she carried out.
In practice – to her subsequent chagrin – comprehensivisation proceeded faster than ever during Mrs Thatcher’s time at the DES. Under Section 13 of the 1944 Education Act final approval of every local scheme still lay with the Secretary of State; and Mrs Thatcher took this responsibility very seriously. She was meticulous in examining every scheme personally, burdening herself with a ‘massive workload’9 and giving rise to allegations of deliberate delay; in November 1971 she told the Commons that she currently had 350 schemes under consideration.10 Where she could discover valid grounds for refusing approval she did so; but in practice she found few schemes that she could reasonably stop. In many cases schools had to merge, on purely practical grounds, to create Sixth Forms to cope with the raised school-leaving age. The result was that over the four years of Mrs Thatcher’s tenure of the DES she rejected only 326 out of 3,612 schemes which were submitted to her; that is about 9 per cent. But it was this small minority which made the headlines. Wherever she withheld approval from a scheme she laid herself open to the charge that she was making nonsense of the Government’s professed policy of leaving local decisions to local option.
Defending her budget
Her first serious challenge on coming into office in June 1970 was to defend the education budget. Just like her own Government nine years later, the Heath Government took office promising immediate economies in public spending to pay for tax cuts. Macleod’s first act as Chancellor – virtually his only one before his sudden death – was to demand a series of savings from the departments. Having established in opposition that the Tories were committed to increasing education spending, Mrs Thatcher was in a better position than most of her colleagues to resist. Even so, she was required to find some short-term economies. She did so by raising the price of school meals and stopping the supply of free milk to children over the age of seven. These were from her point of view unimportant cuts, falling only on the welfare benefits which had got loaded on to education while protecting the essential business of education itself – in particular the expensive commitment to proceed with the raising of the school-leaving age, and her promise to improve the standard of primary school buildings. In 1971 she was able to announce ‘a huge building drive’ to replace old primary schools, spending ?132 million over three years from the savings on school meals and milk.11 She also reprieved the Open University, which Macleod had earmarked for the axe before it had enrolled its first students. ‘With all our difficulties’, she boasted, ‘the cuts have not fallen on education.’12
When Tony Barber announced his package in October, she was generally thought to have done well: the row over school milk did not blow up until the following year. As Prime Minister a decade later she insisted that her ministers owed their first duty to the Government’s collective strategy, not to their departments; but in 1970, like every other departmental minister, her priority was to fight her own corner. She made a point of telling journalists that she had taken on the Treasury and won.
Her most remarkable feat was saving the Open University. The Tories in opposition had sneered at the projected ‘university of the air’ as a typical Wilson gimmick. But Mrs Thatcher took a different view. She was persuaded that it was a worthwhile enterprise which would genuinely extend opportunity. It was also good value for money, an economical way to produce more graduates. So even though the Department itself was not strongly committed to it, she had already determined to defy the Treasury death sentence and allow it to go ahead. She indicated her intention at a press conference two days after taking office. Contrary to the impression he gives in his memoirs, Heath was furious at this exercise of ‘instant government’: she had unilaterally reversed the party’s policy before he had even appointed the junior minister who would be responsible for the universities. Within days of appointing her he was already talking ‘quite openly’ of getting rid of his Education Secretary ‘if he could’.13 Thirty-nine years later, when the Open University is established as a great success, the credit for its conception is usually given to Harold Wilson and Jennie Lee; but Margaret Thatcher deserves equal credit for single-handedly allowing it to be born when her senior colleagues were intent on aborting it. It is one of her more surprising and unsung achievements.
‘Milk snatcher’
She blamed her officials for failing to foresee the hornets’ nest she would stir up by cutting free school milk. To the Department it seemed an obviously sensible and uncontentious economy. The Government was currently spending more on providing free milk than on books for schools; much of the milk was never drunk – partly
