The Path to Power

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 1970 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