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 possibilities. 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.
16
The Assisted Places Scheme makes public funds available for gifted children from poorer backgrounds to take up places in private schools. Grant-maintained schools are state schools which have opted to move outside local education authority control.