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 priority 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).
Oddly, perhaps, it was not mainly by reading thoughtful analyses or arguing with perceptive critics that I gradually formed my views about what was wrong with the educational system — and the educational establishment which lived off it — but rather by practical, almost random, experience of what was actually happening in schools.
Take primary school education. Few would quarrel with the assertion that those first years of schooling are essential to a child’s formation. But what were these young children actually to be taught — and how? The Plowden Report commissioned by the previous Conservative Minister of Education, Edward Boyle, and regarded by almost everyone as the last word in expert opinion, leaned strongly in favour of teaching in small groups and even one-to-one, rather than classes. I had no strong views on the matter when I arrived at the DES, and the report was well argued. But I now suspect that it sent primary schools in the wrong direction for a generation. Again, my doubts only started to surface when I visited schools and found that in reality individual children were often not being taught in a group, let alone in a class, but were largely left to their own — not necessarily very useful — devices. I saw how in large, open-plan classrooms, groups were inclined to disintegrate into a disorderly hubbub in which quieter children felt lost and even intimidated. I came back to the department and told the Ministry’s architects’ department not to encourage this type of open-plan school.
What I rejected right from the start was the idea, fashionable among the middle classes as much as among experts, that the best way for a child to learn was by self-discovery. This belief entailed the abandonment of the kind of education my generation had had as mere ‘learning by rote’. In fact, any worthwhile education involves the teaching of knowledge, memory training, the ability to apply what one has learned and the self-discipline required for all of these. In all the frenzy of theorizing, these truths were forgotten.
STUDENT PRINCES
Whether or not the acclaim for my defence of the primary school building programme was justified, it soon faded away as a new agitation over the financing of student unions got under way. Unlike the controversy over school milk, this was largely a campaign organized by the hard Left. It was, therefore, less politically dangerous. But it was very vicious. Nor was it just directed against me. My daughter Carol, reading Law at University College, London, also had a hard time. I was thankful she was living at home.
In both Europe and the United States this was the height of the period of ‘student revolution’. Looking back, it is extraordinary that so much notice should have been taken of the kindergarten Marxism and egocentric demands which characterized it. In part, it was a development of that youth cult of the 1960s whereby the young were regarded as a source of pure insight into the human condition. In response, many students accordingly expected their opinions to be treated with reverence.
Yet the student protests of the time, far from being in the vanguard of progress, were phenomena of a world which was about to pass away. The universities had been expanded too quickly in the 1960s. In many cases standards had fallen and the traditional character of the universities had been lost. Moreover, this had occurred at a time when market principles were in retreat and the assumption was near-universal that everyone had a right to a job and the state had the power to give it to them. So these rootless young people lacked both the authority which had been imposed on their predecessors in the 1950s and the discipline which the need to qualify for a good job would place on students in the eighties.
The Left had managed to gain control of many student unions, and therefore of the public money which financed them, using this position to mount campaigns of disruption which infuriated ordinary taxpayers and ratepayers and even many students who simply wanted to study. There were two aspects: first, the financing of student bodies, and second what those bodies did. On the first, the main source of money for student unions was subscriptions out of mandatory grants received from their local education authorities. Union membership was normally obligatory and the union subscription was then paid direct to the student union. As regards activities, some student unions took advantage of this to spend the revenue on partisan purposes, often in defiance of both their constitution and the wishes of their members.
In July 1971 I put proposals to the Home and Social Affairs Committee of the Cabinet (HS) for reform. I had considered setting up a Registrar of student unions, but that would have required legislation. So I limited myself to proposing something more modest. In future, the union subscription should not be included in the fees payable to colleges and universities. The student maintenance grant would be increased slightly to enable students to join particular clubs or societies on a voluntary basis. Responsibility for providing student union facilities would then be placed on each academic institution. The facilities of each union would be open to all students, whether or not they were members of the union. Besides dealing with the question of accountability for public money, these changes would also abolish the closed-shop element in student unions which I found deeply objectionable on grounds of principle. HS was not prepared to go along with my proposals immediately, but I came back to the argument, fully recognizing how controversial they would be, and gained the Committee’s approval.