The White Paper received a disconcertingly rapturous reception. The Daily Telegraph, although making some criticisms about the lack of proposals for student loans or vouchers, said that the White Paper established me ‘as one of our most distinguished reforming -and spending — Ministers of Education’. The Daily Mail described it as a ‘Quiet Revolution’ and commented, ‘there has been nothing like it since the war’. More unsettling was the Guardian’s praise for a ‘progressive programme’ and the comment — I hoped tongue in cheek — that ‘apart from not mandatorily ending 11-Plus segregation, Mrs Thatcher is more than half way towards a respectably socialist education policy’.
REALITY BITES
With the exception of some vigorous exchanges with Labour’s new and highly articulate Education spokesman, Roy Hattersley, about the rate of increase of education expenditure, the early months of 1973 were as near as any at the DES to being quiet. But the consequences of the Government’s fiscal and monetary policies were shortly to catch up with us. The first instalment was in May — a round of public expenditure cuts designed to cool the overheated economy. Capital spending in education, particularly the less politically sensitive area of higher education, was an obvious target. In the event, I staved off Treasury pressure and my building programmes were not cut.
But there were other problems in the DES budget. As inflationary pressures pushed up prices in the construction industry, an increasingly alarmed Treasury refused to sanction higher spending. The rest of the school building programme had to be slowed down as well. As October — the time for firm public expenditure decisionmaking — approached it was increasingly clear to me that public expenditure cuts were essential, and that it made political sense to agree early with Patrick Jenkin, the new Chief Secretary, on reductions in my education budget. In the event, there were cuts in the school building plans and in teacher training, and school meal prices were increased.
Nor was this the end of the search for savings. As the effects of the oil crisis and the miners’ strike bit in December, Tony Barber began a frantic search for further cuts.[20] Capital spending is the only area in which large immediate public expenditure cuts can be made. So ministers were required to reduce their capital programmes by a fifth and their procurement of supplies and other current expenditure on goods and services by a tenth. Accordingly, I implemented further cuts in the school and higher education building programmes, including most painfully a moratorium on replacing older primary schools; for the longer term there would also be a reduction in the rate of expansion of student numbers. The reduction in the DES budget for 1974/75 was £182 million — out of £1,200 million total cuts in public spending. But I did manage for the time being to salvage the nursery school programme and also building programmes for special schools.
By now, however, my mind was fast focusing on the cataclysmic events overtaking the Government. It was not long before I would have to mount my soapbox and defend the policies I had pursued in my years at Education. I found no difficulty in doing so, for on almost every front the record was one of advance. And if the measures by which ‘advance’ at this time was assessed — resources committed rather than results achieved — are accepted, it was also a record of genuine improvement. Nearly 2,000 out-of-date primary schools in England and Wales were replaced or improved. There was a substantial expansion of nursery education. I pushed through the raising of the school leaving age, which the Labour Party had had to postpone. Fewer pupils were now taught in very large classes. There were more qualified teachers and more students in higher education. But too much of my time at Education had been spent arguing about structures and resources, too little in addressing the crucial issue of the contents of education.
Equally, it was clear by the time of the general election that both the figures and more fundamentally the approach of A Framework for Expansion had been by-passed by events. There was no way that a programme of universal nursery education was affordable. Schools would have to make do with leaky roofs for many more years, until declining pupil numbers and school closures allowed resources to be better used. The Robbins Report principle — that ‘courses of higher education should be available for all those qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them’ (paragraph 31) — would have to take second place to the demands of financial stringency.
However frustrating it was to watch the shrinkage of my cherished plans and programmes, I can now see that it was unavoidable. And it may have had the side effect of forcing us to think creatively about how to get the best value from our suddenly limited resources. In the economic sphere, the crises of 1973 to 1976 led to a deep scepticism about the value of Keynesian demand management and to a new appreciation of the classical liberal economic approach of balanced budgets, low taxes and free markets. Similarly, in education and in other areas of social policy too, the realization that remedies must be found other than increased public expenditure opened up a whole new world. Fundamental questions began to be asked about whether the education system in its present form could deliver the results expected of it. Did it not in practice largely exist for the benefit of those who ran it, rather than those who received it? Was the state — whether the DES or local education authorities — doing too much, rather than too little? What did the — often superior — results of other countries’ education systems and methods have to teach us? It was becoming necessary to rethink these policies; and we were shortly to be granted plenty of time to think.
CHAPTER VII
No End of a Lesson
The Heath Government 1970–1974
GLAD CONFIDENT MORNING
Shortly before 11 o’clock on Tuesday 23 June 1970 my new ministerial car dropped me in Downing Street, where with other colleagues I ran the gauntlet of press and television outside No. 10. The hubbub in the ante-room was of enthusiasm and laughter. There was a spring in our step as we filed into the Cabinet Room where Ted Heath, with the Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend beside him, awaited us. I found my place at the Cabinet table, but my mind was at least as much on the department[21] as on the large strategic issues before the Government. As I shall explain, it remained there — perhaps excessively so. But I felt an exhilaration which was prompted by more than the fact that this was my first ever Cabinet meeting: I felt, as I suspect we all did, that this was a decisive moment in the life of the country.