The Iron Lady Read online

  It was a department with an entrenched culture and a settled agenda of its own which it pursued with little reference to ministers or the rest of Whitehall. The convention was that education was above politics: government’s job was to provide the money but otherwise leave the running of the education system to the professionals. Political control, such as it was, was exercised not by the DES but by the local educational authorities up and down the country; the real power lay with the professional community of teachers, administrators and educational academics, all of whom expected to be consulted – and listened to – before any change in the organisation or delivery of education was contemplated. Political interference in the content of education was taboo. The Secretary of State, in fact, had very few executive powers at all. One of Mrs Thatcher’s Labour successors complained that his only power seemed to be to order the demolition of an air raid shelter in a school playground. It was not a department for an ambitious minister keen to make her mark.

  Politically as well as temperamentally, Mrs Thatcher was antipathetic to the DES. She instinctively disliked its central project, the spread of comprehensive schools, and the whole self-consciously ‘progressive’ ideology that lay behind it. She disliked the shared egalitarian and collectivist philosophy of the educational establishment, and resented the fact that they all knew each other extremely well. Attending her first teachers’ union dinner soon after coming into office she was disturbed to discover that her senior officials were ‘on the closest of terms’ with the NUT leaders.1 She particularly disliked the assumption that her views were immaterial and her only function, as the elected minister, was to get the money to carry out the predetermined policy. In addition she correctly sensed that the educational mafia frankly disliked her.

  The DES traditionally looked for two qualities in its Secretary of State. On the one hand, the Department’s self-esteem required a leader of high intellectual calibre and broad liberal culture. Senior officials were sniffy about Mrs Thatcher’s science degree and her lack of cultural interests. At the same time, however, the DES wanted a minister who would fight its corner in competition with Cabinet colleagues and against the Treasury; and in that respect Mrs Thatcher quickly proved her mettle. She was not a heavyweight but she was a fighter. The stubbornness which exasperated her officials within the Department delighted them when it was deployed against the rest of Whitehall. She could be ‘brutal’ and ‘a bully’; but the obverse was that she was ‘strong, determined and bloody-minded enough to wear down the Treasury’. She was ‘absolutely maddening’, one of her most senior mandarins recalled. ‘We liked that.’2 Despite her intellectual limitations – perhaps because of them – she turned out to be highly effective at winning the resources to carry out the Department’s policies; so that in the 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 Gover
nment 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 because the crates of little bottles were not refrigerated, partly because children’s taste had simply moved on since Attlee’s day. Labour had already stopped the supply to secondary schools, with no public outcry and no ill effect on children. By ending the provision to children aged seven to eleven, Mrs Thatcher was merely continuing a process which Labour had begun: as she pointed out, milk would still be provided free to those children who were prescribed it on medical grounds, and schools could still sell milk.14 Insofar as she was withdrawing a previously universal benefit in accordance with the Tory belief that those who could afford to pay should do so, it could be presented as an ideological measure; but in truth it was a minor administrative rationalisation, ending a wasteful anachronism.

  She was unprepared for the furore it aroused. It was the personal nature of the attacks which shook her. The Sun asked ‘Is Mrs Thatcher human?’15 and dubbed her ‘The Most Unpopular Woman in Britain’.16 For the first time in her political career her sex was being used against her. The fact of a woman, a mother, taking milk from children was portrayed as far more shocking – unnatural even – than a man doing the same thing; and the cruel nickname ‘Thatcher – Milk Snatcher’ (coined by a speaker at the 1971 Labour Party Conference) struck a deep and lasting chord in the public mind. For better or worse it made her name: image recognition was never a problem for her again.

  At the beginning of 1972 there was speculation that Heath might sack his Education Secretary. In fact, he stood by her in her darkest hour. At the end of the month he invited her, with Pile and other of her officials, to Chequers to discuss her future plans. This was a clear signal that she was not about to be removed. She ‘emerged radiant’, the Daily Mail reported. ‘The comeback has begun.’17

  From this low point her fortunes sharply improved: the second half of her time at the DES was, at least in terms of public perception, dramatically more successful than the first. This was partly due to the fact that from late 1971 she had a new press officer with whom she got on exceptionally well. Terry Perks had a lot to do with Mrs Thatcher’s more professional presentation of herself from 1972 onwards. The first sign that she had turned the corner actually came before the end of January when she won an unexpectedly good reception from an NUT dinner. She was able to reap the credit for having finally given the go-ahead to raising the school-leaving age. She made ‘a splendid speech’, The Times reported, ‘full of warmth, wit and friendly reproach to her critics. Seasoned Thatcher-watchers reckoned it her best public appearance yet.’18

  Mrs Thatcher sealed her rehabilitation in the eyes of the educational establishment with the publication, towards the end of 1972, of her White Paper, A Framework for Expansion. This represented the culmination of a whole raft of policies the DES had been working on for twenty years. In truth she had remarkably little to do with its conception: she was merely the midwife. It projected a 50 per cent rise in education spending (in real terms) over the next ten years, pushing education’s share from 13 to 14 per cent of total government expenditure (overtaking defence for the first time). Within this overall growth there was to be a vast expansion of nursery education, designed to provide free part-time nursery places for 50 per cent of three-year-olds and 90 per cent of four-year-olds by 1981 (concentrated at first in areas of greatest need); a 40 per cent increase in the number of teachers – from 360,000 in 1971 to a projected 510,000 in 1981, which would cut the average teacher – pupil ratio from one to 22.6 to one to 18.5; and the continued expansion of higher education, evenly divided between the universities and polytechnics, to a target of 750,000 students by 1981 (an increase from 15 to 22 per cent of eighteen-year-olds).19

  This was a hugely ambitious plan, and a triumph for the DES. Pile was afraid that Mrs Thatcher would not swallow it: in fact she took it all on board without demur. At a time when Government spending was expanding on all fronts she was determined to get her share of it. Having had to fight the Treasury hard over her first two years to get the money she wanted for school building and improving teachers’ pay, she was taken aback by the ease with which the Cabinet accepted her proposed White Paper. She had expected another battle. Very soon she came to repudiate her own enthusiasm for it. Looking back, she wrote in her memoirs, it was ‘all too typical of those over-ambitious, high-spending years… In retrospect the White Paper marks the high point of the attempts by Government to overcome the problems inherent in Britain’s education system by throwing money at them.’20 At the time, however, she basked in the almost universal praise her plans attracted. Every minister likes to put his or her name to something big; and she was happy to be seen as less of a reactionary than had been thought.

  Alas, her optimism was blown away within a year by the quadrupl
ing of oil prices following the Yom Kippur war and the consequent recession which forced cutbacks in Government spending for the next decade. Mrs Thatcher’s bold plans were under threat before she had even left office. They were not pursued by her Labour successors after February 1974; and by the time she returned to Downing Street as Prime Minister in 1979 her interest in using the state to extend educational opportunity had passed. Not until 1995 did the aspiration to offer nursery places to all pre-school children creep back on to the political agenda. A generous vision which might have been the most far-reaching legacy from Mrs Thatcher’s time as Education Secretary was sadly destined to go down as one of the great might-have-beens of recent history.

  In the end, however, even she could not protect her department from the heavy cuts Barber was forced to impose at the end of 1973. Excluding Scotland, science and the arts, the DES share of the cuts amounted to £157 million out of a total departmental budget of £3.5 billion. This she described as ‘serious but not disastrous’ : she gave the impression that the cuts would only slow the projected building programme and procurement by LEAs, insisting that the department’s priorities – including the nursery programme – had been substantially preserved.21 But this was her last speech as Education Secretary. Just over a week later the miners – whose overtime ban had already reduced the country to a three-day week – voted for a full-scale strike. Confronted with this challenge, Heath finally gave in to the hawks in his Cabinet and called the General Election which removed him from office.