The Downing Street Years (101 page)

I was back in Britain by 2.30 on Tuesday afternoon. A draft of my speech for Harrogate that evening was waiting for me with Stephen Sherbourne and the speech writers when I landed at Gatwick. To my relief and their amazement I liked it. It was essentially a summary of what I, at least, thought were the three main themes of the election: Conservative prosperity, Labour extremism, especially on defence, and the new reforms of education and housing to give more power to the people. On the way to the hall at Harrogate I had been given the results of the specially large — and therefore significant — Gallup 2000 poll. They showed us with a 7-point lead. ‘Not enough,’ I said. But it was good news all the same. It seemed that our opinion poll rating had been practically level throughout the entire campaign.

I returned to London, but I did not ease up. On Wednesday morning I answered questions on the
Election Call
‘phone-in programme. I spent most of the afternoon campaigning in Portsmouth and Southampton.

After voting myself, I spent Thursday morning and early afternoon in Finchley visiting our Committee Rooms and then, as the time for getting late voters out to the poll approached, I returned to No. 10. Norman Tebbit came over and we had a long talk over drinks in my study, not just about the campaign and the likely result, but also about Norman’s own plans. He had already told me that he intended to leave the Government after the election because he felt that he should spend more time with Margaret. There was not much I could say to try to persuade him otherwise, because his reasons were as personal as they were admirable. But I did bitterly regret his decision. I had too few like-minded supporters in the Government, and of these none had Norman’s strength and acumen.

I had supper in the flat and listened to the television comment and
speculation about the result. Before I left for Finchley at 10.30 p.m. I heard Vincent Hanna on the BBC forecasting a hung Parliament. ITV was talking about a Conservative majority of about 40. I felt reasonably confident that with the Alliance vote having clearly collapsed we would have a majority, but I was not at all confident how large it would be. My own result would be one of the later ones; but the first results began to come in just after 11 p.m. We held Torbay with a larger than predicted majority. Then we held Hyndburn, the second most marginal seat, then Cheltenham, a seat targeted by the Liberals, and then Basildon. At about 2.15 a.m. we had passed the winning post. My own majority was down by 400, though I secured a slightly higher percentage of the vote (53.9 per cent).

I was driven back into town, arriving at 2.45 a.m. at Conservative Central Office to celebrate the victory and thank those who had helped achieve it. Then I returned to Downing Street where I was met by my personal staff. I felt grateful to them because, whatever the deficiencies of the national campaign, they had done a superb job. I remember Denis saying to Stephen Sherbourne, as we went down the line: ‘You have done as much as anyone else to win the election. We could not have done it without you.’ Stephen may have been less pleased by my next remark. It was to ask him to come up to the study to begin work on making the next Cabinet. A new day had begun.

CHAPTER XX

The first priority after the 1987 election victory was to see that I had the right team of ministers to implement the reforms set out in our manifesto. The reshuffle was a limited one: five Cabinet ministers left the Government, two at their own request. The general balance of the new Cabinet made it clear that ‘consolidation’ was no more my preferred option after the election than before it. John Biffen, whose less than inspiring slogan this had been, left the Cabinet: this was a loss in some ways, for he agreed with me about Europe and had sound instincts on economic matters too, but he had come to prefer commentary to collective responsibility. I lost Norman Tebbit for reasons I have explained. But Cecil Parkinson, a radical of my way of thinking, rejoined the Cabinet as Energy Secretary. I made no change at Education where Ken Baker would make up in presentational flair whatever he lacked in attention to detail, nor Environment where Nick Ridley was obviously the right man to implement the housing reforms which he had conceived. These two areas — schools and housing — were those in which we were proposing the most far-reaching changes. But it was not long before I decided that there must be a major reform of the National Health Service too. In John Moore, whom I had promoted to be Secretary of State for Health and Social Services, I had another radical, anxious to reform the ossified system he had inherited. So the Government soon found itself embarked on even more far-reaching social reforms than we had originally intended.

The starting point for the education reforms outlined in our general election manifesto was a deep dissatisfaction (which I fully shared) with Britain’s standard of education. There had been improvements in the pupil-teacher ratio and real increases in education spending per child. But increases in public spending had not by and large led to higher standards. The classic case was the left-wing dominated Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) which spent more per pupil than any other education authority and achieved some of the worst examination results. Precisely what conditions and qualities made for good schools was a matter of vigorous debate. I had always been an advocate of relatively small schools as against the giant, characterless comprehensives. I also believed that too many teachers were less competent and more ideological than their predecessors. I distrusted the new ‘child-centred’ teaching techniques, the emphasis on imaginative engagement rather than learning facts, and the modern tendency to blur the lines of discrete subjects and incorporate them in wider, less definable entities like ‘humanities’. And I knew from parents, employers and pupils themselves that too many people left school without a basic knowledge of reading, writing and arithmetic. But it would be no easy matter to change for the better what happened in schools.

One option would in theory have been to advance much further along the path of centralization. In fact, I did come to the conclusion that there had to be some consistency in the curriculum, at least in the core subjects. The state could not just ignore what children learned: they were, after all, its future citizens and we had a duty to them. Moreover, it was disruptive if children who moved from a school in one area to a school elsewhere found themselves confronted with a course of work different in almost all respects from that to which they had become accustomed. Alongside the national curriculum should be a nationally recognized and reliably monitored system of testing at various stages of the child’s school career, which would allow parents, teachers, local authorities and central government to know what was going right and wrong and take remedial action if necessary. The fact that since 1944 the only compulsory subject in the curriculum in Britain had been religious education reflected a healthy distrust of the state using central control of the syllabus as a means of propaganda. But that was hardly the risk now: the propaganda was coming from
left-wing local authorities, teachers and pressure groups, not us. What I never believed, though, was that the state should try to regiment every detail of what happened in schools. Some people argued that the French centralized system worked: but, whether it worked for France or not, such arrangements would not be acceptable in Britain. Here even the strictly limited objectives I set for the national curriculum were immediately seen by the vested interests in education as an opportunity to impose their own agenda.

The other possibility was to go much further in the direction of decentralization by giving power and choice to parents. Keith Joseph and I had always been attracted by the education voucher, which would give parents a fixed — perhaps means-tested — sum, so that they could shop around in the public and private sectors of education for the school which was best for their children. The arguments against this were more political than practical. By means testing a voucher one could even reduce the ‘dead weight’ cost — that is the amount lost to the Exchequer in the form of subsidy for parents who would otherwise have sent their children to private schools anyway.

However, Keith Joseph recommended and I accepted that we could not bring in a straightforward education voucher scheme. In the event, we were, through our education reforms, able to realize the objectives of parental choice and educational variety in other ways. Through the assisted places scheme
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and the rights of parental choice of school under our 1980 Parents’ Charter we were moving some way towards this objective without mentioning the word ‘voucher’.

In the 1988 Education Reform Act we now made further strides in that direction. We introduced open enrolment — that is allowing popular schools to expand to their physical capacity (broadly judged by the numbers of children accommodated in 1979). This significantly widened choice further and prevented local authorities setting arbitrary limits on good schools just to keep unsuccessful schools full. An essential element in the same reforms was per capita funding, which meant that state money followed the child to whatever school he attended. Parents would vote with their children’s feet and schools actually gained resources when they gained pupils. The worse schools in these circumstances would either have to improve or close. In effect we had gone as far as we could towards a ‘public sector voucher’. I would have liked to go further still and decided that we must work up a possible full-scale voucher scheme — I hinted at this in my final
Party Conference speech — but did not have the time to take the idea further.

But we needed to do one more thing to make parental choice a reality. This was to give more powers and responsibility to individual schools — something very much in line with my instinctive preference for smaller schools rooted in real local communities and, insofar as this was possible in the state sector, reliant on their own efforts and energies. But it was Brian Griffiths who devised the extremely successful model of the ‘grant-maintained (GM) schools’, which are free from local education authority (LEA) control entirely and are directly funded from the DES.
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With a healthy range of GM schools, City Technology Colleges, denominational schools and private schools (known as ‘public’ schools, much to the confusion of American visitors to Britain) parents would have a much wider choice. But, even more vital, the very fact of having all the important decisions taken at the level closest to parents and teachers, not by a distant and insensitive bureaucracy, would make for better education. This would be true of all schools, which was why we had introduced the Local Management of Schools Initiative (LMS) to give schools more control of their own budgets. But GM schools took it a giant step further.

The governors of a GM school were empowered to manage its budget (receiving their money directly without a service charge deducted by the LEA). They appointed the staff including the head teacher, agreed policy as regards admissions with the Secretary of State, decided the curriculum (subject to the core requirements) and owned the school and its assets. The schools most likely to opt out of LEA control and become GM schools were those which had a distinctive identity, which wished to specialize in some particular subject or which wanted to escape from the clutches of some left-wing local authority keen to impose its own ideological priorities.

The vested interests working against the success of GM schools were strong. The DES, reluctant to endorse a reform that did not extend central control, would have liked to impose all manner of checks and controls on their operation. Local authority officials sometimes campaigned fiercely to prevent opting out by particular schools. And,
unexpectedly, the churches also mounted an opposition. In the face of so much hostility I had the Grant-Maintained Schools Trust set up to publicize the GM scheme and advise those interested in making use of it. In fact, GM schools proved increasingly popular, not least with head teachers who were now, in consultation with the governors, able to set their own priorities.

The decentralizing features of our policy — open enrolment, per capita funding, City Technology Colleges, Local Management of Schools and above all grant-maintained schools — were extraordinarily successful. By contrast, the national curriculum — the most important centralizing measure — soon ran into difficulties. I never envisaged that we would end up with the bureaucracy and the thicket of prescriptive measures which eventually emerged. I wanted the DES to concentrate on establishing a basic syllabus for English, Mathematics and Science with simple tests to show what pupils knew. It always seemed to me that a small committee of good teachers ought to be able to pool their experience and write down a list of the topics and sources to be covered without too much difficulty. There ought then to be plenty of scope left for the individual teacher to concentrate with children on the particular aspects of the subject in which he or she felt a special enthusiasm or interest. I had no wish to put good teachers in a strait jacket. As for testing, I always recognized that no snapshot of a child’s, a class’s or a school’s performance on a particular day was going to tell the whole truth. But tests did provide an independent outside check on what was happening. Nor did it seem to me that the fact that some children would know more than others was something to be shied away from. Of course, not every child had the same potential and certainly not in every subject. But the purpose of testing was not to measure merit but knowledge and the capacity to apply it. Unfortunately, my philosophy turned out to be different from that of those to whom Ken Baker entrusted the drawing-up of the national curriculum and the formulation of the tests alongside it.