I now came under fierce attack from the educational establishment because I had failed to engage in the ‘normal consultation’ which took place before a Circular was issued. I felt no need to apologize. As I put it in my speech in the House, we had after all ‘just completed the biggest consultation of all’, that is, a general election. But this carried little weight with those who had spent the last twenty-five years convinced that they knew best. Ted Short, Labour’s Education spokesman, a former schoolmaster, even went so far as to suggest that, in protest, teachers should refuse to mark 11-Plus exam papers. A delegation from the NUT came to see me to complain about what I had done. Significantly, the brunt of their criticism was that I had ‘resigned responsibility for giving shape to education’. If indeed that had been my responsibility, I do not think the NUT would have liked the shape I would have given it.
In fact, the policy which I now pursued was more nuanced than the caricatures it attracted – though a good deal could have been said for the positions caricatured. Circular 10/70 withdrew the relevant Labour Government Circulars and then went on: ‘The Secretary of State will expect educational considerations in general, local needs and wishes in particular and the wise use of resources to be the main principles determining the local pattern.’ It also made it clear that the presumption was basically against upheaval: ‘where a particular pattern of organization is working well and commands general support the Secretary of State does not wish to cause further change without good reason’.
Strange though it may seem, although local education authorities had been used to sending in general plans for reorganization of all the schools under their control, neither these nor the Secretary of State’s comments on them had any legal standing. The law only entered the picture when the notices were issued under Section 13 of the 1944 Education Act. This required local education authorities to give public notice – and notice to the department – of their intention to close or open a school, significantly alter its character, or change the age range of its pupils. Locally, this gave concerned parents, school governors and residents two months in which to object. Nationally, it gave me, as Secretary of State, the opportunity to intervene. It read: ‘Any proposals submitted to the Secretary of State under this section may be approved by him after making such modifications therein, if any, as appear to him desirable.’
The use of these powers to protect particular good schools against sweeping reorganization was not only a departure from Labour policy; it was also a conscious departure from the line taken by Edward Boyle, who had described Section 13 as ‘reserve powers’. But as a lawyer myself and as someone who believed that decisions about changing and closing schools should be sensitive to local opinion, I thought it best to base my policy on the Section 13 powers rather than on exhortation through Circulars. I was very conscious that my actions were subject to the scrutiny of the courts and that the grounds on which I could intervene were limited. And by the time I made my speech in the debate I was in a position to spell out more clearly how this general approach would be implemented.
My policy had a further advantage. At a time when even Conservative education authorities were bitten with the bug of comprehensivization, it offered the best chance of saving good local grammar schools. The administrative disadvantage was that close scrutiny of large numbers of individual proposals meant delays in giving the department’s response. Inevitably, I was attacked on the grounds that I was holding back in order to defer the closure of more grammar schools. But in this the critics were unjust. I took a close interest in speeding up the responses. It was just that we were deluged.
For all the political noise which arose from this change of policy, its practical effects were limited. During the whole of my time as Education Secretary we considered some 3,600 proposals for reorganization – the great majority of them proposals for comprehensivization – of which I rejected only 325, or about 9 per cent. In the summer of 1970 it had seemed possible that many more authorities might decide to reverse or halt their plans. For example, Conservative-controlled Birmingham was one of the first education authorities to welcome Circular 10/70. A bitter fight had been carried on to save the city’s thirty-six grammar schools. But in 1972 Labour took control and put forward its own plans for comprehensivization. I rejected sixty of the council’s 112 proposals in June 1973, saving eighteen of the city’s grammar schools.
Similarly, Richmond Council in Surrey had refused to come forward with a scheme under the Labour Government’s Circular 10/65, but in September 1970 voted by a large majority to end selection. I had no choice but to give my approval to the change the following year.
Perhaps the most awkward decisions I had to make related to Barnet. The Conservative-controlled Barnet Council decided to go comprehensive in October 1970, having conducted a survey of parents in which 79 per cent apparently favoured ending selection. There was fierce opposition to Barnet’s scheme, and in January 1971 I received 5,400 letters of protest. The following month I approved a scheme which ended two grammar schools, but I saved a third on the grounds that the proposed merger would lead to an inconvenient divided-site school. In April I saved another grammar school and in June blocked two more schemes, thus saving a good secondary modern and another grammar school. The Conservative Party locally was split and I was censured by the local council. Most of the borough’s secondary schools in fact went comprehensive that September. The local authority kept reformulating its plans. Christ’s College and Woodhouse Grammar Schools were the main bones of contention. They were still grammar schools when I became Leader of the Opposition in 1975; they only became part of a comprehensive system (in Woodhouse’s case, a sixth-form college) in 1978 after Labour’s 1976 Education Act scrapped Section 13 and attempted to impose a comprehensive system from the centre on England and Wales.
In retrospect, it is clear that a near obsessive concern with educational structures characterized the 1960s and ′70s. It is not that structures 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.
In one respect at least, the Department of Education was an excellent preparation for the premiership. I came under savage and unremitting attack that was only distantly related to my crimes.
I have described the arguments about grammar schools and comprehensives. Yet these caused me only limited trouble, partly because many people – and not just Conservatives – agreed with me and partly because I was the bringer of good tidings in other matters. For example, I was hailed in a modest way as the saviour of the Open University. In Opposition both Iain Macleod and Edward Boyle had committed themselves in public against it. And although its abolition was not in the manifesto, many people expected it to perish. But I was genuinely attracted to the concept of a ‘University of the Airwaves’, because I thought that it was an inexpensive way of giving wider access to higher education, because I thought that trainee teachers in particular would benefit from it, because I was alert to the opportunities offered by technology to bring the best teaching to schoolchildren and students, and above all because it gave people a second chance in life. On condition that I agreed to reduce the immediate intake of students and find other savings, my Cabinet colleagues allowed the Open University to go ahead.
There were more discussions of public expenditure that autumn of 1970. The Treasury had its little list of savings for the education budget – including charges for libraries, museums, school meals and school milk. I persuaded the Cabinet to drop the proposed library charges, while reluctantly accepting entry charges for