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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.

APPROACHES TO EDUCATION REFORM

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