Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [366]
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* 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.
GRANT-MAINTAINED SCHOOLS
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.* 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