Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [367]
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 NATIONAL CURRICULUM
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.
There was a basic dilemma. As Ken emphasized in our meetings, it was necessary to take as many as possible of the teachers and Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) with us in the reforms we were making. After all, it was teachers not politicians who would be implementing them. On the other hand, the educational establishment’s terms for accepting the national curriculum and testing could well prove unacceptable. For them, the new national curriculum would be expected to give legitimacy and universal application to the changes which had been made over the last twenty years or so in the content and methods of teaching. Similarly, testing should in their eyes be ‘diagnostic’ rather than ‘summative’ — and this was only the tip of the jargon iceberg — and should be heavily weighted towards assessment by teachers themselves, rather than by objective outsiders. So by mid-July the papers I was receiving from the DES were proposing a national curriculum of ten subjects which would account for 80–90 per cent of school time. They wanted different ‘attainment targets’, stressing that assessments should not denote ‘passing’ or ‘failing’: much of this assessment would be internal to the school. Two new bodies — the National Curriculum Council and the Schools Examination and Assessment Council — were to be set up. In fact, the original simplicity of the scheme had been lost and the influence of HMI and the teachers’ unions was manifest.
All this was bad enough. But then in September I received a further proposal from Ken Baker for comprehensive