Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [369]
In July 1989 the History Working Group produced its interim report. I was appalled. It put the emphasis on interpretation and enquiry as against content and knowledge. There was insufficient weight given to British history. There was not enough emphasis on history as chronological study. Ken Baker wanted to give the report a general welcome while urging its chairman to make the attainment targets specify more clearly factual knowledge and increasing the British history content. But this did not in my view go far enough. I considered the document comprehensively flawed and told Ken that there must be major, not just minor, changes. In particular, I wanted to see a clearly set out chronological framework for the whole history curriculum. But the test would of course be the final report.
By the time this arrived in March 1990 John MacGregor had gone to Education. I thought that he would prove more effective than Ken Baker in keeping a grip on how our education reform proposals were implemented, though I knew that he did not have Ken’s special talent for putting our case in public. On this occasion, however, John MacGregor was far more inclined to welcome the report than I had expected. It did now put greater emphasis on British history. But the attainment targets it set out did not specifically include knowledge of historical facts, which seemed to me extraordinary. However, the coverage of some subjects — for example twentieth-century British history — was too skewed to social, religious, cultural and aesthetic matters rather than political events. The detail of the history curriculum would impose too inflexible a framework on teachers. I raised these points at a meeting with John on the afternoon of Monday 19 March. He defended the report’s proposals. But I insisted that it would not be right to impose the sort of approach which it contained. It should go out to consultation but no guidance should at present be issued.
By now I had become thoroughly exasperated with the way in which the national curriculum proposals were being diverted from their original purpose. I made my reservations known in an interview I gave to the Sunday Telegraph in early April. In this I defended the principles of the national curriculum but criticized the detailed prescription in other than core subjects which had now become its least agreeable feature. My comments were greeted with consternation by the DES.
There was no need for the national curriculum proposals and the testing which accompanied them to have developed as they did. Ken Baker paid too much attention to the DES, the HMI and progressive educational theorists in his appointments and early decisions; and once the bureaucratic momentum had begun it was difficult to stop. John MacGregor, under constant pressure from me, did what he could. He made changes to the history curriculum which reinforced the position of British history and reduced some of the unnecessary interference. He insisted that the sciences could be taught separately, not just as one integrated subject. He stipulated that at least 30 per cent of GCSE English should be tested by written examination. Yet the whole system was very different from that which I originally envisaged. By the time I left office I was convinced that there would have to be a new drive to simplify the national curriculum and testing.
THE NEXT WAVE OF EDUCATION REFORM
Education policy was one of the areas in which