Kind of Blue by Ken Clarke

Author:Ken Clarke [Clarke, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509837243
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

15

‘School Days’

(Dizzy Gillespie, 1951)

EDUCATION

In November 1990, John Major was ascendant and triumphant, newly anointed as leader of the party and our fresh-start prime minister. He very quickly telephoned me, asking me to continue as Secretary of State for Education. I had expected this, but others in the defeated Hurd camp were less optimistic. I spent much of the rest of that day reassuring them that John Major was quite happy to ‘take prisoners’ from our ranks.

I then turned seriously to the business of being a reforming Education Secretary. Margaret Thatcher had moved me to the department before her fall from power. She wanted to cool down the wild controversy over at the Department of Health but she plainly wanted me to warm up the level of political activity at the Department of Education. As Education Secretary, Ken Baker had initiated radical legislation to introduce self-government to state schools – to be called ‘grant-maintained schools’ and ‘city technology colleges’ – a national system of regular testing of all pupils, and a national curriculum. However, in the eighteen months since he had been reshuffled away from the department, his reforms seemed to have lost all momentum. John MacGregor had presided over the department in an exceptionally calm and inactive way even for someone of his measured temperament. I was once told that, many years later, he had had to be reminded that he had once had a spell at Education: it had momentarily slipped his memory. John had a very distinguished political career but he was certainly not an activist in this particular portfolio.

Margaret had therefore stressed how much she wanted me to get on with her government’s reforms. Until this conversation, I had not realized, despite working with her for so many years, how much she had hated her time as Ted Heath’s Secretary of State for Education. She apparently had had a very dominant permanent secretary with whom she had obviously been at war most of the time. She now bitterly denounced the department’s left-wing tendencies and gave me dire warnings of the obstruction that I should expect.

Margaret’s warnings might have been infused with an element of personal retrospective animosity, but they soon turned out to be not very far from the truth. The officials in the Department for Education were friendly, agreeable people, but the whole culture there was totally hostile to the Baker reforms and resistant to any further implementation of them.

I am a great believer in and defender of the non-political Civil Service, and a great fan of the many hard-working and talented civil servants with whom I have worked over a long career. I deeply object to the growth in the number of politically appointed advisers, who are exempt from the requirements on civil servants to be appointed on merit, to behave with impartiality and objectivity, and to act so as to retain the confidence of future governments of a different political complexion. Many of these so-called special advisers are not nearly so expert as they think they are and simply magnify the political faults of their ministers.

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