Change at Curzon Street
EDUCATION STUART MACLURE
It looks very much as if the world of public education—that strange sub-culture which em- braces 300,000 teachers and a network of pro- fessional and lay administrators up and down the country—has taken to the new Secretary of State for Education and Science, Mr Edward Short, with an almost audible sigh of relief. Mr Patrick Gordon Walker has left the scene with a good deal of personal sympathy. He had thoroughly bad luck, made worse by a sequence of king-size gaffes. But the past seven months must have been a nightmare for him and he seemed to collect, like St Sebastian, many of the arrows which were more properly directed at the Government as a whole.
There is no reason to doubt Mr Short's considerable ability. He has already deserved well of the -educational world if, as is said, he was the man who blocked the appointment of Mr Richard Crossman as Education Minister when Labour took office in 1964, using his strategic influence as Chief Whip to indicate that this appointment would not go down well with the teachers. He is good in the .House of Commons, an efficient and reliable, if seldom inspired, performer who can more than hold his own in debate and at Question Time.
Where he scores immediately—apart from not being personally associated with the January cuts or the Enfield debacle—is by knowing his way about the educational sub- culture. In some ways, perhaps, he knows his way about a good deal too well. He trained as a. teacher at Bede College, Durham. Until he entered Parliament in 1951 he was a practising schoolmaster, ending up for the last five years as head of a secondary modern school at Blyth. He has a record of solid NUT membership and activity—secretary and later president of the Northumberland Teachers Association—and at the last two elections he was an NUT supported candidate. He also, happens to have strong local government connections.
• There are circumstances in which the appointment of such an obvious insider as Mr Short could be disastrous. The same qualifi- cations which make him at home in the schools are likely to arouse the suspicions of the mandarins of the university world. Some would say it is bad in principle to make an tour member Secretary of State for Education —especially when one of the Ministers of State in the Department, Alice Bacon, is also an NUT veteran. It seems a bit like appointing a railwaymen's MP Minister of Transport—a short way of courting trouble.
But everything in practice is going to depend on how Mr Short sets about the job. Nobody understands better than he that it would be absolutely fatal from the start if he let it get about that he was in the pocket of the NUT or was unable to act impartially between one teachers' union and another. He has the strength of character to carry this off and to profit by the knowledge of teachers and the education system which his background affords, without remaining the prisoner of his past. On balances it looks much more likely that he will turn out to be a good minister—perhaps a very good one indeed—for the two years' hard slog promised by Mr Jenkins.
There is no doubt that his first task is to restore morale among the educational establish- ment, who will probably welcome a minister without too much imagination. At a time of extreme financial stringency, imagination can be an expensive luxury. Mr Gordon Walker had an unhappy knack of rubbing the teachers and the authorities up the wrong way. Mr Short should at least know how to avoid doing this accidentally and how to pick the issues on which to stand.
The policies for the immediate future are already determined within strict limits by the financial situation. What remains to be done is to re-establish the confidence and goodwill of the teachers and administrators by paying more than lip-service to the conventions of con- sultation and partnership on which the system is based. If this sounds banal, it may be that for the next year or two there is a solid, prosaic job, which, banal or not, has to be done.
But this is not by any means the whole of it. The leadership which is needed must extend beyond the in-group of the professional edu- cators to the public at large, both as tax- payers and as parents. This is much less likely to be something which comes easily to Mr Short, unless he has a flair for publicity and catching the public mood which he has kept discreetly hidden up till now. And there are two major preoccupations which any modern Secretary of State for Education must have as he looks ahead to the steadily rising education budgets of the 'seventies.
The first concerns tong-term educational planning. With an annual bill of £2,000 million to account for, Mr Short cannot avoid the challenge to educational productivity which the economists whom Mr Anthony Crosland brought into the Department's planning branch are there to provide. At all levels, from infants' school to university, the education system employs a vast quantity of fixed capital assets, and adds to them by over £200 million a year. One of Mr Short's aims in life must be to ask whether these resources cannot be used more effectively, even if this means offending sections of the establishment who now regard him as safe.
Mr Crosland managed to do just this for the training of teachers in the col- leges of education. He called down obloquy on his own head by asking them to increase their student numbers without a correspond- ing increase in college buildings. This meant resorting to one administrative device or another, including in some cases, reorganising the college year. It was most unpopular at the time, and undoubtedly resulted in some hard- ship and loss, but the extra teachers have been trained and the demonstration was effective.
Now Mr C. F. Carter, Vice-Chancellor of Lancaster, heads a Vice-Chancellos's sub-com- mittee which has begun to discuss equally radical suggestions at the university level. There is no reason why such productivity exercises need to be restricted to higher education, given the right kind of leadership, and the skill to overcome immediate and irrational hostility by patient persuasion and negotiation.
Mr Short's second preoccupation should be closely linked with the first. This is to encourage as critical an examination of the curriculum as there is of the use of plant: to ask how far the human resources—of teachers and of learners— are being used to the best advantage. There are plenty of grounds for suspecting that an appalling waste of effort now takes place when valuable teaching and learning time is devoted to doing things which aren't worth the candle, and that much of this involves the most expen- sive teachers and the ablest pupils. It could be that the quest for economic and educational productivity will come together in the current attempts to reform the sixth forms.
By convention, the Secretary of State is a spectator in matters of curriculum. But there are ways in which he can use his influence to speed up or slow down the movement for cur- riculum reform—chiefly by the attitude he adopts towards the in-service training of teachers and the urgency with which he inter- prets this in terms of increasing the productivity of the educational process. This, again, is where Mr Short's impeccable pedigree could disarm suspicion among the professionals and enable him to achieve far more than a brash outsider. But only if he himself recognises the importance of this part of his job, and the extent to which the present situation is wide open to change.
Previous page
