Teachers on the rack
From The Lord Deramore Sir: John Turnbull (Letters, 31 March) correctly points out that the Conservative party was in government for most of the years between 1945 and 1997. Indeed, the 1944 Education Act was the brainchild of a Conservative, R.A. Butler, but it was Attlee's postwar government of 1945-51 which was responsible for implementing its provisions.
In those five years the Labour government established the basic structure of the stateeducation system in this country. Succeeding Conservative administrations pursued a policy of maintaining the status quo, which Keith Joseph called 'the ratchet effect'; i.e., each fresh administration by Labour moved policy further to the Left and the intervening Conservative administration did nothing to move policy to the Right.
Sir Edward Boyle was a very left-of-centre Tory education minister, and Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath were left-ofcentre Tories. Furthermore, there were other equally important issues to be resolved, and the Ministry of Education was left in peace to develop its own ethos, which was fundamentally statist in nature, involving centralised control from the ministry and vast bureaucracy at the ministry and in local authorities, whether they were politically Labour, Conservative or Liberal.
From 1949 to 1965, while I imagine Mr Turnbull was teaching, I was an architect designing schools and supervising their erection. As they were all either state or Church of England schools, my hands were tied by regulations of all sorts emanating from Whitehall, and architects worked closely with educationists, whose political orientation was generally socialist. Many architects, too, were left-wing or extreme left-wing; some were communists and others fellow-travellers.
There is no doubt in my mind that teacher-training colleges became indoctrinated with subversive theories and that this has been at the root of the present abysmal education system. Clearly, there were thousands of good teachers like Mr Turnbull and still are, but one only needs to look at the NUT gatherings to see the appalling calibre of many teachers.
Arthur Deramore
Pickering, North Yorkshire
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