Faith in Britain

The second lesson to be learnt from 1944 concerns political consensus. When R.A. Butler became President of the Board of Education in 1941 he believed that there was a general consensus that a new deal in schooling was long overdue. Butler was a one-nation Conservative and an Anglican; his Parliamentary Private Secretary was Chuter Ede, a Labour MP and Free Churchman. This was still during war-time Coalition Government. Churchill advised against the Bill being laid before the Commons but Butler disregarded his advice and with still a year to go before the Japanese surrender, Parliament enacted a reform which was based on political and public agreement.

What a contrast with the ill-considered, meretricious, and often contradictory changes which central government and local authorities have implemented since.

Education has become a political football and it is little wonder that young people and the teachers who work with them feel undervalued. It is a paradox that political parties who see the need to work together in times of war, cannot co-operate in peacetime.

Fifty per cent of qualified teachers now leave the profession within five years.

They are over-burdened with bureaucracy, each teacher receiving 1438 sheets of paper to enable him to implement the National Curriculum. The system as a whole has generated half a billion sheets of paper. Perversely, the same teachers are given less to spend each week on books and equipment for the children in their care than the cost of four copies of The Sun. The buildings they work in are similarly neglected, with ÂŁ3 billion of repairs outstanding in 1990. As our ambitions for young people seem to decline, consensus among policy makers has become a dirty word.

Higher education is not much better. Only thirty-five per cent of sixteen to eighteen-year-olds go on into full-time education or training, compared with seventy-nine per cent in the USA and sixty-six per cent in France. We also secure fewer graduates: 132 per 1000 twenty-one-year-olds, compared with 236 in Japan, 230 in America and 202 in France. From 1982 to 1987 graduations in the UK fell by 2.4 per cent. At a time when Britain was emerging from the early 1980s recession, higher education should have been the engine for pushing the country out of the mire, rather than a casualty of it.

I would like to see a clear objective of increasing the total number of students to 2 million by the year 2000. I would like closer co-operation between education and industry but not ownership of education by commerce. Parental means tests should be replaced by flat-rate grants repayable via taxation during the graduate's working life. Loans simply 'double tax' the student, add to indebtedness (see Chapter 8) and act as a disincentive to many who need to be attracted into education. In addition to secure funding for students and institutions, academics, researchers and teachers all need to be paid according to the high value which the rest of us recognise as their vital contribution. In the setting of Europe, Britain should give greater support to