Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, unlike Tony Blair, took their Cabinets seriously and generally chose them on merit. There was no place for either Morris brother.Even after five and a half years as PM, however, Mr Blair nourishes the delusion that most Cabinet ministers can be treated as dignified aspects of the constitution rather than efficient ones He never intended Miss Morris to run education policy. That would be done from No 10, while she mouthed platitudes and gave impressive performances at photo-calls But this is not how the world works. Ministers cannot evade responsibility for their departments, and the only way in which she could discharge hers was to resign. Nothing in her career became her like the leaving of it – which does not mean that she is entitled to a second ministerial innings, though she will probably get one.Yet there is a paradox. In one respect, Estelle Morris’s departure could be bad news for English education. The melodrama of her haplessness has distracted attention from the structural weakness which bedevils education, and which goes well beyond one minister’s incompetence.
Over the past 20 years, clever education secretaries have been plentiful. Keith Joseph, Kenneth Baker, Kenneth Clarke, John Patten, Gillian Shephard, David Blunkett; not a dud among them, yet none succeeded in their most basic responsibility: to raise standards in schools. None of them could turn the Department of Education into a force for good.Ken Baker’s experience was instructive. He decided that there ought to be a national curriculum setting out the building blocks of a child’s education. He also decreed that there would be tests, to ensure that children were learning and to identify failing schools.
That sounds like common sense, and so it might have been, but for the Department of Education. Long ago, its officials invented the opposite of the philosophers’ stone. They can transmute gold into dross.Under them, the simplicity of the Baker plan was eradicated Teachers found their time invaded by form-filling. Pupils found themselves dominated by low-grade exams, denying them either a worthwhile qualification or pleasure in learning.Ultimately, however, the ministers are more to blame than officials, for the real problem is philosophical, and only ministers can sort out philosophy. Because of chronic ministerial cowardice, quality and diversity in English state education are both being crushed under the weight of a failed philosophy: comprehensivisation.The ideal underlying comprehensivisation was not educational, but egalitarian. Schools were to be reorganised to ensure equality of outcome. This explains the relentless campaign against schools and universities which value excellence above equality, and against the examinations – O-levels and the old-fashioned A-levels which Estelle Morris failed – whose results highlight differing attainment levels and frustrate uniformity.During their 18 years, the Tories ought to have had the intellectual courage to overthrow the comprehensive philosophy.
