Very Near the Line

During the eleven years of Margaret Thatcher's premiership, education in England
was transformed by her determination to reorganise the state sector along public
school lines and, in doing so, to remove local councils from the key role they had
always played in the national system.

Throughout this time, Donald Naismith was the Director of Education for three
of them where he frequently came, in Lord Denning's words, 'very near the line'
in pursuing policies central to Mrs Thatcher's revolution but opposed by both the
'right' as well as the 'left' wings of the education establishment. In this description
of the impact of Mrs Th atcher's policies on local government, he draws attention
to the extent to which she unwillingly depended on local councils themselves
to provide the practical means of putting her reforms into effect - among them
Richmond's 'league tables', Croydon's 'national curriculum' and standardised
testing, and Wandsworth's specialist schools.

Donald Naismith argues that Margaret Thatcher's reforms would have made
more headway had she enlisted the cooperation of local councils instead of fatally
weakening them and predicts that a new, more powerful version of local government
will, paradoxically, need to be invented if her education 'market' strategy now
gathering momentum is to succeed.