Very Near the Line

During the eleven years of Margaret Thatchers 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 Dennings words, very near the line
in pursuing policies central to Mrs Thatchers 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 atchers 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
Richmonds league tables, Croydons national curriculum and standardised
testing, and Wandsworths specialist schools.

Donald Naismith argues that Margaret Thatchers 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.