4 - Redistributing Ignorance in the 1990s

Summary

The last half-century … has been a period of struggle, of rebuffs, but sometimes victories in the continuous endeavour to ensure access for all to a full, all-round education.

Brian Simon, Education and the Social Order 1940–1990, 558

I wanted to believe that he [John Major] was the man to secure and safeguard my legacy and take our policies forward.

Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 860

The 1990s were my busiest years ever: career peaking with a job at Goldsmiths, London University as professor of education policy and dean of education, then promoted to pro-warden (a sort of vice-principal). Perks included dinner with the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in the City. Other delights were three grandchildren and more juggling work and family. With funding from the Leverhulme Trust I organized seminars and a conference on the results to date of Conservative education policies. I also entered into Labour politics in a small way, beingon Jack Straw's Education Advisory Group from 1989 to 1992 and on a European Enquiry Team into technical and vocational education set up by Neil Kinnock. This included interviewing Lionel Jospin, later the French prime minister, and a school dinner of three courses with wine at a lycée (secondary school) in Paris. Then for two years I was an advisor to the shadow education secretary, Ann Taylor, when we wrote the last “old Labour” policy paper on education, and an associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), where a young David Miliband organized us into producing Labour education policies, which never happened.

HOW DID HE WEAR HIS UNDERPANTS?

Hindsight is always right. Looking back 30 years it is clear that under John Major's term as prime minister he did take Thatcher’s educational legacy of ignorance for the majority forward, and did not ensure access to a full all-round education for all young people. When he first got the job he was a bit of a figure of fun. After a suggestion that he tucked his shirt into his underpants, cartoonist Steve Bell depicted him as Superman who wore his underpants outside his trousers, and the Spitting Image television series during the 1990s portrayed him as a grey man slowly eating peas (Fluck et al. 1990). But he was clever enough during the struggle to succeed Thatcher to absent himself in hospital to have his wisdom teeth out.