John Watson: The Conservative record on education was good, now the party should make it a key policy aim to make it excellent

John Watson was a partner in a City legal practice and formerly edited the Shaw Sheet online magazine.

Steady the Buffs

As the Tories reel under the weight of the election results, they need to ask themselves the obvious question: “what would Mrs. Thatcher have said?”

No doubt she would have had plenty of suggestions but if popular report is to be believed her initial comment in the face of adversity was “Steady the Buffs”, a reminder to stop panicking, maintain discipline, think, and, above all, not to start running around shouting like a pack of demented children.

The present difficulties are not an occasion to challenge a yet untried leadership, for faction to full upon faction, or for any other form of blamestorming. No, the need is for the party to pull together with its leader in deciding how to fashion its pitch to the electorate.

Where should it focus?

Not on migration, although it must of course have views, but migration is now the problem of the government. Either the government will make a success of its  policies or it will not. If it does, the party will presumably follow its approach. If not, new policies will have to be tried. At the moment it is Labour’s game and what the Conservatives need is a policy area on which they can lead the debate, on which they can engage the public, and where their thinking is in line with both public opinion and the national interest. The obvious area is education.

Follow for a moment the national consensus.

Everyone agrees that a successful Britain would be a generator of high value goods and services. The trouble is that other countries have this aspiration too. The French think that the highest value goods and services should be generated in France; the Germans think that they should be generated in Germany; the Americans think that if they’re not generated in America then they should be barred by a tariff.

Even those countries which specialise in the mass production of low value goods will be trying to lever on their experience to hit the high value markets as well. If Britain is to succeed in this highly competitive market it must have something which puts it at the front of the pack and in the long term that can only be a better educated population.

The challenge which the Conservative party should be addressing, then, is how to increase the educational standard of the British public in order to exploit its natural inventiveness. Obtaining the best output from our schools is central and that is a message which it would be easy to explain to the public.

If Britain is to thrive commercially, and on that  thriving depends the ability to provide a good standard of living for its citizens and good care for its sick and elderly, It has to have top educational achievement. That does not just mean a lot of people trained In business studies and computer skills, although there is nothing wrong with these disciplines, but rather a population which has been taught to think and to innovate and to analyse by studying a myriad of different subjects.

It should be Conservative policy to pursue this objective ruthlessly and without being deflected by political considerations.

At the moment we have a private sector and a public sector and schools fit into one or the other. But the proper route to increasing educational standards is not to interfere with what we have but to increase the variety and  types of school available.

One of the great advantages of private education is that the financial commitment made by parents makes them unlikely to tolerate low standards at exam time. Why should it be necessary to pay full private school fees to get this advantage. Where are the schools where part of the cost is met privately and part by the state? Should entrance be exam based? Should there be a new generation of state subsidised boarding schools?

I am not seeking to answer these questions but to say that there should be a national debate on them and that leadership would naturally fall to the Tories. After all Labour are hamstrung here. They have already attacked the most successful part of the educational sector out of malice and in weighing the balance between the excellence of output and other social objectives would witlessly favour  the latter.

Come then, the field is open. A vital issue on which the Tories can take the lead, something that would restore political momentum, something which would reestablish us in the public eye, a service to the nation.

Just do it Kemi Badenoch, just do it.