'Better education value' cuts-Thatcher through

Workers Press no. 346, 7 January 1971 · scan page 4

Topics: Education, Tory government, Post office and public services

Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: headlines and words can be misread, and a caption or advert can run into the text. For anything you quote, read the scan.

BETTER VALUE for money in education might be achieved. by cutting the number of teachers entering the profession, Education Minister Mrs Margaret Thatcher suggested yesterday.

Addressing an education conference in Buxton, she said it was questionable 'whether, in the second half • far of this decade, it will be right to continue the output of teachers at the present rate and thus to pre-empt a very large share of the total resources available for improving the operational standards of the school'.

Yet a recent National Union of Teachers booklet pointed out that 40,000 more teachers were needed if a sharp and irreversible decline in standards was to be avoided.

And 10,000 children of university ability now leave school at the age of 15 every year.

Mrs Thatcher went on to destroy any idea that the Tories plan to carry on the half-hearted measures taken by the Labour government in introducing comprehensive education.

CONSOLIDATE

It would be a boon, she said, if all the education Acts on the statute book could be consolidated.

This would undoubtedly strengthen the class structure of the education system and provide security for public schools.

Increases in the student-staff ratio, further cuts in government spending (especially on comprehensive schools) and attacks on 'welfare' provisions (like free milk and meals) are presumably the Tory way to get 'better value for money. firms.

NATIONAL Union of Teachers' executive yesterday gave support to London headmistress Mrs Phyllis Clarkson who refused to take 16 children at her school because it BY A WORKERS PRESS REPORTER three — Mitsui, Itoh and Nichimen - said the loan was for the purchase of plant making ethylene, micro-