Not for at least a generation had any major Western nation made such a drastic change in its entire educational system. Out of patience with a structure it views as rambling and inept, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has pushed through Parliament a reform bill that will radically change the way Britain educates its young. Among other things, the new law wipes out tenure for university professors appointed or promoted after November 1987; puts control of financing higher education under a pair of powerful new government-appointed funding councils; imposes a back-to-basics curriculum for publicly funded elementary and secondary schools; and allows parents a greater say regarding which school their children will attend.
Sponsors of the great Education Reform Bill, dubbed GERBIL, believe it has come not a second too soon. Sounding much like U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett critiquing his own domain, British Education Secretary Kenneth Baker asserts that "the past 30 years' curriculum development has been too free-form, everyone doing their own thing. I sense a yearning for a more explicit framework." As for Britain's colleges and universities, says George Walden, Conservative M.P. and former Minister of Higher Education: "The higher-education interests were simply incapable of reforming themselves, and the government has had to take a hand."
GERBIL's opponents, mainly from the faculties of Britain's 47 universities and their allies in Parliament, have condemned the bill as a "recipe for disaster." The evidence, however, indicates that British education does need a powerful cure -- if not necessarily the medicine prescribed. Some of the ailments mirror those that beset American education. For example, a new report by Britain's Inspectors of Schools condemns 1,000 of England's 4,000 secondary schools as "unsatisfactory." Critics lay the blame on poor teaching and a grab-bag curriculum that has strayed from the three Rs and from Britain's cultural heritage. Moreover, British higher education badly needs additional funding, even though annual government-aid grants to students have spiraled to $1.3 billion. "Students can no longer be sure they will have enough to live on," reported the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals. "The present system of student support has broken down."
These educational quandaries are especially troubling to Britain's universities, which have stood for centuries as a world standard. Most Americans still hold a romantic image of British education as a kind of academic nirvana peopled by elegantly robed Oxbridge dons and uniformed Etonian schoolboys learning Latin verses under a benevolent Mr. Chips. But the unhappy fact is that over the past decade, the cost-conscious Thatcher government, which supplies 71% of all university funding (totaling $4.2 billion a year), has kept such a tight rein on budgets that many institutions can barely operate. Oxford is dipping into reserves to avoid a deficit on its $188 million budget and has enough money to fill only 25 of 122 vacant teaching positions. Among the posts that will be unoccupied in 1989 are a pair of prestigious Regius chairs, one in Greek and the other in modern history, set up by British kings hundreds of years ago. They may remain empty for more than a year. Less lofty positions are simply being abolished.