The Fiona Millar interview

Fiona Millar is a journalist, education campaigner and author of The Secret World of the Working Mother. She met Alex Smith on Friday, 29th May, 2009.

You’ve campaigned for years to make schools admissions fairer, but when I applied to the school at which you are now a governor, they had a quota for musically gifted students. Isn’t that a form of selection?
I’m completely opposed to any form of selection at eleven, whether it’s by musical aptitude or academic ability. The decision to keep selection at 10% for music was taken by the governing body long before I joined it and it is still the view of the governing body that it should continue for now. My views are well known, but I have to abide by the decision of the whole governing body. I certainly wouldn’t put my children through any sort of selection test; I think it’s wrong and I wish the government would take it out of the approved list of admissions criteria. I don’t think any schools should select on aptitude for anything.

But people will be judged on a meritocracy throughout their lives. Isn’t some form of testing good real world preparation?
I do accept that there is disappointment and rejection in life but I happen to think it’s too early at ten and can have a profound impact on the way pupils perform throughout their secondary school life. But the real scandal is that well-off parents can tutor their children to pass entry tests, so it becomes a test of wealth rather than ability.

Having 1,500 pupils in one place under the Comprehensive system can have a fantastic impact on the way a child develops because of all the different strands of life they are exposed to, but that sort of ghetto is not ideal.
In an ideal world you would have schools that have children of all abilities and all backgrounds. I agree that if you have 1,500 children with difficult or chaotic home lives or in the lower ability bands, it doesn’t make for a very good school. And that’s what happens in a lot of urban secondary schools, partly because the admissions criteria are unfair and other schools can cream off the more able, more motivated, better-off pupils via selective tests or via fees. However, I do think most schools are too big and I’d like to see many more smaller schools. The trouble with Building Schools for the Future is that we’re just building more and more huge schools, which isn’t what parents want; it would be much better to have smaller schools where there’s a more intimate atmosphere. If you could ally that with broadly balanced intakes, you’d have the sort of local schools that most parents want.

You were lucky enough to have good schools around the corner, but if your local schools were in Special Measures and under the threat of closure, would your children still have been enrolled there?
Actually the primary school they went to was failing at the time they were there – it was literally at the bottom of the Camden league table and a lot of parents took their children out. But Alastair and I decided we would keep our children there and get involved with the school to try and make it better. He got involved in sport and I got on the governing body. So I know what it feels like and I feel the most important thing is to go to your local school and try and make it as good as it can be for all children.

But people aren’t necessarily aware that they can have that stake in their local school…
Yes, but the whole “best for my child” argument has taken over. I can’t argue with that, it’s a natural instinct, but it means that the job of government is to create a system that’s fair for everybody’s children, not just for the children of the select few. A lot of Labour policies have been quite ambivalent to that; they’ve tried to create the sort of schools that middle class parents want without thinking of the knock-on effects on the other schools.

You recently went to speak to pupils at Westminster School and you said that many of the pupils there were dead to the world around them…
Well they’re very well brought up and well-mannered and they’re not all dead to the world. But I was quite shocked at my experience of going to speak to the sixth formers at that school and by their attitudes to the society around them and what they thought about other people’s children. They’re quite insular and they’re going to proceed through a network to certain universities and into certain careers, so why should they care?

Only 7% of children in this country go to independent schools, and yet our best two universities draw over 40% of their students from those schools. At the Fabian conference this year, there was broad support for legislating quotas on Oxbridge admissions.
Well I would like to see a lot more positive discrimination for pupils that do well in state schools. I’m not in favour of giving places at universities to pupils who haven’t got the right grades, but I think that we know from the Sutton Trust research that there are a number of young people who leave state schools with 3 As at A Level who either don’t apply to the top universities or don’t get in. That seems to me to be very unfair, because whatever you think of their home lives, that fact is they are coming from bigger class sizes and they’ve been in schools that are less well resourced, with teacher shortages in important areas. If you manage to get three very good A Levels in that context, I think it ought to be rewarded.

But if you go to a state school, you’re not trained to succeed in interviews for the best universities as you might be at private schools.
At your school it is much better now but at many state schools that’s definitely still a problem. It’s difficult if you haven’t got teachers who know how the system works, or who haven’t been through the Oxbridge system themselves, who know the people there and what the process involves, which is what a lot of independent schools have. So it isn’t a level playing field. But Oxbridge isn’t the be-all and end-all; lots of people go to other universities and do perfectly well in life.

Does your support for the state school sector extend to a desire to abolish private education?
Obviously, if we were starting from here, I wouldn’t invent fee-paying schools. But the fact is that they do exist and I’m reliably informed that you can’t get rid of them under Human Rights legislation. So they’re here to stay and we have to work within that. I think we should be more determined to level the playing field by removing their charitable status for example – state school have got to be able to compete and one way of doing that is by funding them at the same level. Tragically now that’s unlikely to happen because of the recession.

What if you gave schools a bigger degree of autonomy so they could set their own salaries and attract the best teachers?
I think schools are much more autonomous now than people realise; they can spend nearly 100% of their budgets as they wish to. I’m very much in favour of schools being given autonomy but there still needs to be a standard regulatory framework on admissions, provision for special needs, exclusions policy and basic rights for teachers. And as a member of a trade union, I wouldn’t be in favour of a free-for-all on pay. But I do think it’s wrong to give some schools degrees of independence that other schools don’t have. That’s what this government has done with the academies and that’s what a Tory government would also do – but it seems fundamentally unfair. If it’s right for one school to have control over its curriculum, let’s give it to every school.

What can parents do apart from getting involved on a governing board?
I think there’s a myth that parents need to be in the school all the time, quizzing teachers. Of course it’s very important that parents know the level their children are at, the potential they are capable of and what they can do to help them achieve it. But all the evidence shows that what goes on in the home is actually the crucial factor in terms of children’s achievement. Certainly at the primary level, the home is 6 times more important than what goes on in the school. That’s why we could send our children to a failing school and they’ve still ended up at university. Maybe other children who don’t have that supportive background will fare less well. That’s one of the reasons Alastair and I were determined to make that school better, to help children that didn’t have the same advantages that ours had.

I think this government has really done a lot to grapple with the issue of parenting and the difference that makes to outcomes for children. Really important work is going on in the early years in Sure Start centres; schools are offering support services to parents; and the new report card the government is consulting on would judge schools on how they work with parents. I think that’s incredibly important and it’s one thing I’m suspicious about with the Tories. If they cut all that, we’ll just be left with what the school can provide and for a lot of children a school alone isn’t enough. There are big issues at home, a lot of them related to inequality. So we do need to be investing in all these others services to support families who are in difficulty. The Tories say they will keep the schools budget but the use of the word ‘schools’ is very interesting: it implies that a lot of the other educational services that have been invested in over the last ten years might not be secure. That’s a big dividing line.

So you were passionate about educational equality and fair admission, and then you went to work for the Blairs, who sent their children to a selective school. You must have had some heated discussions about that?
Yes, we did. You have to remember that Tony Blair was the first Prime Minister ever to send his children to a state school – that was important. But I regret the choice of the Oratory because I believe strongly that people should use their local schools and they had local schools in Islington that they could have made a big difference to. The Blairs chose a grant maintained school, and that was very awkward and unfortunately that experience went on to have a big impact on the educational policies that the New Labour government followed – the belief that if you have more faith schools and more autonomous schools, they will all be like the Oratory. But the Oratory is as it is partly because it is highly, highly selective and uses all sorts of criteria including faith and aptitude tests to cream off a very able and aspiring group of young men. If you set out to create some schools like that, which was the subtle aim of Labour’s education policy over the last ten years, you’re also going to create a group of schools that are inferior because they have to take children the selective schools reject.

And while at Number 10, you also worked with Alastair. What was that like?
Well we’d met because we’d worked in the same office many years before.

But not in such high profile…
Yes, although Number 10 is a huge building and some days I’d never see Alastair at all. Peter Stoddard wrote a book about Tony Blair during the Iraq War saying that Tony and Cherie and Alastair and I were like two couples who had been on holiday together for too long. For the four of us to be wound up in the same enterprise for so long was a bit too intense to be perfectly honest. It was ten years by the time we left and it became too much. But they were great moments.

And you both left Downing Street the same year, 2003, for different but presumably related reasons…
I’ve thought about this quite a lot. Say I’d left on my own to campaign on education policy; I’d have been completely at loggerheads with Alastair constantly. He’d been thinking about leaving for some time, as had I, then there was the whole business with David Kelly’s death and that awful, regrettable experience. I was not in favour of the war and found that time very, very difficult. I’d wanted to resign when the war started but had been persuaded out of it because people said it would be a bad story. But in the end I decided that the politics were going in a direction that I couldn’t wholly support, and I wanted a better work-life balance.

Alastair supported the war in Iraq and then there was David Kelly, which must have been a period of heavy strain. How did that affect your family?
We had a lot of terrible arguments. I’ve spoken to our children about their experience and one thing that struck me was that they never really minded us both working so hard while it made us happy because they could see that we were fulfilled. But what they really hated was when the job brought this terrible tension into the home and we were arguing all the time. That was what happened in 2003. It was a very, very unpleasant experience and it had quite a negative effect on them and I really regret that. No child likes to see their parents arguing all the time and we did argue a lot, particularly about the war. It was very, very difficult because Alastair was doing what he believed was right on Iraq, and I profoundly believed it was wrong.

In that sort of crisis, how did you prioritise between work and family?
In a crisis, unless you’ve got an understanding employer, it’s often the children who suffer. The Blairs were very good people to work for because they completely understood…

Because they were in a uniquely similar position with their own children…
Partly, yes, but also because they knew we would put the hours in when we were most needed and also because Cherie always felt very strongly about a woman’s right to work and family-friendly employment. Most jobs don’t have the sort of crises that blow up in number 10, and it did get very, very hairy at times, particularly around Iraq.

How did you and Alastair share that burden?
Well, Alastair worked much longer hours than me. I took the conscious decision to take a job in Number 10 that allowed a little more flexibility. So it really did work well until the end.

I asked my Mum what she thought was the most difficult thing about being a working parent during a crisis and she said the guilt that you can give neither your work nor your family the attention they deserve. Is that something you can relate to?
I think a lot of women feel that, and it’s a problem that will only be resolved when more men start to feel that they have to be conflicted in the same way. There’s still a great deal of ambivalence about working women and what alarms me is the feeling that women should go back into the home. Look at some of the things Iain Duncan Smith is saying through the Centre for Social Justice, that we should be paying women to stay at home. That seems to be a very, very backward step. If you can share the responsibilities with your partner, it’s possible to have a perfectly happy life. Alastair and I did have that until it all went belly-up in 2003.

So now that it’s quieter, is Alastair good around the house?
No! He’s a very, very good father but he’s hopeless at everything else and I think he would be the first to admit that. That’s partly my fault – I’ve slipped into the role of being provider, of doing everything for everybody. But my advice to any young woman thinking of having a family is to train your children from an early age to make sure it isn’t only the woman’s responsibility to do the domestic chores!

Do you give your kids time independently of each other, or do you invest more time as a family unit?
Well one of the boys supports Burnley and one of them supports Manchester United so both always have distinct one-to-one activities with their father – going to Burnley or Manchester. Unfortunately, I’m not really a football fan and they generally don’t want me along, although I did go to watch Burnley get promoted to the Premiership, which was really exciting. But they’re generally very nice about us as parents, so something must have gone right in spite of all those horrible days that we were never around. I think the key thing is to make them feel they’re the most important things in the world to you when you are with them, to take an interest in what they’re doing and focus on them. Even if you can’t be at the football match, find out about it, make sure they’ve got the right kit, talk to them, take an interest in their school life and their friends, watch what they want to watch. I watch a lot of soap operas with our daughter; I’ve watched the whole of the OC, the whole of Sex and the City, the whole of Desperate Housewives, and we’re into the final stages of Gossip Girl. Now the boys are at university she has a great time!

How does Alastair feel about having the house taken over by the girls?
He hates it! He really misses the boys and he just can’t understand our interest in shopping or what we watch on TV. I think he also feels a bit like he’s done it all and doesn’t really know what to do next.

But you’re both still relatively young…
Yes, 51, 52, but I’m depressed about what’s to come next if there’s a Conservative government. It was a fantastic achievement to come out of the 1980s and get to a Labour government, with all the good things we’ve done. Some people seem to have forgotten but I remember what the Tories were like: so many of the problems in society now can be traced back to the last Tory government.

The Tories would argue that David Cameron is not Margaret Thatcher, that this is a new, “compassionate” Conservatism…
People are falling for that all over the place but I don’t believe it at all. The roots of the broken society, where it does exist, are very often in the communities that Thatcher destroyed. So I don’t feel persuaded at all that they’re going to be a different power and I don’t understand why we’re not doing more to put them under the spotlight. At the same time, Labour has got slack on its own positive agenda. I would like to see a big message about equality, because more equal societies do better on a range of indicators – education, health, crime – and they’re generally happier places, whereas societies with huge gaps between the rich and the poor are generally not happy societies. Everybody recognises we have problems here, especially with young people, But if you dig into why young people fail or develop conduct disorders and anti-social behaviour, 99% of the time it’s because of factors directly related to inequality. So I’d like to see us go into the election on a big message of equality and fairness. The Tories won’t go that far, because I don’t think they so fundamentally believe in an equal society or that they would work to achieve that as a priority.