In the face of such rapid development, HMC felt it should make its voice heard.It has never liked GCSE – discerning the gap between GCSE and A-level to be too great. In many ways HMC has chosen a curious moment to air its new-found consensus.In a new spirit of rapprochement to teachers Mrs Shephard has declared a moratorium on major change for five years, so one wonders how this herald of a new age of stability will react to such a document.In reality, HMC’s intervention at this stage is understandable, for without any new initiative or effort on the Government’s part, the post-16 landscape will change substantially during the coming years.Staying on post-GCSE has already become the norm, and the introduction of General National Vocational Qualifications, whose level 3 is described as A-level equivalent, has proved spectacularly popular. The abolishing of GCSEs, raising of the school leaving age to 18 and the introduction of an over-arching qualification at 18 called the Advanced Diploma, all seem surprisingly radical from a body that stands out as a bastion of conservatism. It is the first time that the Headmaster’s Conference, which represents the country’s major independent schools, has approached the Government with an agreed statement on curriculum matters.
Ever since the Higginson proposals during Mrs Thatcher’s government for revision of A-levels to a five-subject qualification, HMC members have been deeply divided between those who favoured breadth and those who favoured depth. IN HER postbag, Gillian Shephard, the Secretary of State for Education, will have received final proposals from leading independent schools for a revision of post-14 education. You see, at that level, they’re not crooks, simply innocents; only it’s not They but Us who suffer from the fact that, like the legendary piano player in the brothel, they didn’t know what was going on upstairs.(Photograph omitted).

Ah, said Mrs T, but such compulsion had long been the practice in Switzerland.Our Nige closed the argument with the crushing retort: ‘But Prime Minister, it is well known that in Switzerland everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.’Strange but true: throughout the lengthy accounts in both ministers’ memoirs it is simply taken for granted that the private pensions industry would, inevitably and automatically, provide a perfectly splendid deal for the Great British Public. Mrs T weighed in with the proposal that people should be forced to take out compulsory private pensions. Lawson duly riposted that compulsory anything was wholly against the prevailing philosophy. ‘A pension of your own’ could have the same kind of appeal as ‘a house of your own’.The role of government should be to ensure that such pensions met sensible regulation (sic) so that the public interest was protected.’What did worry his colleague, Nigel Lawson, then doing his number as the Fat Controller at Number 11 Downing Street, was the cost of shifting pension provision into the private sector, given the level of subsidy involved. The motive for their pensions revolution couldn’t have been more orthodox.
‘My view,’ wrote Sir Norman in his curiously titled memoirs, Ministers Decide, ‘was that most people would prefer a pension that was theirs by right rather than being dependent on the decisions of government. It was your zeal that landed us with the present personal pensions mess. .

STAND UP Sir Norman Fowler and Lord Lawson. ‘Could be incredibly useful,’ summed up one cynic, ‘if you’re not allowed fat as long as you don’t mind your teeth rotting.’. Clearly they weren’t well enough financed to survive a difficult year. It’s still a fact of life that ice-cream is very, very sensitive to the weather, and this year the heat came in July, just before the holiday season.’And the taste of Tofutti? Bunhill’s panel was reasonably enthusiastic about the Butter Pecan but cooler towards the Chocolate Chip, found to be a shade too sweet. This did not surprise Geoffrey Mulloy, the veteran chairman of the Ice Cream Federation.’Pollards were a small regional maker.