Education: The Milk Snatcher

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Mrs. Thatcher brought the fiscal toughness of a future Chancellor to the nation's schools. Instead of rebuilding the most dilapidated secondary schools—a program originally planned as part of the trend toward the comprehensives—Mrs. Thatcher has budgeted £. 132 million ($343 million) for the improvement and replacement of 460 primary schools. "Primary education is the foundation of all later education," she explains. "The value of later opportunities is lost if a child does not get off to a good start."

Mrs. Thatcher has other ambitious plans—an allotment of $525 million over three years for the improvement of technical and vocational colleges and a program to increase the number of nursery schools, particularly in remote areas. She is also pushing legislation, which was shelved by the Labor government for economy reasons, to raise the age for leaving school from 15 to 16.

Rickets and TB. To help finance such plans, Mrs. Thatcher undertook her most furiously criticized venture. At a saving of $99 million, she increased the price of school lunches by one-third and abolished free milk rations for some 3.5 million primary schoolchildren. One independent research group promptly charged that the abolition of free milk would cause the number of children with a calcium deficiency to increase from 13% of the primary school population to 34%. Some school administrators announced that they would pay for free milk out of local property taxes, but Mrs. Thatcher put through a bill making this illegal. Even then, the poor Welsh mining town of Merthyr Tydfil went on distributing free milk because, as School Councilor Bryn Watkins said, "we know all about malnutrition, rickets and TB here." That revolt ended when local officials were notified that they would be personally liable for the milk bills of $5,200 a term.

Mrs. Thatcher dismisses her critics easily: "People who resort to personal attacks usually do so because their arguments are so weak. I will not be hounded. I will never be driven anywhere against my will." Though her critics may be numerous, Prime Minister Edward Heath is not one of them. He recently rejected a demand for her resignation and said that her regime had been "a period of remarkable achievement."