ABSTRACT
Heath appointed Margaret Thatcher as Secretary of State for Education. The education expansion that had started in the later 1960s continued into the early 1970s, and, at first, morale was generally high at all levels of education. Labour was very good at criticising Thatcher and the Conservatives for having no real education policy; they made little progress in finding one themselves. Despite the right-wing backlash and four years of Margaret Thatcher as Education Secretary, the number of comprehensive schools doubled between 1970 and 1974, so that more than half of secondary school pupils were then attending comprehensive schools. The importance of the US sociologist, J. S. Coleman was that he did a good deal of research that seemed to indicate that schooling had very little statistical significance in terms of changing working class life-chances.
