The New approach to old problems

At last, the world of higher education has one of its own in the ministerial hot seat - a tough and determined operator with a radical edge. In her first interview since taking office, Baroness Blackstone assesses the task ahead. By Lucy Hodges

Tessa Blackstone received the call to office from the new PM on a semi-audible mobile phone line en route to friends for lunch. Not one to mess around, Baroness Blackstone declared: "I really can't hear a thing. Who am I speaking to? Is that Tony?" "Yes," replied our Prime Minister. More inaudible grunts. Baroness B managed to jot down his telephone number and called him back when she arrived at her lunch date in Hungerford. Thus was Baroness Blackstone of Stoke Newington appointed Minister of State in charge of further and higher education.

Overnight the Master of Birkbeck College London, scourge of the Foreign Office when she was a Think Tank member in the 1970s, deputy education officer (resources) of the Inner London Education Authority in the 1980s, and paid-up member of the great and good, has the kind of job for which she has been preparing all her life. It may not be exactly what she wanted (foreign affairs was thought to be closer to her heart) but at the age of 54 she could not afford to refuse it.

"To have a precise view of the job you want is ludicrous," she says. "You're not going to get that. There were a number of different posts I thought I would be happy doing. This is certainly one of them. I had been doing foreign affairs [House of Lords foreign affairs spokesman] for five years so there was a possible expectation of something there. But I'm delighted."

Hardly a ringing endorsement of the position she occupies, but an honest reply. The higher education world generally is pleased it has one of its own in the hot seat. "I think it's an excellent appointment," says historian Ben Pimlott, who teaches at Birkbeck, the college she has just left. "That post usually goes to someone who knows nothing about higher education."

Today Tessa, as she prefers to be called, sits in Tory ex-minister Robin Squire's former office at the top of the DfEE with a sweeping view of Westminster roofs. To date her office is pictureless, apart from a family snap of her granddaughter, Scarlett. She intends to decorate the walls with paintings picked last Friday from the Government's art collection - including a painting of a Victorian woman traveller and adventurer which she thought appropriate for her all-female private office and press secretaries. "This may be the only all-woman office in the Government," she says. "I was really pleased to find that." She's also bringing in her two favourite pictures, two old London County Council prints advertising evening classes.

The new minister faces a formidable set of tasks. She will have to deal with the immediate funding crisis in further education (last week London colleges were on strike) as well as the chronic shortage of cash in the universities. The Association of University Teachers is already demanding that cuts planned for 1998-99 be set aside and that the new government establish a pay review body. (The new minister won't be drawn on either issue.)

In a couple of months' time, Sir Ron Dearing's national committee of inquiry report on the future of higher education lands on her desk. That will force the Government to make up its mind whether students should pay for tuition fees as well as maintenance, whether the loans system needs reform and whether student debt can be sold off to the private sector - issues which were mothballed for the election because they were considered so hot by the previous regime.

Charging students fees is the most politically contentious for a Labour government. Full-time students in Britain do not pay for their higher education, and many Labour supporters are horrified by the thought that students should pay. Although a consensus is emerging among policy experts that fees combined with income-contingent loan repayments is the only way to inject more money into our cash-starved universities, the new minister may sidestep it for now.

Labour was elected on a pledge of replacing the current system of funding student board and lodging (loans, grants and parental contributions) with a loan repayable according to graduate earnings. There was no mention of the loan being for repayment of tuition fees. "That's still our position," says Blackstone. "We will be waiting for Dearing to see what his recommendations are."

Last year, however, Baroness Blackstone argued that Labour's policy of reforming only the maintenance bit of student funding and leaving alone tuition might not be enough. "But we're not persuaded of that," she says, before invoking the "waiting for Dearing" mantra again.

A passionate advocate of access to higher education, particularly as a result of her experience at Birkbeck, a college almost entirely populated by part-time students, the new minister is against individual institutions charging top-up fees. In fact, as a member of the court of governors at the London School of Economics (from which she has just resigned) she got into some public scraps with John Ashworth, the previous LSE director, who was a famous proponent of fees.

Such commitment endears her to like-minded academics. Those who have crossed swords with her are less enamoured. All agree, however, that she is intelligent and tough. One admirer, Professor Roderick Floud, vice- chancellor of London Guildhall University, who lost out to Tessa for the post of Master of Birkbeck, says: "She's extremely determined. She has a very clear mind and clear sense of priorities and she goes hard for what she thinks is right."

At Birkbeck one of her great legacies was to ensure the survival of the beleaguered institution by raising money, a total of pounds 7.6m, putting the institution on the map and recruiting academic stars. She integrated London University's extramural department into the college and expanded, developing new programmes and bringing in more students - as well as courting unpopularity by closing down physics. In the process she put a lot of backs up, just as she once offended Foreign Office mandarins by questioning ambassadors about their lavish lifestyles. Her combination of beauty, brains, radicalism and plummy voice frightens men. It gave rise to the infamous Foreign Office epithet that she was a "dark-eyed evil genius".

Certainly, those who know her say she can be pretty sharp. Some complain she's a bully. Others say she is cold and grand and Thatcher-like. Yet more complain she won't brook dissent and that this makes her a lousy manager because she can't carry people with her. In short, she arouses the sort of negative feelings that many effective leaders do.

Economists distrust her, arguing that she's too Old Labour in her views on the funding of higher education. One academic who has had dealings with her thinks she's the wrong person for the job because she's anti- market. "Tessa's instincts are very egalitarian," he says. "If you combine egalitarianism with a real gut distrust of the market, you know what you get. You get poor quality and people who lack incentives."

To journalists, however, she is charm itself - helpful, unstuffy and, above all, not boring. In fact it is difficult to reconcile the dirt people dish about Tessa Blackstone in private.

Listeners to the radio programme Stop the Week will never forget the time she talked about getting caught short on a weekend away from home. Waking up in the middle of the night with a full bladder, she found the door of her bedroom stuck. Ever resourceful, she whipped open the window and peed out into the dark night. The radio show was inundated with letters from shocked listeners.

Today Tessa Blackstone looks more severe than she did 10 years ago because she wears her hair up in a bun rather than in a soft, fluffy perm. She also wears more expensive clothes - well-cut suits and silk blouses - rather than the designer sweater and beads of her time as fellow at the Policy Studies Institute.

Everyone in higher and further education must be hoping that Chancellor Gordon Brown is a sucker for her charm and style, because the funding situation looks bleak. One pot of gold - the selling-off of student debt - could yield pounds 1bn to pounds 1.5bn a year for ever. Frank Field, the new minister for welfare, has his eye on it. Can Tessa reassure the education world that it won't be hijacked by another ministry? "I hope that I can give you a reasonable assurance that this money will be used for post-school education," she says.

A self-confessed radical, in that she's prepared to think the unthinkable, her background was comfortable. Her father, who rose to be chief fire officer for Hertfordshire, came from a family of successful Victorian engineers who invented the Blackstone diesel engine. There were four children: two boys who went to private school and two girls who attended the local grammar, and a discontented mother, a former actress and Paris model. Both parents were ambitious for their daughters.

By the time she left school, Tessa had discovered sociology, which she studied at the LSE. There followed a PhD in pre-school education, after which she became a lecturer, first at Enfield College then at the LSE. Her Think Tank job with the Callaghan administration in the 1970s was followed by a professorship in educational administration at the London Institute of Education.

She is a Labour Party intellectual - of the highly organised and practical variety - believing in the application of reason and analysis, the preparation of sensible schemes and their effective implementation.

Her offspring seem to be following in her footsteps: her daughter makes documentaries for the BBC, and her son was an advance man in Tony Blair's election campaign. Having married young, she separated from her husband and ended up nursing him through terminal cancer when he was in his early forties.

That experience helped her to appreciate life as she had not done before. "There's a hell of a lot to do," she says of her new job. First she has to read copious amounts from her red box. She admits she doesn't know much about further education, training and - the new buzz phrase - lifelong learning. One of the things she wants to do is to rectify that by visiting colleges, meeting people and talking to them about their problems.

Does she have a vision of what she wants to achieve? Give me a break, she says. She's only been in the job one week. "Of course, what I want to see is high quality, fair funding and improved access."

Those are quintessential Blairite aims: one part idealism to two parts hard-headness. Very New Labour.