The new Minister of Education is Miss Florence Horsbrugh. Her appointment was announced on November 2.
Miss Horsbrugh first entered Parliament in 1931 and sat as Conservative member for Dundee from that year until 1945. She had, however, been earlier prominent in public life. She received the M.B.E. for her work in canteens and national kitchens during the last part of the 1914-18 war and was closely associated with the British Legion.
In the House, Miss Horsbrugh soon made her mark as an effective private member, and in 1936 she made Parliamentary history by being the first woman to move the Address in reply to the King's Speech. In that year, too, she was appointed chairman of the Departmental Committee on Adoption Societies and Agencies. The recommendations of her committee led to the Adoption of Children (Regulation) Act, 1939. The outbreak of war postponed the operation of this Act until 1943, but the work of Miss Horsbrugh's committee marked an important stage in that concern of Parliament for the deprived child which culminated in the Children Act of 1948 and the Adoption Act of 1950.
In the years immediately before the war Miss Horsbrugh was a British official delegate to the League of Nations Assembly. In July, 1939, she became Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health, in which office she was at once concerned with the arrangements made for the evacuation of children. She remained at the Ministry of Health until the end of the Coalition Government, and in the "Caretaker" Government of 1945 she was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food.
In the General Election of 1945 Miss Horsbrugh was deafeated. She was again unsuccessful in 1950 when she stood for Midlothian and Peebles; but she was immediately adopted as Conservative candidate for the Moss Side Division of Manchester, where the nominated candidate had died before polling day. She won the seat there with a majority of 8,500 in a three-cornered fight, and increased her majority by 2,200 in a straight fight last month.
It was in the last Parliament that Miss Horsbrugh's interests, already centred on the social services, became linked with education, for it was then that she became chairman of her party's Parliamentary Committee on Education. In that capacity she took a leading part in debates. In July of this year, as the main Opposition speaker in a Supply debate, she revealed a close knowledge of educational developments in this country. It was clear then that whether the subject was the health of schoolchildren, to which Miss Horsbrugh brings a special interest from her previous office, or attainment in the primary school, her first concern was that criticism should be cautious and informed. "I think," she said on that occasion, "we want to find out more and more as education in our schools goes on, whether it is up to the standard required and how we can improve it." This desire for careful advance was endorsed in a statement which Miss Horsbrugh made recently to The Times Educational Supplement, when she said that, for her, the first task in education was to assess progress since 1944, to see where the difficulties had arisen, and then to draw up a list of priorities.
Miss Horsbrugh was educated at Lansdowne House, Edinburgh, and St. Hilda's, Folkestone. She was made a Privy Councillor in 1945 and a C.B.E. in 1939. She is a Doctor of Letters of Mills College, California, Hon. F.R.C.S., Edinburgh, and L.L.D., Edinburgh.
