drafted by senior civil servants based on ideas that had been in circulation for years. Butler's decisive role was to secure passage by negotiations with interested parties from Churchill to the churches and from educators to MPs. Background In July 1941, Butler received his first Cabinet post when he was appointed President of the Board of Education. Some writers, such as Addison, suggest that Education was a backwater and that Churchill offered him it or a diplomatic post to remove him from the more sensitive Foreign Office. However, he had been keen to leave the Foreign Office, and press stories that he had previously declined Cabinet positions were misinformed. His biographer argues that the promotion was not, contrary to Butler's own later insinuations (such as that Churchill had talked of "wiping babies' bottoms"), intended as an insult. At the time, Butler recorded that Churchill had demanded more patriotic history teaching: "Tell the children that Wolfe won Quebec". Butler was also the chair of the War Cabinet Committee for the Control of Official Histories. Butler became Chairman of the Conservatives' Postwar Problems Central Committee on 24 July 1941. It had subcommittees to deal with demobilisation, agriculture, industry and finance, education and social services, constitutional and administrative affairs and national security. Butler proved to be one of the most radical reforming ministers on the home front. The main problem standing in the way of education reform was the question of integrating church schools into the state system, which had bedevilled Balfour's Act in 1902. H. A. L. Fisher had failed to integrate the church schools in his 1918 Act. Butler wrote to Churchill (12 September 1941) to suggest a Joint Select Committee. Churchill did not want a new bill and replied (13 September) that "we cannot have party politics in wartime". Churchill warned him not to "raise the 1902 controversy during the war". Butler later wrote that having seen the Promised Land, "I was damned if I was going to die in the Land of Moab. Basing myself on long experience of Churchill over the India Bill, I decided to disregard what he said and go straight ahead". Negotiation with the churches More than half the schools in the country were church schools. However, Church of England schools now educated 20% of children, down from 40% in 1902 (Roman Catholic schools educated 8% of children). Many church schools were in a poor