ABSTRACT
Although the movement to national curricula appears to be a significant international trend it is neither new nor novel. Indeed in 1987 the then Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker, compared the British education system unfavorably with those in Europe, arguing that whereas the later had tended to centralize and standardize, Britain had gone for diffusion and variety. This meant that the school curriculum had been largely left to individual schools and teachers. This had to change, he argued, by establishing a national curriculum which works through national criteria for each subject area of the curriculum. The subsequent 1988 Education Act introduced a national curriculum of ten subjects for all maintained schools in England and Wales, heralding fundamental shifts in primary school practice. In this chapter, we report on primary teachers' initial and continuing responses to the implementation of the national curriculum gained through national surveys of perceptions and practice. But flrst, to provide the necessary context, we consider practice prior to the enactment of the 1988 Act.
