ABSTRACT
The authors of this chapter for the Cambridge Primary Review were charged with presenting an assessment of the current state of the professional environment of the English primary school. We decided to overview the salient issues, and then to identify a number of central themes whose understanding seemed to us to be of central importance. It was clear also that sustained empirical research of life inside primary schools, or indeed any schools, of the kind published in the 1980s heyday of ethnographical sociology is now limited. We found that what empirical studies did exist had also become more theoretically impoverished over the years. Atheoretical and simplistically evaluational approaches tend to dominate contemporary academic published writing. This is not to deny that there is significant and critical work being done by the likes of Pollard and Alexander (see, for example, Pollard and Triggs 2001 and, in the international comparative field, Alexander 2001). Nevertheless, there seem to be large enclaves of sponsored research that did not seem able or willing to contest critically the realities of contemporary schooling.
