ABSTRACT
On 6 March 1974 Harold Wilson became Prime Minister for his third term of office, but without a majority in the House of Commons. In Greece the military rule of the colonels came to an end, and a peace deal in Cyprus was signed by the Foreign Minister, James Callaghan, in May 1974. Callaghan did care about education and, conscious of his own lack of university education, his attitude to schools as a whole was traditional, even old-fashioned. By the 1970s some sociologists, the positivists, were trying to remain as close as possible to classical scientific method; others wanted to develop a quite different methodology. Callaghan became Prime Minister in April 1976. By then it had become fashionable for the popular press to criticise standards in schools and the competence of some teachers.
