ABSTRACT
In the year 2000 the work of British primary schools is highly visible and politically contested. Whether visibility derives from their contentiousness or vice-versa, and how the relationship between these two features has changed over the course of a century, poses an interesting question for historians of education. Primary teachers currently suffer an uneasy relationship with the State and complain that their work and their schools have become a political football. Compulsory education of children between the ages of five and 11 is managed and conducted within a statutory curriculum framework, but pedagogical style varies from teacher to teacher and from school to school, reflecting the individuality of the teachers and the ethos of individual schools. A new departure in the closing years of the century was the launch of ‘national strategies’ for literacy and numeracy which sought to impose some uniformity on teaching method, as the introduction of a national curriculum ten years earlier had done on the content of what primary school children learned. The account below will follow two themes in primary education: curriculum discourse between State and teachers, and increasing visibility of the primary school which brought that discourse into the public arena.
