ABSTRACT
As this chapter, written in 1979, argues, the debunking of the myth was accomplished primarily by the national survey of English primary education carried out by HMI and published in 1978 under the title Primary Education in England: A Survey by HM Inspectors of Schools. This provided firm evidence of curricular and pedagogic continuities between pre-and post-Plowden practice in the vast majority of schools. It showed that with the advent of non-streaming and the spread of mixedability classes organizational changes had occurred. There was more individual and group teaching than previously and there were changes in the ways in which classes were organized and in the layout of classrooms, but the curriculum was ‘scarcely more than a revamped elementary school curriculum with the same major utilitarian emphases’ (an equally apt description of the current post-1997 ITEMS-IT, English, mathematics and science-curriculum). The primary survey was important as a rigorous professional appraisal of post-Plowden primary education and as an agenda-setting publication which provided the impetus for a decade of HMI-led initiatives in primary education. 6
When the history of English primary education in the twentieth century comes to be written, three dates are likely to be seen as particularly significant: 1931, when the notion of the ‘primary school’ received official recognition in the Hadow Report;
1967, when ‘child-centred education’ (however loosely defined) was accepted as the official orthodoxy of English primary education; and 1978, when the publication of Primary Education in England: A Survey by HM Inspectors of Schools provided the first publicly accessible, rigorous overall appraisal since Hadow. (The appraisal conducted by the Inspectors for the Plowden Committee in the 1960s did not, in my view, meet these criteria.) The survey published in 1978 counters very effectively the wild assertions and scaremongering rife following Tyndale and Bennett in 1976-a year when the fortunes of primary education reached their nadir. However, it provided cold comfort for curriculum developers and for both the advocates and the critics of ‘child-centred education’. To my mind, with the major exception of its very simplistic treatment of teaching approaches, the survey does justice to many of the complexities, successes, short-comings and subtleties of primary practice.
