ABSTRACT

One of the first courses I was asked to take responsibility for when I arrived at the Institute in September 1985 was a DES Regional Course on

Topic and Thematic Work which was due to run during 1986. In close consultation with group leaders and advisers representing local authorities in the region, we put together a package of activities, the central intention of which was to offer course members the opportunity to reflect critically upon their own practice and at the same time learn from the practice of others. As you can imagine, the initial impetus for the course derived from the increasing demand for accountability within and outside the education system, exemplified by comments such as the following from Eric Bolton, the Chief HMI (in the proceedings of a Conference on Evaluation and Assessment published by HMSO in 1985):

We lack broad agreement about how to describe and scrutinise the primary curriculum. The absence of clarity and agreement about what children should be capable of at various stages of their primary education leads to a distinct lack of information about standards of pupil achievement in individual primary schools and a consequent difficulty of establishing any standards of achievement as a basis for an assessment of performance.