Introduction

For most of those who teach in them and for all those who learn in them, the place of primary schools within the educational system and within society more generally is rarely, if ever, seriously questioned. Teachers view them as the institutional expression of the state’s concern to educate the young up to the age of 11; children see them as part of the ‘natural’ order of things. Yet primary, as opposed to elementary, education and schools to foster this kind of education are comparatively recent developments within the educational system of England and Wales. As a stage of education, primary education was formally established by the 1944 Education Act (pp. 34-6), though it had been government policy since 1928 to establish schools specifically for children of this age-group. During its short history, primary education has had to contend with a number of formidable problems in its attempts to create a distinct identity, as the second paper in this section documents. These included the legacy of the elementary school tradition with its relatively narrow, instrumental emphasis on the three Rs; the selective role assigned to primary schools and symbolized by the ‘11+’ examination; the vast expansion followed by spectacular contraction in the number of children of primary school age; and the inability of the sector to attract resources on a scale comparable to secondary and higher education. Despite these difficulties it has established itself as a distinct, and in some ways distinctive, sector, though with very considerable internal variations in ‘philosophy’ and practice, as the papers in the second section of the reader reveal.