ABSTRACT
In the past the Education Department would have set up a committee to consider a specific subject or area of education and asked for its recommendations in due course. The public at large, and some educationists and teachers in particular, still do not realise how dramatically different this was from the kind of working groups and committees of inquiry that educational professionals had been asked to join in the past. The progressives were best represented by two of the education professionals in the group, Hilary Shuard, director of a primary school mathematics group at Homerton College, Cambridge, and Hugh Burkhardt, director of the Shell Centre for Mathematics Education at the University of Nottingham. The view stemmed from a mixture of the low esteem in which both were held in this new era of education in which the government was going to dictate what was to be taught, and the realisation of the sheer practical difficulties.
