ABSTRACT
The unhappy story of key stage 4 which lays down what children should be taught between 14 and 16 runs through the first three years of the National Curriculum Council's history, at first behind the scenes and then in the full glare of often acrimonious publicity. Key stage 4 was pushed more and more into the background on the basis that it would be a long time before the entire national curriculum would be introduced into schools. School Examinations and Assessment Council (SEAC) countered by arguing that the law required terminal examinations at the end of each key stage and that modules could not be tested or validated. HMI saw the opportunity to remove a huge part of the curriculum with the reform of key stage 4 and returned to trying to convince ministers that too much prescription was undesirable.
