ABSTRACT
One area of curriculum awareness that secondary English teachers are beginning to benefit from thanks to National Curriculum links between Key Stages Two and Three, has been an exposure to what has been going on in local primary schools. Part of the Language In The National Curriculum (LINC) initiative in Sutton schools gave its secondary English teachers the chance to spend days with primary colleagues, and it was at a meeting of language co-ordinators in Sutton that the idea of taking a GCSE class into a primary school first arose. Three schools had shown how their students in Year 2 and Year 3 had written and produced their own picture books (a National Curriculum task), which were then kept in special book boxes in the school library for other children to read. The secondary teachers were made aware of the influx of superb children's picture books in the last ten years, reaching new heights with the sophistication of books like Janet and Allan Ahlberg's The Jolly Postman, the brilliant picture and text interplay of David McKee's Not Now Bernard and the subtextual illustration craft of Anthony Browne's A Walk in the Park. A National Curriculum in English is forcing many colleagues to look at curriculum content from Years 1 to 11, in a way destined perhaps at last to bridge the ‘Great Divide’ between primary and secondary schooling.
