ABSTRACT

When the history of English primary education in the twentieth century comes to be written, three dates are likely to be seen as particularly significant: 1931, when the notion of the ‘primary school’ received official recognition in the Hadow Report; 1967, when ‘child-centred education’ (however loosely defined) was accepted as the official orthodoxy of English primary education; and 1978, when the publication of Primary Education in England: A Survey by HM Inspectors of Schools provided the first publicly accessible, rigorous overall appraisal since Hadow. (The appraisal conducted by the Inspectors of the Plowden Committee in the 1960s did not, in my view, meet these criteria.) The survey published in 1978 counters very effectively the wild assertions and scare-mongering rife following Tyndale and Bennett in 1976, a year when the fortunes of primary education reached their nadir. However, it provides cold comfort for curriculum developers and for both the advocates and the critics of ‘child-centred education’. To my mind, with the major exception of its very simplistic treatment of teaching approaches the survey does justice to many of the complexities, successes, shortcomings and subtleties of primary practice.