ABSTRACT
Professional assumptions rest partly on close identification with children, but also in part from experience of living through periods of time with their own particular configurations of circumstances. The sense of loss and unease felt by many teachers in primary education during the last decade results from a challenge to their assumptions forged during a unique period of time (1944-74) when all of them were children in primary schools, teachers in primary schools or, in many cases, both. Two quotations from MacLure’s book on the work of school architects, Educational Development and School Building (1984), provide pointers to current attitudes. The first provides a broad-brush picture of the first 25 years of post-war education:
It is important to note MacLure’s words: ‘unparalleled expansion’, ‘conditions uniquely favourable’, ‘the longest period of sustained prosperity’. For those currently involved as teachers or advisers in primary education, their formative years in a professional sense occurred in a period which was economically and educationally aberrant. The loss of morale, which has characterized primary education, though not all primary schools, over the last decade (but particularly from 1980 to 1987) has arisen partly through the straightened circumstances of the time but partly from the atypicality of the previous period to which so many teachers have been, and to some extent still are, unwitting prisoners. In a second quotation, MacLure refers to changes in attitudes, thinking and practice required of school architects post-1975, once the period of unparalleled expansion had come to an end:
As far as primary teachers are concerned, the period since 1974 has witnessed considerable self-examination as the results of successive national surveys by HM Inspectorate have revealed the extent of the gap (inevitable to some degree) between aspiration and realization, between rhetoric and reality-soul-searching further promoted by local education authority curricular reviews and school self-evaluation activities. In some cases, unprofitable nostalgia has been the only result of such experiences. However, in others, realization of shortcomings has led to determination to tackle issues through policy formulation and implementation at national, local authority and school levels. Sometimes as a result of such initiatives and sometimes independent of them, many schools have continued to develop their conception of an appropriate primary education and have adapted to changing circumstances through the exercise of professional intelligence and imagination. Such schools have risen to the challenge presented by MacLure: development has continued despite, or in some cases even, spurred on by ‘the more austere disciplines of contraction’.
