ABSTRACT
When Sir David Eccles, the then minister of education, referred in March 1960 to the ‘secret garden of the curriculum’ (Hansard 1960), he was coining a phrase that came to symbolize the freedom accorded to school teachers in England and Wales to control what they taught and how they taught it. It is a phrase that increasingly evokes a particular phase or period in educational history, roughly from the 1940s until the ‘Great Debate’ of the late 1970s, that has been superseded by active state intervention culminating in the 1990s in the National Curriculum. Lawton anticipated (1980a, 1980b) the ‘end of the secret garden’. By the late 1980s, Lawn could dismiss the idea of teacher autonomy in curriculum control as ‘historically specific to the period 1925-80’ (Lawn 1987: 227; see also Chitty and Lawn 1995; Lawn 1996). The National Curriculum introduced under the Education Reform Act of 1988 appears to mark a new phase in the role of teachers in the school curriculum, characterized by centralized control and external accountability.
