ABSTRACT
To begin at the beginning. I do not think curriculum was even in my vocabulary when I began as a 32-year-old fledgling headmaster of Senacre Secondary School, Maidstone in 1957 (a product of a public school and Cambridge who had achieved the rank of lieutenant in the RNVR). School mastering was all I knew about education. But then the curriculum was of scant interest to the government. R.A. Butler records in his memoirs The Art of the Possible (Butler 1971: 92) that during a conversation about his forthcoming Act he reminded Churchill, who wanted pupils to learn about Wolfe’s storming of the Heights of Abraham, that it was not thought to be the business of parliament or ministers to decide what children were to be taught. That was for the teachers and professionals who ran the schools. Such was the ethos of the time.
