ABSTRACT
During the previous five years I had taught in a College of Education which specialised in preparing teachers for nursery and primary schools. During this period I had seen the work of a number of nursery schools, and I had also become aware of the great problems facing primary schools which serve areas made up almost entirely of lower-working-class families. Such schools were to be found not only around the city centre, where the majority of children came from the long rows of back-to-back houses, with their narrow cobbled or unsurfaced streets, but also from the more spacious surroundings of the council housing estates on the perimeter of the city, particularly where the policy was to build schools which would almost entirely serve the estate's population. I came to realise how great the problems were for the teachers and for the students on teaching practice, in these schools.
