ABSTRACT
The urban school curriculum was ceaselessly distorted. There were innumerable causes. If it was not that the teachers were pursuing some grand design of total curriculum renewal, it might be the cancellation of sports day because mob violence was threatened from truant members of another school. Curriculum planning was often hit and miss. The examination system was still a demanding task-master. Widespread discrimination against girls was reported in 1976.1 There was often a shortage of subject teachers. A whole comprehensive school of 2,000 pupils might be timetabled next year for one weekly lesson of music for each pupil, although the senior staff knew perfectly well that in September there would only be one music teacher in the entire school. One large urban authority introduced a special mathematics curriculum that non-specialist teachers could teach, based on mathematics work cards in the style of ‘do-it-yourself’ cookery cards. The aim was to provide children with at least some mathematics at a time of teacher shortage; the result was, as so often, second-rate curriculum and teaching for the already disadvantaged child.2
