ABSTRACT
The inner-city school which forms the specific research was influenced by the policy of "positive discrimination" advocated in the Plowden Report on primary education in England and Wales. That is to say, the school sought to compensate for the presumed material and emotional difficulties which beset its pupils in and around their homes. Schools are not laboratories, and teachers and children should not be regarded as 'subjects' to be 'controlled' and 'manipulated'. Scotland's education system is administered by the Scottish Education Department, not by the Department of Education and Science. The organisation of Scottish education is different from that in England and Wales: it is more centralised, and the breadth of the curriculum is wider in the secondary school. At primary level, however, the educational ideology is similar to that in England and Wales. Both the Scottish 'Primary Memorandum' and the Plowden Report in Engand and Wales, espouse 'child-centred' education.
