ABSTRACT
WHAT IS PRIMARY TEACHING? Teaching in primary schools has sometimes been thought of as having lower status than ‘real’ teaching – that is, teaching a proper subject in a proper school, which means a secondary school. Primary teaching, so folklore tells us, is just looking after young children until they attend ‘proper’ school – showing them how to hold a pencil, wiping their noses, telling them a story or two, but not actually teaching them much of real importance. Those (rather rare) teachers who have made the change from teaching in secondary schools to primary schools often find that parents, even children, ask them why they have ‘moved down’, the idea that someone might voluntarily choose primary teaching over secondary being a hard one to grasp.
