Introduction

In recent years the role of the subject or curriculum co-ordinator in the primary school has emerged as an essential element in the management of a quality learning experience for all. However, the various modelsof the role of the co-ordinator which have been developed during the last decade, certainly in the minds of practitioners in schools, are often viewed almost as flights of fancy. Seen through nostalgic eyes they may appear to belong to a former age of comparatively generous funding of a national education service, when it was optimistically assumed that time and resources would be in sufficient supply to enable co-ordinators to support the work of less confident colleagues as and when necessary. Or, alternatively, these models are dismissed as purely academic constructs which represent unrealistic and unattainable demands on the skills and persistence of co-ordinators, and which fail to reflect the very real difficulties of observing and attempting to support colleagues at the point of delivery – in their classrooms.