The Cambridge Primary Review was carried out in the context of a number of theoretical and policy-relevant developments in the study of children and childhood. Whilst Plowden (CACE 1967) could confidently, it seems, rely on Piagetian concepts – a universalist vision of the child as individual explorer programmed to develop through identifiable stages – more recently other ideas within developmental psychology and sociology and the rights movement have come to prominence. All three conceptualise children as active participants in social relations and learning. Thus psychologists stress that knowledge is actively constructed through social

interactions (Goswami and Bryant in Chapter 6 of this volume). Socio-cultural theory focuses on the specificity of the concepts, language and patterns of action that children acquire in their earliest social environments – at home (for example, Bruner 1986); it is fashionable nowadays to study children ‘in their cultures’, rather than ‘the child’ in isolation (Greene 1999). We learn that children come to school with varying languages and varying linguistic styles, which may clash with those of the school (Bernstein 1971). We learn about the plurality of children’s daily experiences and about cultural variation in the goals of socialisation across the world (Cole 1996; LeVine 2003). In relation to this, Penn (2002) has described and deplored the globalising of Western child-rearing ideas. In England, work on the varying cultural arenas within which children grow up has built on Bourdieu’s work and has argued for the necessity for schools to recognise and respond to variation in children’s lived experience. Psychological paradigms which focus on children’s own knowledge and perspectives –

and which remain the dominant approach to children in England – are complemented by the sociology of childhood, developed over the last 25 years, where children are understood as social agents who contribute to social relational processes and to the construction of their own childhoods (Prout and James 1990; Hutchby and Moran-Ellis 1998b; Mayall 2002). Children are conceptualised as a social group, which contributes to the division of labour in a society, largely through the work they do in pre-schools and schools (Qvortrup 1985). Commentators within this paradigm draw attention to the power that adults hold over children and over childhood itself; to adult responsibilities to enable good childhoods; and to the difficulties adults and children face when adults try to reconcile adult power with respect for children (for example, Shamgar-Handelman 1994). These ideas challenge the idea of the teacher as benevolent but intrinsically superior, responding to the ‘needs’ and stages of development in their ‘pupils’; instead, the educational endeavour is to be seen as a joint enterprise between citizens.