ABSTRACT
The most obvious indicator of curriculum priority is the amount of time spent by the child in each area. However, while in secondary schools such calculations are straightforward, and a timetable analysis will suffice (see Wilcox and Eustace 1981), in primary schools time allocations are more difficult to ascertain. There are four reasons for this. First, the classteacher system enables teachers to be highly flexible from one day or week to the next whereas a published secondary timetable is necessarily rigid and predictable: thus the typical week, let alone the typical day, may be hard to define. Second, variation in curriculum emphasis: one child might be having extra remedial reading while others at the same time are undertaking a topic. Third, the organisational practice of having different activities going on simultaneously makes the recording of time allocations very difficult. Fourth, there is the ideological disinclination of many primary teachers to define their teaching in terms of others’ curriculum labels.
