ABSTRACT
The so-called ‘great debate’ about education followed Prime Minister Callaghan’s speech at Ruskin College, Oxford in 1976 which questioned the success of the work which British schools were doing in meeting the needs of a modern society. It was hardly a ‘debate’ at all, since it involved a number of public meetings around the country at which most contributors came from established positions and reiterated their present point of view, but it did have the effect of further opening the door to the ‘secret garden’ of the curriculum which had been in the hands of schoolteachers rather than of administrators for almost the whole of the century. The idea of a National Curriculum was born.
