ABSTRACT
The time between the ‘Great Debate’, started by Prime Minister James Callaghan’s speech at Ruskin College in 1976, and the publication of national tests results for 11-year-olds in 2002 has one defining characteristic: the colonisation by the government of the primary school curriculum, with regard to its aims, nature, assessment and modes of delivery. By colonisation I mean, metaphorically, the ‘settlement in a hostile or newly conquered country’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary) so as to control and administer it according to purposes set by the colonising authority. No metaphor is perfect, but in this attempt to colonise the primary curriculum, the natives proved more unruly than the colonisers expected and the colonisers consistently misread the context in which they were working, although in the end they succeeded. The central conceptual problem in the period under review is how substantial and substantive change to the curriculum has been brought about by the government. I argue below that there were three phases in the attempt to solve this problem, but the curriculum was only defined as a problem when the questions being asked about education started to change, when economic difficulties undermined the optimism about social institutions, and especially educational institutions, in the mid 1970s. When this happened, colonisation of the primary curriculum became inevitable, and was able to be construed in the public and professional discourse as desirable to bring about improvements in accountability and performance.
