ABSTRACT
The Education Reform Act (1988) and the National Curriculum may have had the intention to change the ideology of primary education from an informal and child-centred approach to a more formal one. While teachers have certainly made changes in the way they work there is little evidence that they have become less child-centred or completely abandoned former ways of working. Broadfoot (1996: 84), writing of the findings of the PACE (Primary Assessment, Curriculum and Experience) project with respect to the changes brought about by the Education Reform Act and the National Curriculum, reports the following conclusions:
It is clarity of aims, assessment skills and subject knowledge which have figured most prominently as requirements of change. Against this, teaching skills, knowledge of and relationships with children have stayed as constants in the core of teachers’ work. Thus there is little evidence as yet of any shift from a child-centred ideology of teaching. Rather a reconfirmation of the findings of PACE 1 that teachers will add new practices to their repertoire by law, but that in the short term at least, will seek to mediate the goals of these new practices to support their existing understanding of what primary teaching is and indeed their values concerning what it should be.
