ABSTRACT
Teaching in primary schools has often been thought of as having a somewhat lower status than ‘real’ teaching – that is, teaching a proper subject in a proper school, which means a secondary school. Primary teaching, so the folklore tells us, is just looking after young children until they get to the ‘proper’ school – showing them how to hold a pencil, wiping their noses, telling them a story or two, but not actually teaching them too much of real importance. Those (fairly rare) teachers who have made the change from teaching in secondary schools to primary schools often find that parents, even pupils, ask them why they have ‘come down here’, the idea that someone might voluntarily choose primary teaching over secondary being a hard one to grasp.
