ABSTRACT
Prior to the advent of the National Curriculum in 1988-9, the nature of teachers’ planning was quite different to what is expected today. As students, before we started our teaching carreers, we would carry out detailed lesson plans for each activity that we planned. These activities would be generated from an original ‘topic web’ that would have a central theme or ‘topic’ that would unite all the activities for that half term or term. It was expected that the children’s responses to the activities would enable the teacher to respond to their interests and needs by changing the initial planning. Once we qualified as teachers, the detailed lesson plans were not required and the main planning requirement was the topic web and a weekly plan that listed the activities to be carried out. The negative aspect of this was that children could cover the same topic several times in their primary school career, in a way that was unplanned, simply because teachers cooincidently chose the same topic. Although in the better schools these topics were mapped to avoid unnecessary repetition.
