ABSTRACT
Despite promising innovations and lively ideas for change in many individual schools, curriculum thinking both nationally and locally was still drifting and uncertain. But increasingly vociferous public opinion and an emphatic shift of stance among politicians, civil servants and curriculum researchers brought inquisition and counterreformation by 1975. The most unfortunate victims of the clamour for improved classrooms were the children whose schools were publicly investigated, exposed as shoddy, violent or incompetently staffed. But the first casualty, the Schools Council, attracted little sympathy. 1
