ABSTRACT
Ideological, technological, economic and other changes in British society in the twentieth century have created considerable impetus for change in education. As with many concepts in education, that of 'curriculum development' is not easy to grasp and impossible to pin down definitively. It is elastic with a range of meanings from one which involves almost every type of educational change to one which refers to the specific processes of planning a course of study. For purposes of convenience, four categories of assumptions are distinguished: those basic to the general notion of curriculum development, those held by people professionally engaged in curriculum development, those specific to the English context and those specific to each set of curriculum proposals. Whatever their correspondence to reality, these were some of the assumptions shared by the variety of agents and agencies charged with the task of devising new intended curricula to take account of cultural, social and economic changes.
