ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the historical aspects, referring mainly to the education systems in England and Wales. The beginning of the nineteenth century heralded the start of widespread British systems of voluntary and then compulsory education, in which mathematics slowly took a broader and more central role. The examination syllabuses, in both mathematics and English, were usually designed to ensure that pupils had an adequate grounding for grammar school studies rather than to assess the learning achieved in the primary school. The psychological ideas, together with data on physical growth, suggested the need for children up to the age of 11 years to receive a separate education in primary schools. The post war years brought a renewal of help to schools by societies, firms and business companies. Just before the Second World War, the 1938 Spens report highlighted the unsuitability of examining older pupils in three separate branches of mathematics, namely arithmetic, algebra and geometry.
