Essential Theory for Primary Teachers

An introduction for busy trainees

Lynne Graham-Matheson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415722827
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317624608
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Essential Theory for Primary Teachers is a succinct, accessible introduction to the key theories, concepts and policies that have shaped primary education as we know it, and underpin our practice in the classroom. Written with the ever busy training and practising teacher in mind, this straightforward guide offers the foundations for a solid understanding of how we teach and learn effectively, and how we develop as professionals.

Together with key further reading highlights, a glossary of acronyms, and an at-a-glance timeline of the major events, acts and policies in education it explains core topics:

• A short history of the education system
• What is education for?
• Inequality and education
• Special educational needs and inclusion
• Child development
• How children learn
• Theories of motivation
• Behaviour for learning
• Assessment for learning
• Understanding and using research evidence
• Undertaking your own action research project

Essential Theory for Primary Teachers brings together in one volume theory and knowledge that stands the test of time, it guides you through what others have said about them and will help you relate them to your own practice. A much-needed source of guidance for training and newly-qualified-teachers, it will support you as you develop the skills you need to teach confidently and help your learners succeed.

1 The English education system since 1944

DOI: 10.4324/9781315754604-1

The further back you look, the further forward you are likely to see.

(Winston Churchill)

The 1944 Education Act and selection

The 1944 Education Act was very significant because it provided free secondary education for all, for the first time. In 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill wanted to establish ‘a state of society where the advantages and privileges which hitherto have been enjoyed only by the few, shall be far more widely shared by the men and youth of the nation as a whole’ (Taylor 1977, p. 158; note the emphasis on men and youth, rather than boys and girls). The First World War had made clear the wide divisions in society, and, between the wars, there was a full debate about education, at a time of high unemployment and with a quarter of the country living on a subsistence diet. There was much consideration of the nature of primary education and growing interest in the work of people such as Dewey and Montessori. The 1944 Act was described as ‘a drastic recasting of our educational system’ (Giles 1943, p. 21, in Jones 2003, p. 15). Reformers were delighted, because it promised a free, common and universal system of education for students up to the age of 18, underpinned by the principle that, ‘the nature of a child’s education should be based on his capacity and promise and not by the circumstances of his parent’ (Board of Education 1943, p. 7).

The five Hadow Reports (1923–33) and the Spens Report (1938) were produced by the Consultative Committee, and these in turn shaped the Education Act 1944 (the Butler Act), which set out the structure for state education in England following the Second World War. The 1944 Act gave governors and head teachers control of the curriculum and resources. It did not anticipate politicians being in control of the curriculum – in 1960, Sir David Eccles, Conservative Minister of Education, said he was not expected to enter ‘the secret garden of the curriculum’. Head teachers were very much in control in schools, and education was rarely the subject of debate at Cabinet level until the 1980s.

Apart from free secondary education for all, the Butler Act’s most important provision was a proposal for three types of education – primary, secondary and further. The Act also introduced the controversial 11 plus examination – a set of tests in arithmetic, English, problem-solving and sometimes verbal and non-verbal reasoning – at age 11. These tests sorted children into three categories – academic, practical and technical – and determined whether they went to a grammar, secondary modern or technical school. Some have suggested that this was social policy not educational policy, and debates around selection have continued throughout the recent history of education.

All schools were supposed to have equal status, although catering for different abilities. Three types of secondary school had been recommended by Spens (Board of Education 1943, pp. 2–3):

• Grammar schools were for the pupil who was interested in learning for its own sake, who could grasp an argument or follow a piece of connected reasoning.
• Technical schools were for pupils whose interests and abilities lay markedly in the field of applied science or applied art.
• Secondary modern schools catered for the pupil who dealt more easily with concrete things than with ideas.

As universities wanted a grammar school education for admission, pupils from other schools were excluded. In the 1930s, about 10 per cent of elementary school pupils were selected to go on to secondary schools. There were clear class divides, and secondary schools were failing pupils – twice as many pupils went on to higher education in Germany, even more in France, over three times as many in Switzerland and about ten times as many in the US. Scotland’s system, ‘based on a widespread respect for learning and a more traditionally egalitarian social outlook’ (Benn and Chitty 1996, p. 4), was also doing much better than England’s. There were still arguments based on a divided and elitist system, but, whereas before this was about class, now it was based on intelligence and aptitude. As Ball (2013) comments, the history of education is about a complex set of relationships between the state, the economy and social class. Educationists, trade unionists and others wanted a more rational system and an end to plans for differentiated secondary education, but the Ministry of Education was determined on a divided system.

The idea of grouping children according to their ability came from the new technique of psychometrics, or measuring human abilities. In France, Alfred Binet had developed intelligence tests; an American, Lewis Therman, developed Binet’s work and, in 1916, came up with the idea of the intelligence quotient, or IQ. These early psychologists believed that intelligence was inherited and you had to make do with what you had, and so it made sense for schools to educate children according to their level of ability. Through a number of studies of twins, Cyril Burt, appointed as the first psychologist for London, became convinced that intelligence was inherited (although with some environmental influence) and fixed, and so the education system should be a segregated system. Promoting testing to categorise children, Burt was one of the most influential members of the Hadow Committee, which was convinced by Burt that:

by the age of twelve the range has become so wide that a still more radical classification is imperative. Before this age is reached children need to be grouped according to their capacity, not merely in separate classes or standards, but in separate types of schools.

(Cyril Burt evidence to Hadow, in Van der Eyken 1973, p. 320)

Intelligence was believed not to be fixed until children reached the age of 11, hence the 11 plus. It is ironic that the 11 plus came from the idea that intelligence was innate and fixed, and yet parents still expected primary schools to prepare their children to pass it. Rather than being seen as a way of allocating children to an appropriate school, for many it was about gaining entry to a grammar school and a matter of pass or fail. After his death, much of Burt’s work was found to be fraudulent and he was largely discredited, but it was the strong conviction that the age of 11 was significant that led to the primary/secondary division we still have today.

Labour’s 1964 election manifesto promised to abolish the 11 plus and reorganise secondary education on comprehensive lines, but, although the government expected local education authorities (LEAs) to go comprehensive, it did not compel them to do so. According to Gillard (2011), a fatal mistake was in not looking at how to run comprehensive and grammar schools together, and so comprehensive schools were implemented in an uneven and piecemeal way. Even within comprehensive schools, the General Certificate of Education/Certificate of Secondary Education (GCE/ CSE) exam system divided children into academic and nonacademic streams.

The 11 plus was abolished in 1976, but 164 grammar schools remain in England. In those counties that still operate the 11 plus, it is optional and used as an entrance test for a specific group of schools. In Northern Ireland, the 11 plus was abolished in 2008, but parents and grammar schools were unhappy about a ‘one size fits all’ education system, and there are now two 11 plus-type selection tests, run by two school consortia.

Critics claim that it is wrong to label children at 11 years old: ‘a system that labelled over two-thirds of children as failures at the age of 11’ (Benn and Miller 2006). In the 1950s, the Central Advisory Com mittee for Education wanted to assess whether the 11 plus was a reliable measure of intelligence and future attainment by tracking children who had passed or failed. It was found that 22 per cent of army and 29 per cent of RAF recruits to national service had been assigned to the wrong type of school, according to their ability or background (Ministry of Education 1959, p. 119). In 1969 Pedley

(p. 24) said that, ‘Success bred success and failure bred failure’. A child transferred from secondary modern to grammar school increased their score on an IQ test by 23 points (Sumner 2010). Early tests had a class bias, and the 11 plus was redesigned during the 1960s to be more like an IQ test, but research suggests that grammar schools are still more likely to be attended by middle-class children.

Primary schools

In the early 1900s, educationists agreed that the elementary schools did not provide a suitable education for the under-5s, and doctors suggested that attendance at school was prejudicial to health, as it deprived young children of sleep, fresh air, exercise and freedom of movement at a critical stage in their development (Hadow 1933, pp. 30–1). The 1921 Education Act empowered LEAs to provide nursery schools or classes for 2–5-year-olds, whose attendance at such a school was necessary or desirable for their healthy physical and mental development and to attend to the ‘health, nourishment and physical welfare’ of children attending such schools. By the 1920s, London and some other towns had three-decker schools – the infant department on the ground floor, up to age 7 on one of the other storeys (divided into boys and girls) and up to age 14, the school leaving age. In 1926, Hadow recommended a change of department at age 11 as well as at 7 – the three storeys could have infant, junior and senior, instead of infants, boys and girls (see Plowden 1967, vol. 1, pp. 97–9). This led to the creation of primary or junior schools for 5–11s, which was government policy from 1928 but was formally established in the 1944 Education Act. Local authorities had to provide primary and secondary schools ‘sufficient in number, character and equipment to afford for all pupils opportunities for education offering such variety of instruction and training as may be desirable in view of their different ages, abilities and aptitudes’ (1944, p. 8, 1c).

The 11 plus and large primary classes in the late 1940s and 1950s meant that the curriculum for younger children was little changed from that of the drill method of elementary schools, with the emphasis on basic literacy and numeracy – ‘the tradition derived from 1870 was still dominant’ (Galton et al. 1980, p. 36) – but a number of factors began to influence this, including the growth of developmental psychology, the kindergarten movement based on Froebel’s theory and practice and the work of Dewey, Montessori, Isaacs and others. According to Hadow (1931, p. 93), ‘the curriculum of the primary school is to be thought of in terms of activity and experience, rather than knowledge to be acquired and facts to be stored’. Galton et al. (1980) argue that although by 1939 this new approach had become the official orthodoxy of teacher training colleges, local authority inspectors and so on, the extent to which it affected actual practice in schools was another matter. Primary schools were in the middle of a number of competing forces, and those who believed in the new ideas about child development clashed with those – who tended to win – who saw the job of primary schools as getting children through the scholarship exams, so that primary schools were seen as ‘a sorting, classifying, selective mechanism’ (Galton et al. 1980, p. 36). When the 11 plus was abolished, teachers, especially in primary schools, suddenly had freedom to experiment with progressive styles of teaching, child-centred learning, open-plan schools, discovery methods and creativity, and there was real optimism about education. ‘One of the main educational tasks of the primary school is to build and strengthen children’s intrinsic interest in learning and lead them to learn for themselves rather than from fear of disapproval or desire for praise’ (Plowden 1967, vol. 1, p. 196).

Before the Plowden Report in 1967, primary schools had mainly fitted in with and fed into secondary schools. The report noted that changes between the wars had been unplanned and unco-ordinated – understandable, perhaps, in the circumstances. The Plowden Committee visited primary schools in many countries and noted that the issues were the same everywhere. With its roots in the Hadow Report, Plowden was probably the single greatest official impetus for progressive education in the twentieth century anywhere – there was a post-war desire for freedom and self-expression, and the report was very much about the new ideas in psychology and sociology and reference to skills and development.

Recurring themes of Plowden were individualised learning, flexibility in the curriculum, the use of the environment, learning by discovery and the importance of the evaluation of children’s progress – teachers should ‘not assume that only what is measurable is valuable’ (Plowden 1967, vol. 1, p. 202). Ideas in the report were firmly grounded in Piagetian theory and ideas about developmental stages (see Chapter 5) and an insistence that discovery learning is best.

Faith schools and religion

For some, the 1944 Act failed, because it did not resolve the problems of church schools and private education. (Now, we refer to faith schools, rather than church schools.) Since the 1870 Education Act, the Church of England had controlled most rural and many urban elementary schools. Almost all were housed in Victorian buildings that the church could not afford to maintain and ‘were in many cases the epitome of low-level mass education’ (Jones 2003, p. 18). The government could have subsidised them but would have found strong opposition from those who objected to public funds subsidising the church. The solution was to trade influence for cash – public funding in return for majority local authority representation on governing bodies. The Act categorised church schools as either voluntary aided, where the church had greater control and which received 50 per cent of building and maintenance costs from state funds, or as voluntary controlled, where the local authority had greater control and which received 100 per cent of costs. According to Barber (1994), ‘The question of the future role of the churches in education proved more complex, more sensitive and more fiercely contested...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The English education system since 1944
• 2 Education – the great debate
• 3 Inequality and education
• 4 Special educational needs and inclusion
• 5 Child development
• 6 How children learn
• 7 Theories of motivation
• 8 Behaviour for learning
• 9 Assessment for learning
• 10 Research
• 11 Critical reading and writing
• Useful websites
• Acronyms you might come across
• Useful information
• Index