Primary Education at a Hinge of History

Colin Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135699529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Primary education is currently at the centre of political attention. Reform is constantly under consideration, though the leading proponents of reform are often far removed from the classroom and the world of hard-pressed, demoralised primary teachers. Colin Richards rectifies this by communicating the big picture of primary school culture. He takes the world of the primary school since Plowden (1967) and traces perennial and emergent issues - the issues that need to be understood in order to make a difference to the future of primary education. Through constructive criticism of the national curriculum, OFSTED, ITT and teaching methodology the book will influence and improve the understanding of policy makers, headteachers, governors and teachers and students.

1 Introduction: Primary Education—
At a Hinge of History?

To its cost or benefit, primary education in England is at the centre of political attention. It is seen as crucial to achieving the government’s target of driving up educational standards. It is the subject of many initiatives. It is the focus of many criticisms. Yet almost all of its critics and leading proponents of its reform, whether in government, the DfEE, QCA, TTA or OFSTED have little or no background experience in primary education to draw on except presumably as pupils (though not always in the state system) and, in some cases, as parents. They have no first-hand experience of the culture of the primary education they are trying to reform, no empathy with hard-pressed, demoralized primary teachers struggling with an almost impossible job and no understanding of the recent history of primary education with its stresses, pressures, opportunities and enduring myths.

This book provides perspectives on the developing culture and context of primary education since the publication of the Plowden Report in 1967. It analyses and comments on a wide range of issues, many of which are current concerns and remain perennial to the pursuit of primary education. It provides a constructive critique of the development of the National Curriculum and of OFSTED; comments on developments in primary teacher education from the viewpoint of a concerned ‘returner’ to higher education; and contributes to contemporary debates about primary teaching methodology and the future of primary education from the perspective of someone who, very immodestly, wants his views heard.

The book is based partly on unpublished material, originally written as talks or lectures, and partly on published work; all the chapters have been modified to varying degrees and all, except the historical pieces, have been up-dated. Some of the chapters are contributions to the history of English primary education. Others contribute to current debates and introduce concepts or distinctions to carry that discussion forward. Still others are deliberately speculative and to a degree polemical raising issues about the future of primary education in the medium term. Each chapter in the book is prefaced by a short section in which I put the chapter in the context of developments since 1967: and highlight the significance of the issues it raises.

The main title of the book is taken from this ‘Platform’ piece published in the Times Educational Supplement in April 1996. I felt it was important to record how primary schools had coped reasonably successfully with the introduction of the National Curriculum and the multitude of other changes consequent on the 1988 Education Reform Act and, very importantly, how they had begun to re-examine many of their long-established assumptions and practices such as topic work, the class-teacher system, grouping practices and other aspects of primary pedagogy. I wanted to paint a picture of a sector ‘on the move’, self-critical, sceptical towards the ‘verities of the past’, responsive to change and ‘at a hinge in its history’. However, I wanted to draw attention to the deep malaise and demoralization within primary schools. I also wanted to warn against the gathering forces of reaction whose view of primary education was more informed by the realities (and aspirations) of the nineteenth century rather than the late twentieth century and who could turn that ‘hinge’ backwards to the certainties of a latter-day elementary education rather than forward to confront the challenges and uncertainties of primary education in the early twenty-first century.

I hope that this book will help primary practitioners make sense of the present and recent past and that it will also dispel many misconceptions and misunderstandings about primary education as it faces an uncertain future ‘at a hinge in its history’. Who knows, it might even make a small contribution to the re-education of at least some contemporary critics and proponents of reform.

I don’t know where the idea of a ‘hinge of history’ originated but I first used it in 1979 when giving a talk to primary headteachers on developments in the 1980s. I remember making much of the crucial importance of the date on which I gave the talk and then speculating, I believed authoritatively, on a wide range of probable developments. Almost none of my speculations proved correct! My only success was to predict the crucial significance of the date 8 May 1979, the date of the general election which brought the Conservative Party to power. As with hinges which open or shut doors, so that day opened up a wide range of unimagined possibilities and initiatives and shut off others. To use a fashionable cliché it proved ‘a defining moment’ in the recent history of the education service

I believe that 17 years on, primary education is again at a ‘hinge of history’ where possibilities can be opened up or shut down, where policies and practice can move forward or regress. This ‘hinge’ is not tied to a general election, though one is in the offing. There is a very real paradox. At the very time when primary education is poised to move forward after a decade of far-reaching change, there is a danger of failure of nerve, a possible fateful hesitation, a danger of reversion to the certainties of nineteenth-century education rather than confrontation with the challenges and uncertainties of twenty-first century primary education.

Primary schools generally (though not universally) have achieved much in the decade since 1986. David Bell in the Times Educational Supplement (9 February 1996) highlights the successful introduction of the National Curriculum and the implementation of more sophisticated assessment procedures at a time of falling budgets and rising class sizes—achieved without damaging the very positive, motivating atmosphere of so many primary schools. A dispassionate evaluation of evidence from OFSTED and other sources reveals other improvements: the successful introduction of LMS; the development of more effective curriculum coordination and planning; the fostering of closer, more productive links with parents; more systematic approaches to school and staff development. Other improvements could be cited. There is no inspection evidence to suggest that these have been achieved at the expense of standards in the so-called but mis-named ‘basic skills’; indeed, there is evidence of improvement in children’s basic knowledge, understanding and skills related to time, place and the physical/biological world.

Of possibly longer term significance is the questioning of long-established assumptions and practices. In some (though again not all) schools, primary education is being seen, not as an end in itself or merely preparatory to secondary education, but as part of a reasonably consistent, continuous and coherent educational experience offered to pupils from 5 (or earlier) to 16. In some schools, distinctive curricula go well beyond the basic requirements of the National Curriculum. In some, the ‘mixed economy’ of separate subject work and topic work is being reviewed (though rarely replaced) and separate treatment given to particular aspects of the programmes of study. In some, generalist class teaching is being complemented (but again rarely replaced) by forms of semi-specialist teaching to make better use of the curricular expertise available on the staff. In some, teaching methodology is being ‘opened up’ to scrutiny; discussion about the relative merits of class, group or individual teaching (a relatively unimportant pedagogic issue) is being extended to a much more valuable examination of the range and quality of teaching techniques to be employed whatever the context. Such questioning of assumptions and practice is necessary if primary education is to move consciously forward, rather than consciously or unconsciously back, into the twenty-first century.

YET, despite some improvement in policy and practice, despite some encouraging signs of a healthy professional scepticism towards the verities of the past, there is a deep malaise within English primary education—a malaise shared by so many heads, teachers, advisers, inspectors and HMI. There is a feeling of disspiritness, a sense of being ill-used by government and by government agencies such as OFSTED; a feeling of being misunderstood and unappreciated by local and national politicians; a sense of being victimized and scape-goated by unsympathetic media and others anxious to denigrate rather than objectively evaluate educational achievement. A decade or more of derision is in danger of corroding the professionalism of so many heads, teachers and inspectors.

This negative tone is captured for me in this year’s Annual Report from Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools. The dismal picture it paints of English primary education is not one which I recognize. In my view, it contributes to a deepening, not an alleviation, of the malaise afflicting primary education. It needs to be contested. The lowering of morale and loss of self-confidence occasioned by this and other examples of negative comment, are particularly regrettable at a time when the rhetoric of the Dearing settlement offers schools the possibility of reclaiming the curriculum and making it to some extent their own through the exercise of professional discretion.

That rhetoric needs to be accepted at face value. The discretion it offers needs to be seized and worked upon in school after school despite countervailing pressures such as testing, performance tables and OFSTED’s increasing preoccupation with inspecting a core, rather than a broad entitlement, curriculum.

At this hinge of its history, primary education is indeed at a ‘defining moment’. Building on the achievements of the last decade and rising to the challenge of discretion, post-Dearing primary schools could develop broad, challenging curricula, perhaps with elements of tailor-made enrichment, which involve a liberal view of what is basic to a child’s education and which are taught through a wide variety of techniques in a range of contexts. Or they could lose their nerve and end up providing a curriculum dominated by the ‘basic basics’ which fails to challenge the multiple intelligences of their pupils and which is delivered by a pedagogy more suited to the nineteenth rather than the twenty-first century.

Will the next decade see the continuing development of a genuine primary education or the re-emergence of neo-elementary schooling?

Part 1
Primary Education:
Towards a Recent History

2 The Plowden Report: Reappraised

The publication of the Plowden Report (Children and their Primary Schools) in 1967 represented a major landmark in the history of English primary education. It represented the high point of political and public interest in primary education in the 50 years following the Second World War. It brought primary education into the limelight. It represented primary education as part of the ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s. It embodied a spirit of optimism, expansion and confidence, far removed from the educational recession and professional depression of the decades that followed. It promised, though was not able to deliver, the end of primary education’s ‘Cinderella’ status within public education. To many, it represented the zenith of the beneficent influence of ‘child-centred’ education both in terms of official orthodoxy and professional practice. To many others, it represented a pernicious influence which was to weaken educational standards and quality for decades to come. ‘Represented’ is key to understanding its significance. The Central Advisory Council did not, could not, legislate; it did not make policy; it did not provide resources; it did not administer primary schools. It did, however, represent and articulate the importance of primary education to a degree that no other official reports before or since have done. Throughout the last 30 years it has remained the most quoted text in the canon of primary education. Its influence on professional opinion cannot be denied; its influence on policy and practice is more uncertain and contentious. Only now can its effects be assessed with any degree of objectivity, as this brief appraisal, written in 1997, attempts to do.

English primary education badly needs appreciating in two senses of the word—a favourable recognition of its achievements and a sensitive understanding and appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses. Children and their Primary Schools (the Plowden Report) provided both for primary education in the 1960s. Its celebration of achievement may have been over the top; its appraisal may have been flawed in important respects; and the trends it identified may have failed to materialize, but it stands as a significant landmark in the history of primary education and one which inspired many primary teachers.

It was the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education which, in 1926, first officially recommended the establishment of primary and secondary education as two distinct stages to replace the notion of elementary education. It was the Committee’s second report in 1931 (The Primary School) which established a rationale for primary education and made recommendations on its curriculum, teaching, organization and staffing based on what was known of children’s physical and mental development. It viewed the curriculum both in terms of ‘activity’ and ‘experience’ but also in terms of ‘knowledge to be acquired’ and ‘facts to be stored’. It acknowledged ‘the great and special virtues’ of class-teaching but pointed out that there were ‘limits to its flexibility and therefore its usefulness’ because of the ‘varying needs of children or the natural movement of their minds’. If the rest of philosophy can be regarded as footnotes to Plato, then in a very real sense Plowden provided the footnotes to the 1931 report with its developmental emphasis and with its eclectic approach to both curriculum and pedagogy (unacknowledged by many of its critics).

In the intervening period between the publication of the two reports there were many significant events—not least a world war and in education a new act (1944) which formally established primary education as a distinct stage in the English educational system. Post-war, the government’s chief concerns for the new sector related to problems of teacher supply, ‘roofs over heads’ for the fast-burgeoning population of primary-aged pupils and the replacement of ‘all-through’ schools by primary and secondary provision (a process not completed until after the publication of Plowden). In very many areas junior schools and the junior departments of newly established primary schools were in thrall to the selection examination at 11 plus. Those schools large enough to stream pupils by ability did so. For older primary pupils, in particular, the developments advocated by the 1931 report largely went unrealized; their curriculum remained dominated by the teaching of reading, writing, number and ‘intelligence’ in preparation for the selection examination.

However, with younger children, a long-established developmental tradition did increase its influence on practice post-war. In many, though not all, infant schools the rigidities of the timetable were dispensed with; work related to centres of interest or topics was introduced; children were given more choice of activities and encouraged to take a measure of responsibility for their own learning; classrooms were reorganized along ‘informal’ lines; more individual and small group teaching took place; there was an increasing emphasis on methods involving ‘discovery’, creativity and first-hand experience. Such approaches also began to affect junior-aged pupils in some schools in a number of local education authorities such as Oxfordshire, West Riding, Bristol and Leicestershire. It was developments such as these that Plowden identified as ‘a quickening trend’ and sought to publicize, celebrate and disseminate for the benefit of all pupils up to the age of 12 (its recommended age of transfer).

There are a number of important general points to be made about the report. First and foremost it was a serious attempt ‘to consider primary education in all its aspects’. It took over three years to complete; it involved commissioning a great deal of research; it drew on a survey by HMI of all English primary schools; it called on oral or written evidence from a very wide range of interested parties; it also involved a small element of comparison with primary education overseas. The Plowden Committee amassed facts, canvassed opinions but was not afraid to make generalizations, judgments and recommendations on the basis of the evidence it had collected. The report provided a rich, detailed, comprehensive appreciation of a developing sector.

Allied to this was the principled approach adopted in the report. It made its underlying values very explicit: equality of opportunity, compensation for handicaps, respect for individuality, and a commitment to the highest educational standards involving ‘special stress on individual discovery, on first-hand experience and on opportunities for creative work’. It treated research findings with caution and care; it revealed, rather than hid, the wide spectrum of opinion it solicited but it was not frightened to take its stand in favour of the ‘developmental tradition’. It asserted rather too confidently, as it turned out, that ‘the gloomy forebodings of the decline of knowledge which would follow progressive methods have been discredited’.

But most amazing of all to the reader who revisits the report after 30 years was its positive, affirmative tone. Not only was the future of English society viewed optimistically, but teachers, schools and, above all, children were valued both for what they had achieved and what they could achieve in the future. The report praised, celebrated, and encouraged. In a number of places its plaudits verged on the hyperbolical and made many readers sceptical of the judgments of the Committee and of the representativeness of the practice it characterized—‘English primary education at its best…is very good indeed. Only rarely is it very bad. The average is good’ (p. 461, my italics).

Partly because of its very positive stance the report was criticized by many practitioners (including me) for being far too Utopian. With its composite vignettes of ‘good practice’ and its inevitably selective use of illustrations to support its aspirations it presented a view of practice far removed from the reality of very many primary teachers toiling with classes of over 40 in urban contexts, coping with the demands (and backlash) of the ‘11 plus’ and very often still imbued with the attitudes, expectations and practices associated with the elementary school tradition. To many, its aspirations, both for them as teachers and for their pupils, appeared utterly remote and unrealistic. To use 1960s’ language, it probably put off more teachers than it ‘turned on’. In too many cases its advocacy of what it considered excellent practice militated against the generality of practice advancing towards what it would see as good.

One of its most appealing features, its purple prose, proved a mixed blessing since phrases taken out of context could be, and were, seized upon both by its critics and by its uncritical devotees. ‘The child is the agent in his own learning’, the ‘danger sign’ of ‘much time spent on teaching’ and the all-too-confident assertion that ‘finding out’ has proved to be better for children than ‘being told’ were seen by some as implying an abdication of the teacher’s responsibility to teach. Both the critics and the zealots conveniently forgot other passages: ‘from the start there must be teaching as well as learning’ or ‘we certainly do not deny the value of “learning by description” or the need for practice of skills and consolidation of knowledge’. The devil can quote scripture to suit his purposes; that was also true of both the antagonists and the protagonists of Plowden.

The effects of the report are difficult to summarize. Certainly for some teachers it provided, and still provides, a perennial source of inspiration—a view of what might be possible ‘in the best of all possible worlds’. Its support for individuality and creativity led to some outstanding work by individual schools or teachers which demonstrated how untapped by conventional schooling is the potential of so many children. It provided powerful support for the abolition of selection (already gaining ground for other reasons) and it helped remove the widespread practice of streaming by ability and the inequalities and the waste that system of internal organization had wreaked. It transformed the physical layout of many schools and classrooms.

But it had other effects too. The value it placed on individuality led in too many schools to an undue emphasis on individual learning, impossible to implement effectively in all but very small classes, and denying too many children sustained interaction with the teacher and other pupils either as a class or in groups. A minority of teachers did effectively abdicate their responsibilities for teaching. Too often far more attention was paid to the niceties of classroom layout, display and learning environment and not enough attention to the content of the curriculum or the means by which it might be taught. The ‘laissez-faire’ curriculum of the 1970s and early 1980s owed much to the lack of a firm clear lead from Plowden on curriculum matters. Having said that, there was no significant ‘primary school revolution’ along Plowden lines; the ‘quickening trend’ it identified failed to materialize.

The publication of the Plowden Report in 1967 contributed to an exceptional context in which primary schools o...