Versions of Primary Education

Robin Alexander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134968244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Getting to the heart of primary education: six contrasting studies of teachers, teaching, learning and classroom discourse, all set in a historical frame. Contains extended lesson transcripts for re-analysis.

The five studies in this book span the tumultuous period from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s. This was a time when the dominant educational ideas and practices of the previous two decades were being questioned and primary teachers were being catapulted from the Plowden era into the very different ethos of the National Curriculum.The first four studies portray the ideas, practices and dilemmas of primary teaching at different points during this period. They also exemplify different approaches to classroom research, though all of them stay close to the interactions between teacher and child which are central to learning. They thus raise educational questions which are perennial and fundamental, rather than tied to policy or fashion. The final study uses a broader brush to provide a historical framework for understanding the particular blend of change and continuity which characterises English primary education as a whole.

Chapter 1

Pluralities

In 1986, when I observed and talked with the teachers who feature in the first of this book’s classroom studies, a national curriculum for England and Wales seemed a possibility, though not yet a certainty. It is true that the debate about education was becoming more noisy and polarised, but then that was the by now all-too-familiar face of this decade of conviction politics, and compared with what had happened elsewhere on the political scene – the jingoism of the Falklands war, the violence and despair of the miners’ strike, the alarm and dissent over the Reagan-Thatcher nuclear weapons alliance, the growing gulf between rich and poor – talk of tidying up the curriculum seemed very small beer. Thus it was still possible for primary teachers to presume, subject to broad public expectations about the importance of the basics, that the curriculum was theirs to shape, and that questions of educational value and purpose, though in a democratic society of concern to everybody, were principally for professionals to define and respond to.

By 1988, when I and colleagues gathered the material from sixty primary classrooms which formed the basis for Chapters 3 and 4, we knew the government’s intentions. The previous April, Secretary of State Kenneth Baker had announced to the Commons Education Committee the imminence of the National Curriculum and related changes, the consultation papers on grant-maintained schools, financial delegation, education in inner London, academic tenure in higher education, collective worship, and of course the National Curriculum, had all been issued, and in between those two events Margaret Thatcher had romped home in the general election for a third successive term, thus making it inevitable that ‘consultation’ would mean nothing of the sort. And so it turned out: in July 1988 the Education Reform Act received Royal Assent, and the governmment had given hardly any ground on the provisions which provoked such widespread protest during the previous months.

Yet still the enormity of what was to come had not struck home in the primary world. The stock assurance at in-service sessions organised to prepare teachers for the changes was ‘Don’t worry: you’re doing this already’, even though the first subject proposals (mathematics and science in August 1988, English and design and technology in November) and the specifications for testing at age 7 issued in December had all indicated otherwise.

Thus it was that the ideas and practices which feature in Chapters 3 and 4 were not much different from those of ten or even twenty years earlier, and a major local education authority remained confident that its vision of primary education, grounded in the certainties of those earlier decades, could and would shape the work of teachers and pupils in its 230 primary schools for many years to come.

By 1992, when the final classroom study in this book (Chapter 5) was undertaken, everything had changed. The National Curriculum had come into force in September 1989. LEAs had submitted their schemes for budgetary delegation that same month and, as these were progressively implemented, so LEA power began to decline. During the next three years the succession of subject interim reports, proposals, consultation reports and draft orders had been translated into statutory orders for all nine subjects at Key Stages 1 and 2, and the assessment procedures for Key Stage 1 had been piloted, trialled, evaluated and implemented. In 1990, ILEA, the country’s largest local education authority, had been abolished. In October 1991, consumerism had spawned a Parents’ Charter whose various threats and promises included the abolition, after a century and a half, of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, and its replacement by parent-friendly OFSTED, putative sibling to OFGAS and OFTEL. Meanwhile, in its run-up to the 1992 general election the government had turned its attention from curriculum to teaching methods, exploiting in the process the report from the project which gave rise to Chapters 3 and 4 of this book, and a controversial discussion paper on classroom practice at Key Stage 2 had been, in just six weeks, commissioned, written and published. (My own involvement in these two developments is not the issue here: my concern at this point is simply to recall the events and the climate.) At the same time, with HMI neutralised and the LEAs weakened, the government had intensified its assault on what it saw as the last bastion of the ‘educational establishment’, the teacher training institutions and departments.

These changes – the challenge to the prevailing culture of primary education, the transformation of the primary curriculum, and the assault on established educational thinking – provide one of the contexts for this book.

During the same period, in what used to be thought of as the rarified world of academe (now rudely shakened by government policies on higher education and teacher training), another revolution was taking place. Most researchers being opportunists, change was generating research on change (and Chapter 5 is an example of this) but, more important for this book’s concerns, primary schools and classrooms had at last been acknowledged as worthy of researchers’ attentions, and a succession of studies focused on teachers and pupils at work. Researchers saw the problems in different ways, came from different research traditions and employed different methods. Thus, all at about the same time, Bennett, Galton, Mortimore and their colleagues were undertaking process-product research which included systematic sampling and a substantial element of quantification with a view to identifying the characteristics of effective teaching; Armstrong was harnessing the intensity of practitioner insight to uncover the processes of learning as it happened; Pollard was using interactionist perspectives to explore the realities of classroom life as these appeared not to external observers but to teachers and children themselves; and Nias was probing ever deeper into the individual and collective psyches of teachers at work.

These are just examples to indicate something of the scope and diversity of the field. By 1988 Alan Blyth, himself arguably the outstanding figure in the post-war development of primary education as a field for serious academic study, mapped out the following areas in which significant research communities were by then at work: child development and learning, philosophical and critical analysis, the sociology of primary schools, organisational and management studies, curriculum studies, pedagogy, and the lives and careers of teachers (Blyth 1989).

The 1988 Education Reform Act gave a boost to some fields of research at the expense of others (as funding for research dried up or was restricted to projects which would advance government policy), especially to work in the fields of curriculum, management, assessment, teacher effectiveness and the impact of policy on teachers and schools. Nevertheless, the territory was by then well staked out and the pre-existing research agendas were maintained. Moreover, just as a war spawns a host of scientific and technological innovations, so policy encouraged attention to areas hitherto not always given the prominence in research which they required – assessment and the use and management of time in schools being two important examples.

These developments in research in primary education, some predating the 1988 Act, some arising as a consequence of it, provide the second context for this book.

Together, the two sets of developments – changes in the rationale, policy and practice of primary education, and changes in the focus and methods of research and study in primary education – combined to suggest the theme of ‘versions’: the idea that, though there is one legal ‘system’ of primary education, there are many views of its proper purposes and conduct, many aspects of the work of teachers and pupils which merit study, and many ways these can be viewed and explored. The idea of ‘versions’ is an important corrective to the unassailable certainties of those, not just in government, who believe that only one model of primary education, and one way of studying it, is possible.

There was a third consideration: born not of the recent past but of the possible future. Millennium studies are currently fashionable, though of course the year 2000 is in reality no more significant for the children who happen to be in our primary schools at that time than the years 1995 or 2005. But it is the symbolic value of the millennium which counts, as we ponder on how far humankind has come since the event which initiated this particular way of defining the passing of the years, and count the costs as well as the benefits of what used to be called ‘progress’. The need to reflect on recent developments seemed to prompt an even more pressing need to consider where primary education might or should be heading, and how far the ideas, policies, structures and practices inherited from the past are adequate to meet the needs of the future.

The other ‘versions’ of primary education, then, have yet to materialise, but the need to identify them is prompted by considerations much more pressing than the imminence of the millennium. First, there is the future itself, in strict terms unknowable and unpredictable, but worthy of the attention of all of us, for it is ours. Especially, it belongs to children in primary schools, now and over the next two or three decades, for assuming that a global catastrophe is avoided, medical advances may enable some of them to live not just well into the next century but possibly beyond. What kinds of lives will they have? What kinds of lives do they deserve? And ‘global’ rather than ‘national’ is the operative word here: for, cliche or not, ours is an increasingly interdependent world – morally as well as economically and electronically – and what happens, say, in the fast expanding economies of the Pacific rim or in the overpopulated Indian sub-continent, let alone the European Union, could well have as great an impact on the lives of these children as any national policies.

Second, there is the matter of the National Curriculum: a model imposed by fiat, untried, untested, unjustified except by recourse to the crudest of claims and slogans. Is this really the version of the primary curriculum which should serve us for the start of the next century, as its proponents proudly proclaim? And what of the attendant policies on assessment and finance?

Third, the Dearing reports of 1993 proposed a five-year moratorium on curriculum change. Dearing, the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (SCAA) and the government may have imagined that this would put a stop to all fond talk of alternatives and encourage teachers to get on with the job of making the 1995 revised model of the National Curriculum work. But making it work does not prove that it is educationally sound, and though one kind of moratorium – on policy made on the hoof and on the deluge of paper from DFE and SCAA – is welcome, that should provide just the opportunity this country needs for asking the questions about education in general and primary education in particular which were pre-empted by government policy in 1987/88 and frustrated by the pace and quantity of change during the years thereafter.

This is the background to the present book. Let us turn now to its structure and content. It draws on four linked empirical studies, together with a fifth study of a historical, analytical and reflective kind which sets both the empirical studies and current developments in a wider perspective and allows us to raise and consider the questions about the future to which I have referred.

Alongside the theme of diversity which is captured in the book’s title and which I have elaborated above, there is a second theme: change and continuity. The evolution of the primary curriculum, and of the processes of teaching and learning in primary schools, demonstrate both radical transformation and the abiding influence of long-established structures, ideas and habits. In this respect we can begin to assess in a balanced way the impact of the two post-war ‘revolutions’ in primary education: that of the 1960s and 1970s, when teachers were on the whole happy to embrace the ideals and practices associated with the Plowden Report, and the traumatic, policy-led changes of the period since 1988 which primary teachers viewed, initially at least, with much less equanimity and with which they are still coming to terms.

The book stays close to the heart of primary education, for the four empirical accounts at its core all draw on systematic classroom observation of children and teachers at work. This observation was undertaken, respectively, in 1986, 1988 and 1992. Thus, the accounts in Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 capture and illustrate the nature, condition and problems of primary education first when the Plowden revolution still provided the main reference-point for most primary teachers, next at a time when government sabre-rattling was loudest and teachers were beginning to face the uncomfortable implications of the shift from laissezfaire to curriculum centralisation and prescription, and finally at a point when the new order was establishing itself and the impact of the 1988 Act in general, and the National Curriculum in particular, was beginning to be assessed.

Each project was to some extent grounded in its predecessor – and the 1992 study actually draws on and contrasts data from two of the earlier studies – but each also explores territory which is new. Thus, the 1986 study is chiefly concerned to unravel the real-life demands and dilemmas of all that used to be connoted by ‘informal’ in primary curriculum and teaching. The two 1988 studies together constitute a substantial analysis of teachers at work in sixty classrooms involved in the widely publicised Leeds evaluation, and their focus moves from the broad context of planning and organisation to the fine detail of pupil-teacher interaction. The fourth study, from 1992, starts where the 1988 account leaves off, and looks at interaction much more closely in an attempt to discover more about this critical influence on children’s learning and about the extent to which as the content of the curriculum changes so the discourse through which content is mediated to children changes also.

It is important not to overstate the chronology, for this is to imply that a study of primary schooling undertaken before the arrival of the National Curriculum may be of little value to those whose professional world is now rather different. That, manifestly, is not the case. The National Curriculum is a specification of subject matter. There is considerably more to education than this, and if a piece of educational research is worth its salt it should address what is universal as well as what is transitory. Indeed, its very way of addressing the here and now should be such as to offer insights into these perennial aspects and problems of education. Pedagogy, a major theme of Chapters 3, 4 and 5, is one such perennial aspect, and a profoundly significant one, for both children and teachers.

Chapters 2 to 6 are mostly based on material produced previously, though only the smaller part of this has actually appeared in print. In its original form Chapter 2 appeared in a collection of studies assessing the character and impact of ‘informal’ primary education (Blyth 1988). Chapters 3 and 4 started life as interim evaluation reports from the Primary Needs Independent Evaluation Project (PRINDEP), and were circulated within Leeds but no further afield. The report which provided the basis for Chapter 3 was then re-edited for inclusion in a published collection of documents from that project (Alexander et al. 1988), while Chapter 4, by a long way the most substantial of the project’s eleven interim reports, has never before appeared outside Leeds. Chapter 5, from the CICADA project, also appears in print here for the first time. Chapter 6 started life as a public lecture given at the University of Leeds. More or less in that form it was published by the Association for the Study of Primary Education (ASPE) as Alexander (1994a). However, the constraints of the occasion for which it was first prepared were such that the discussion of the future of primary education with which it ended had to be very brief. That discussion has now been totally rewritten as a much expanded second half to the paper which also adopts a somewhat different approach to the question of where primary education might be heading.

Placing the five studies together in this way both demonstrates their affinity and the way that as a sequence they combine to provide a manysided account of the critical period 1986–92 and the longer historical span – 1840–1995 – in which this period is set. The book also provides four contributions to the now well-established and increasingly influential field of primary classroom research, and five contrasting approaches to that systematic study of primary education with which policy and professional development need to go hand-in-hand if the system is to improve. It also contains abundant illustrative material of teachers and children at work, including transcribed classroom talk.

It is hoped that these many versions of primary education – past, present and future; observational, conversational and historical; quantitative and qualitative; concerned with classrooms, teachers and children; exploring practices and ideas – will demonstrate something of the current richness of primary education and contribute to the debate about its future.

Chapter 2

Garden or jungle?

Our first version of primary education is the one indicated by the word ‘informal’ – popularly presented as the antithesis of the ‘formal’ or traditional primary education of regimented classrooms, didactic teaching and a subject-bound curriculum, but in reality something considerably more complex. The study combines historical and classroombased perspectives to home in on some of the core dilemmas of day-to-day work experienced by a group of experienced teachers in 1986, the year before the National Curriculum was announced. Thus, though the storm clouds are gathering in the educational sky, few working in the education service at this time have any idea of the thunderbolt which, a year later, the government will unleash. For them, the goal of informality remains as central to professional consciousness as the National Curriculum was to become a few years later.

Certain words have acquired a peculiar potency in primary education, and few more so than ‘informal’. Never properly defined, yet ever suggestive of ideas and practices which were indispu...