Primary Education From Plowden To The 1990s

Norman Thomas., Norman Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781850007081
• eBook ISBN: 9781134957255
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

The Plowden Report delivered high ambitions for more equitable treatment of the under-fives and intended to allow parents and children more influence. Examining how these recommendations have worked in practice, this volume considers changes due to the 1988 Act.

Chapter 1

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Children: Separately and Together

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A neutral though slightly alarming statement about the purpose of schooling — an important part of the educational process — is that it exists to change children from what they otherwise might have been. If it is to have no effect, why spend the effort and money imposing school upon them? In both totalitarian and democratic societies, children are taught to become literate. In the former there might be emphasis on developing obedience and in the latter on individual responsibility. Wherever we are, the statement obliges us, when thinking about schooling, to think also about the children, about what they are like and how they change. That is why the first chapter of this book, mainly about the curriculum and its operation, is about them.

Of course, we have no difficulty in distinguishing between people, including children, and all other living things. Nevertheless, unless a school is on a remote island with only one pupil, each class will be made up of children of mixed age, mixed ability and mixed personality, no matter how much the head teacher may try to group like children together. Before we can consider to what extent schools should or can respond differently to different children we must recall some differences that are educationally significant.

One of the strongest and longest running trends in English education has been the growing concern for children as individuals. Both the Hadow and Plowden Reports placed great emphasis on the importance of taking children's natures into account when deciding how best to educate them. Both drew attention to differences between children of the same age, as have writers of other Reports since. The Hadow Report asserts¹ that:

at the age of five, children are spread out between the mental ages of about three and seven or eight, a total of four to five years. By the age of ten this range has doubled and it probably continues to enlarge till the end of puberty.

The Plowden Report pays early attention to children's growth and development on the grounds that:

At the heart of the educational process lies the child.²

Physical Growth

Plowden drew attention to differences in the rates of development of different parts of the body. The head and brain grow most during the first few years, so that the latter reaches about 90 per cent of its adult weight by the time a child is 5. Children grow taller more rapidly in the first months after birth than they will at any time later, even when they shoot up during puberty. Physical differences between groups and between individuals are also recounted. On average, boys are larger at birth, but girls catch up by six and go through their pubertal height spurt earlier than boys. Boys, when their turn comes, grow more rapidly than the girls did and experience a greater increase in muscular strength. Just as the Hadow Report spoke of mental age and skeletal growth, so the Plowden Report referred to skeletal or ‘bone’ age. The bones in the hand and wrist undergo a sequence of changes as people get older, and these can be plotted in series of X-rays. On this skeletal ladder, girls are some weeks more mature than boys at birth and up to two years ahead by puberty.

These statements about average ages by which children, or groups of children, reach certain levels of growth should, as with ‘mental age’ be treated cautiously:

Among boys of the same chronological age there is a wide range of bone age which, for eight year olds, stretches from six to ten ‘years’.³

Plainly, the range for 8-year-old boys and girls together is wider than four ‘years’, and some girls are less mature in their bone structure than some boys of the same age. It is also important to remember that the rate of maturation is not constant from generation to generation. The Report drew attention to the secular trend in the lowering age of the onset of menstruation in a number of Western countries over a substantial period of time and an increase in the average height of children measured at the same ages.

Differences of achievement

Differences in Reading, Writing and Speaking

The interest in differences between children was picked up again in the Bullock Report of 1975, which followed an enquiry into the teaching of the English language. It quoted a witness as saying:

… in a first-year secondary school class containing the full range of ability, the English teacher may encounter an extraordinarily wide spread in reading age (e.g., from seven to fourteen), and an accompanying wide divergence in maturity of reading interest and taste.⁴

That broad statement hides a maze of complexities. National surveys conducted by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) for the Assessment of Performance Unit⁵ (APU) have shown⁶ that some children misinterpret what they read because they are not familiar with the concepts discussed and vocabulary used. They or others may have difficulty in locating the information they need to answer a question. In some cases, the more complex aspects of English grammar may cause a lack of understanding, though the grammatical system is not a hindrance to the majority. Stylistic variations cause difficulties for many, and the preconceptions children bring can put them off track. The 1982 report shows that very few 11-year-olds ‘appeared to have trouble decoding the printed word.’⁷

The NFER design tests for use with children of a single year group and do not use the concept of, for example, ‘reading age’. They provide tables that make it possible to convert raw scores directly to standardized scores. Whether it is reasonable to define a ‘writing age’ is questionable even within the kinds of uncertainties used in making judgements about mental ages, but no-one looking through the written work of children born in the same school year can fail to recognize that there are differences in the range and complexity of ideas expressed, the clarity of the description or message, adherence to ‘standard’ forms of English including syntax and spelling, the ability to catch and hold the reader's attention. The differences are in part consistent, in the sense that, for example, one child will again and again use a wider vocabulary than another; but inconsistent in the sense that children will swap order according to the accident of the subject of the writing and the states of their interests in it at the time. Work carried out for the APU indicates that about 3 per cent of 11-year-olds⁸ (not in special schools) are in great difficulty with writing. Boys are more likely than girls to have negative attitudes towards writing and girls are more likely to be assessed as better able to express themselves in writing.

Children's writing is influenced by the ways in which they speak and they need to be made more aware of the differences between writing and speaking. Most 11-year-olds⁹ can, to some degree, modify their speaking and listening to suit the circumstances; at the least, they may use different vocabularies, accents and grammar when in the playground as compared with those used in the classroom. Girls and boys are about equal in oral ability. Pupils' performance varies with the purpose of the communication. Individual pupils' spoken language may be either more or less advanced than their performance in reading and writing.

Differences in Mathematical Achievement

A reference to the differences between children in mathematics was made in the Cockroft Report,¹⁰ which produced evidence to show a ‘seven year’ difference in achieving an understanding of place value. When asked to write down the number that is 1 more than 6399, average children of 11 entered the correct number but average children of 10 did not. Additionally, some children of 7 carried out the task correctly and some of 14 did not. That is more evidence, it is said, of a ‘seven year’ range of ability towards the end of the primary school stage.

Surveys by the NFER for the APU reveal still more about mathematical differences between children. The Primary Survey Report No. 2,¹¹ included an account of 11-year-old children's attitudes to mathematics as shown in their responses to a questionnaire. The questions probed whether children liked mathematics, what they thought about the difficulty of the subject, and how far they believed it to be useful to learn. The mean scores in all three groups of questions were similar for boys and girls. When reflecting, more particularly, on their own competence rather than on the inherent difficulty of the subject, girls were more inclined than boys to suppose that they often got into difficulties and were surprised when they succeeded.

The Report quotes other examples of similar findings. Fewer girls than boys liked the more practical topics or found them easy. The (11-year-old) boys, on average, did better than the girls to a statistically significant degree¹² in five of the thirteen sub-categories of the written tests. The five are asterisked in the following full list: lines angles and shapes; symmetry, transformations and co-ordinates; money, time, weight and temperature^*; length, area, volume and capacity^*; concepts — whole numbers; concepts — decimals and fractions^*; computation — whole numbers and decimals; computation — fractions; applications of number^*; rate and ratio^*; generalized arithmetic; sets and relations; probability and data representation. On average, children in schools in metropolitan areas scored significantly less well than children in non-metropolitan areas in nine of the sub-categories. In every sub-category, the mean score was substantially better for children in schools with fewer than 16 per cent on free school meals as compared with those in schools with 36 per cent or more on free school meals. Children in schools with less generous pupil: teacher ratios did better on average than children in other schools. Children in schools where there were fewer pupils in the 10-plus age group (i.e. smaller schools), on average, did better than children in schools with middling to large 10-plus age groups.

Scientific Achievement

The APU's Science Report for Teachers: 1¹³ draws attention to other differences between children. For example, most 11-year-olds read the scales of simple measuring instruments correctly, but only a few took the step of repeating measurements or observations to check results. Most of the children classified objects on the basis of observed properties; about a half made predictions based on observations and used given information to make reasonable predictions; but only a few recorded the observation of fine details, observed the correct sequence of events or gave good explanations of how they arrvied at predictions. The Report records that at this age, the differences between boys and girls are not marked or consistent. Girls, on average, were slightly ahead in using graphs, tables and charts, in observing similarities and differences and in writing up descriptions of events. Boys, on average, were ahead in using measuring instruments, applying physical science concepts to problems and in recording quantitative results.

Differences of Personality and Behaviour

There are other differences between children. Some reference has already been made to self-perception. Most parents who have had more than one child will be aware of the differences of temperament that can be found in two who have drawn f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Children: Separately and Together
• Chapter 2 What Shall Children Be Taught?
• Chapter 3 The Curriculum: The Main Subdivisions
• Chapter 4 Who Determines the Curriculum?
• Chapter 5 The Central Government's Role, 1964—1979
• Chapter 6 The Interventions of the Central Government and Parliament: 1979—1989
• Chapter 7 Assessment and Accountability
• Chapter 8 The National Curriculum and Assessment
• Chapter 9 Operating the Curriculum
• Chapter 10 The Beginning of a New Road
• Bibliography
• Index