Primary Education (1959)

(page numbers in brackets)

Notes on the text
Preliminary pages (i-xiii)
Foreword, Preface, Contents

Part 1 Historical
Chapter I (1-11)
Recent History of Primary Education

Part 2 The Primary Schools
Chapter II (15-26)
Introduction
Chapter III (27-36)
Nursery Schools and Classes
Chapter IV (37-55)
Infant schools
Chapter V (56-77)
Junior Schools
Chapter VI (78-105)
The Working of the School
Chapter VII (106-110)
Special Educational Treatment

Part 3 The Fields of Learning
Chapter VIII (113-116)
The Curriculum
Chapter IX (117-129)
Religion
Chapter X (130-134)
Physical Education
Chapter XI (135-178)
Language
Chapter XII (179-212)
Mathematics
Chapter XIII (213-246)
Art and Craft and Needlework
Chapter XIV (247-259)
Handwriting
Chapter XV (260-274)
Music
Chapter XVI (275-288)
History
Chapter XVII (289-313)
Geography and Natural History

Part 4 The Special Problems of Wales
Chapter XVIII (317-329)
Wales

Index (331-334)

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1959
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Notes on the text: revised version (August 2009)

Between 1905 and 1937 the Board of Education published several editions of its Handbook of Suggestions for teachers in public elementary schools.

This 1959 book, published by the Ministry of Education, was an updated version of the Handbook (though the word itself was dropped from the title) and was designed for teachers in the new primary schools. It set the context for the Plowden Report, published eight years later.

It presents a fascinating snapshot of primary schools in England in the 1950s and of educational thinking at the time.

The full text (scanned from the fourth impression published by the Department of Education and Science in 1965) is online. I've corrected a couple of misprints and a few spelling inconsistencies. Anything added by way of explanation is shown [in square brackets]. The text is displayed with its original capitalisation and paragraphing.

In this revised version of the text, the Roman chapter numbers have been restored and the footnotes (which were previously collected together and numbered at the end of each chapter) are now displayed where they were in the original - at the foot of each page.

I've also amended the formatting of the text (bold, italics, centred etc) so that it is now a reasonably accurate representation of the printed text. However, please note that the pages presented here are not exact facsimiles of the original printed version: the font (Times, Arial etc) and size of print - and therefore the number of words to a line and lines to a page - are determined by the settings you have chosen for your web browser.

If you have any comments - positive or negative - on this new version of the text, or if you spot any errors, I'd be grateful if you'd email me.