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Plowden (1967) Notes on the text Volume 1 (page numbers in brackets) Preliminary pages (i-xxii)
Part 1 Introduction
Part 2 The growth of the child
Part 3 The home, school and neighbourhood
Part 4 The structure of primary education
Part 5 The children in the schools: curriculum and internal organisation
Part 6 The adults in the schools
Part 7 Independent schools
Part 8 Primary school buildings and equipment; status; and research
Part 9 Conclusions and recommendations
Notes (486-495)
Research and Surveys about Plowden |
The Plowden Report (1967)
A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1967
[page 95 (unnumbered)]
[page 97] Its Organisation and Effectiveness 256. Part IV of our Report is concerned with the general structure of primary education: we discuss later the internal organisation of primary schools. This chapter compares the present provision with the arrangements in force when the Hadow Reports were new. It also compares our predecessors' verdict on the schools they knew with our estimate of the quality of schools today. The chapter concludes with descriptions of primary schools which may give the reader a more detailed picture of what we mean by good practices. The Legal Position 257. The law of education, as embodied in the 1944 Education Act and subsequent legislation, does not fully describe its structure. It fixes the lower and upper limits of primary education; but it says nothing about the age of transfer from infant to junior education, and it does not stipulate whether boys and girls should be educated together or separately. The main statutory provisions about primary education are: (a) 'The statutory system of public education shall be organised in three progressive stages to be known as primary education, secondary education and further education.' (Education Act 1944, Section 7).Reorganisation of Primary and Secondary Education 258. The substantial 'three decker' schools which stood, and often still stand, in London and some other towns high above terraced rows of working class housing were designed to fit the educational system as Hadow found it. Its divisions can still be seen commemorated in the clearly carved inscriptions over the doors of many schools - Infants, Girls, Boys. The infant department [page 98] was on the ground floor. At the age of seven boys and girls were promoted to one of the other storeys which normally housed separate boys' and girls' departments where pupils stayed until they left school at the age of 14. In effect the first Hadow report in 1926 proposed a rearrangement of the two upper storeys. It suggested that there should be a change of department at 11 as well as at seven years of age. The typical three decker could be rearranged quite easily to meet these suggestions. The three storeys could house infant, junior and senior departments instead of infant, girls' and boys' departments. Country schools and the older schools in towns were not built to this pattern and often had no separate infant department. The progress of Hadow reorganisation can be seen in the following diagrams (1):  The shaded area represents the proportion of pupils aged 13 in unreorganised or 'all-age' schools, i.e. schools with an age range from five or seven to the end of compulsory education. By 1955 all-age schools had virtually disappeared from the towns; in the last ten years they have nearly gone from the countryside. Hadow reorganisation is usually thought of as preparing the way for 'secondary education for all'. It was just as valuable because it made possible genuine primary education for boys and girls from the age of 7 to 11. Changes within Primary Education 259. The infant department had usually been a mixed school; but for older pupils the normal pattern of English education until comparatively recently was to teach boys and girls in different schools wherever possible. In 1925 half the children aged nine were being educated in single sex schools; today the proportion is three per cent. The following diagrams show how rapid has been the changing pattern since 1926:  The shaded area represents the proportion of nine year olds in co-educational schools. [page 99] 260. In 1952 two fifths of all schools with children of primary age had less than 100 pupils. By 1965 the proportion was less than a third. But it is more important to consider the declining number of these small schools than the proportion they bear to the total. This is illustrated in the graph in Diagram 5 [at the end of this chapter] which shows the position in 1947, the first year for which statistics in this form are available, in 1950 and then at five yearly intervals. The graph shows three possible definitions of a small school. According to each, the number of small schools has declined. It is the smallest schools which are least defensible both financially and, except in special circumstances, on educational grounds. 261. The English infant school, and it is a distinctively English institution, has a long history because it has been accepted for a century now that children up to six or seven need quite different treatment from older boys and girls. Wherever numbers made it economically possible, the policy had long been to provide separate infant schools. 'Hadow reorganisation' in towns did not make sweeping changes in this respect because it was for the most part only the older schools in which the 'all age' structure had included infants. In fact there has been a reduction in the last 40 years in the proportion of six year olds who are being educated in separate infant schools. In 1925 it was 70 per cent; in 1965 it had dropped to 56 per cent. Ten years earlier it had been 60 per cent. 262. 'In the country districts', the 1933 report suggested, 'the typical unit will eventually be a primary school which contains all the children up to the age of 11. The infant class or division will form an integral part of such a school.' (2) It is not because separate infant schools are educationally less valuable than combined junior and infant schools that their numbers have declined. Country schools and voluntary primary schools are usually combined schools. What has been happening recently is that in many new housing estates the distribution and density of population have fitted better with a combined school than with separate infant and junior schools. 263. The corollary to the secondary school under 'Hadow reorganisation' was the establishment of separate junior schools. The Education Act of 1918 enforced compulsory education up to the age of 14 and, by making it a duty of local education authorities to provide courses of advanced instruction for older and more intelligent children, encouraged some of the more enlightened authorities to revise their arrangements for children below the age of 12. From 1919 (3) several authorities began to create junior schools and departments. It was not, however, until the Hadow reports of 1926 and 1931 that much progress was made. Then it came with startling rapidity. Over a brief period of three years, from 1927 to 1930, the number of pupils in separate junior departments rose from 150,000 to 400,000, or an increase from over seven per cent to 16 per cent of the total child population aged between eight and 12 (4). By 1965, half of the children between the age of seven and 11 were in separate junior schools. There were one and a quarter million of them. Nursery Schools and Classes 264. From 1907 it became the policy of the Board of Education to encourage the exclusion from school of children under five, who were often attending in surprisingly large numbers, unless special arrangements could be made for [page 100] them. One effect was to stimulate the foundation of nursery schools by private effort. Rachel and Margaret McMilIan were outstanding among the pioneers. Nursery schools first became eligible for grant in 1919 but growth has been slow, although the last war gave them a temporary boost. Nevertheless, many schools continued to admit children to infant classes before the age of compulsory attendance. In other schools, nursery classes were formed, often including children of the same age as those in admission classes elsewhere. The proportion of children attending any form of school before the age of five has remained roughly stable since 1930. Table 4 illustrates this. The Department of Education statistics do not show separately the numbers of children attending nursery classes. We therefore made our own enquiries of local education authorities. Table 5 shows the distribution of children under the statutory age between nursery schools and nursery and admission classes of primary schools. Some Other Features 265. Other features besides structure have changed. Perhaps the most common experience of the last 30 years has been the great variations in numbers that the primary schools have had to take at short notice. (See Diagram 6 [at the end of this chapter]). We refer to these changes and their effects on class sizes in Chapter 23. 266. There are nearly 21,000 English maintained primary schools which between them contain about 4,000,000 pupils who are taught by nearly 133,000 full-time teachers and by part-time teachers equivalent to nearly another 6,900 (see Table 6 [at the end of this chapter]). The cost of nursery and primary education in 1964/65 in England was £300 million excluding the cost of training teachers, and of meals and milk. In terms of manpower and of the children accommodated in the schools, the primary schools form the largest sector of the whole educational system. Table 6 contains the main figures which describe primary education. Assessments of Primary Education 267. So far this chapter has been confined to the organisation of education on which definite statements can be made and comparisons drawn. Although this is more difficult when judgements of quality are concerned, we think that the attempt should be made. First, however, we should remind ourselves of a comment made by the Hadow Committee on aspects of the later stages of primary education: 'It can, however, hardly be denied that there are places in our educational system where the curriculum is distorted and the teaching warped from its proper character by the supposed needs of meeting the requirements of a later educational stage ... The schools whose first intention was to teach children how to read have thus been compelled to broaden their aims until it might be said that they have now to teach children how to live. This profound change in purpose has been accepted with a certain unconscious reluctance, and a consequent slowness of adaptation. The schools, feeling that what they can do best is the old familiar business of imparting knowledge, have reached a high level of technique in that part [page 101] of their functions, but have not clearly grasped its proper relation to the whole. In short, while there is plenty of teaching which is good in the abstract, there is too little which helps children directly to strengthen and enlarge their instinctive hold on the conditions of life ...' (5).268. We visited as many schools as possible, received much written and oral evidence and had many informal conversations. But we could not possibly claim that we had in this way obtained anything like a complete picture of the state of primary education throughout the country. We felt the need for an assessment covering all the primary schools. Since HM Inspectors were in the best position to undertake a comprehensive survey we asked them to do so. 269. All the 20,664 primary schools in England were included in the survey apart from 676 which were either too new to be assessed or for some other reason could not be classified. The whole body of HM Inspectors responsible for the inspection of primary schools took part. It is probable that misjudgements which must have occurred in particular cases cancelled each other out. The survey was planned to ensure that the various categories into which the schools were placed were exhaustive and did not overlap, to eliminate as far as possible the idiosyncrasies of personal judgement and to make certain that the identity of individual schools could not be discovered. 270. In the first category were placed schools described as 'In most respects a school of outstanding quality'. These are schools which are outstanding in their work, personal relationships and awareness of current thinking on children's educational needs. They are the pacemakers and leaders of educational advance. This category contained 109 schools in which there were about 29,000 children, representing one per cent of the total primary school population. The second category, 'A good school with some outstanding features', indicated schools of high quality, far above the average, but lacking the special touch of overall rare distinction needed to qualify for the first category. There were 1,538 of these schools educating nine per cent of the total number of primary school children. That ten per cent of the schools should fall into these two categories of excellence is highly satisfactory. 4,155 schools (23 per cent of the children) were in the third category: 'A good school in most respects without any special distinction'. These are schools marked by friendly relationships between staff and children, few or no problems of discipline, a balanced curriculum, good achievement and an unmistakable recognition of children's growth and needs as they are known. One third of the children in primary schools go to schools which are quite clearly good. 271. Category 9 was 'A bad school where children suffer from laziness, indifference, gross incompetence or unkindness on the part of the staff'. Into this category fell 28 schools with 4,333 children, or 0.1 per cent of the whole. We were at pains to discover not so much how such schools had come to be since in any large group of human beings or institutions there must always be a few complete failures, but what was done about them when they were identified. Each of the 28 schools was followed up by the local authorities and by HM Inspectors, and action taken. There may always be bad appointments of head teachers; and deterioration in health or character may explain schools such as these. We doubt whether any school in this category would be suffered to stay there long. [page 102] 272. The number of schools in Category 8 - 'A school markedly out of touch with current practice and knowledge and with few compensating features' - is a little more disturbing. 1,309 schools with five per cent of the children were placed in this category. This is a small proportion, but large enough to cause concern. But the situation is not static, nor is it simply tolerated. The local authorities and HM Inspectorate do all they can to assist such schools to improve, but their weakness makes them less susceptible to constructive suggestion than better schools. We would like to see systematic efforts to provide special in-service training for teachers in these schools and to see they take advantage of it. 273. Category 6 is 'A decent school without enough merit to go in Category 3 and yet too solid for Category 8'. This is the largest single category. It contains 6,058 schools and 28 per cent of the children. These are 'run of the mill' schools. The fact that these schools, with Categories 8 and 9, considered above, contain only a third of the children gives some ground for satisfaction. Obviously all the schools in these groups are capable of improvement and ought to be improved, but the figures mean that the general distribution is quite markedly 'skewed' towards good quality. This is a cheering aspect of the assessment. It is reinforced when the remaining three categories are included. These three were deliberately framed as 'odd-men out'. Category 4 is 'A school without many good features, but showing signs of life with seeds of growth in it'. This category contained 3,385 schools and 16 per cent of the children. It is really an offshoot of Category 6. The schools in it might well recently have been there, but all of them are on their way to Category 3. Some may not get there; some may go further; a few perhaps will drop back; but all are at present moving in the right direction and can reasonably be regarded as promising. 274. Category 5 is 'A school with too many weaknesses to go in Category 2 or 3, but distinguished by specially good personal relationships.' This was devised for schools in very poor areas, often with large numbers of immigrant children, which cannot hope to match the achievements of the higher categories but which yet do splendid social work. Into this category the Inspectors put 1,384 schools with six per cent of the children. It is one to which any school so circumstanced might be proud to belong. 275. The remaining Category 7 - 'Curate's egg school, with good and bad features' - contained 2,022 schools (nine per cent of the children). It is likely to be an unstable one. The schools in it might drop into 8, move almost imperceptibly into 6 or 4, or rise to 3 or even further. The disparity is sometimes between the upper and lower part of the school in, for example, a full range primary school where infants may be taught more individually than the juniors, or where the work of the older children may be more interesting than that of the younger children. 276. There was no evidence in the survey that good or bad schools were characteristic of north or south, town or country. The various categories were far from being evenly spread over the areas of different authorities, but they were almost exactly balanced as between counties and county boroughs and the north of England and the south. We consider that it would be worthwhile to undertake similar surveys at intervals of ten years. They must always be based on subjective judgements and, in the absence of a fixed datum line, [page 103] comparisons would have a limited value, but they would tell the Secretary of State and the people of the country something that they ought to know and be the means of revealing trends which would otherwise be only surmises. Description of Schools 277. Finally, we should like to accompany an imaginary visitor to three schools, run successfully on modern lines, which might fall into any of the first three categories. The pictures given are not imaginary, but the schools are composite. 278. The first is an infant school occupying a 70 year old building, three storeys high, near the station in a large city. The visitor, if he is a man, will attract a great deal of attention from the children, some of whom will try to 'make a corner in him'. He may even receive a proposal of marriage from one of the girls. This has nothing to do with his personal charms, but it is a sure sign of a background of inadequate or absentee fathers. A number of children are coloured and some of the white children are poorly dressed. All, however, are clean. The children seem to be using every bit of the building (the top floor is sealed off) and its surroundings. They spread into the hall, the corridors and the playground. The nursery class has its own quarters and the children are playing with sand, water, paint, clay, dolls, rocking horses and big push toys under the supervision of their teacher. This is how they learn. There is serenity in the room, belying the belief that happy children are always noisy. The children make rather a mess of themselves and their room, but this, with a little help, they clear up themselves. A dispute between two little boys about who is to play with what is resolved by the teacher and a first lesson in taking turns is learned. Learning is going on all the time, but there is not much direct teaching. 279. Going out into the playground, the visitor finds a group of children, with their teacher, clustered round a large square box full of earth. The excitement is all about an earthworm, which none of the children had ever seen before. Their classroom door opens on to the playground and inside are the rest of the class, seated at tables disposed informally about the room, some reading books that they have themselves chosen from the copious shelves along the side of the room and some measuring the quantities of water that different vessels will hold. Soon the teacher and worm watchers return except for two children who have gone to the library to find a book on worms and the class begins to tidy up in preparation for lunch. The visitor's attention is attracted by the paintings on the wall and, as he looks at them, he is soon joined by a number of children who volunteer information about them. In a moment the preparations for lunch are interrupted as the children press forward with things they have painted, or written, or constructed to show them to the visitor. The teacher allows this for a minute or two and then tells the children that they must really now get ready for lunch 'and perhaps Mr X will come back afterwards and see what you have to show him.' This is immediately accepted and a promise made. On the way out two of the children invite the visitor to join them at lunch and he finds that there is no difficulty about this. The head teacher and staff invariably lunch with the children and an extra adult is easily accommodated. 280. Later in the day, the visitor finds a small group of six and seven year olds who are writing about the music they have enjoyed with the headmistress. [page 104] He picks up a home-made book entitled My book of sounds and reads the following, written on plain unlined paper: 'The mandolin is made with lovely soft smooth wood and it has a pattern like tortoise shell on it. It has pearl on it and it is called mother of pearl. It has eight strings and they are all together in twos and all the pairs make a different noise. The ones with the thickest strings make the lowest notes and the ones that have the thinnest strings make the highest notes. When I put the mandolin in my lap and I pulled the thickest string it kept on for a long time and I pulled the thinnest wire and it did not last so long and I stroked them all and they didn't go away for a long time.'281. Quite a number of these children write with equal fluency and expressiveness, and with concentration. The sound of music from the hall attracts the visitor and there he finds a class who are making up and performing a dance drama in which the forces of good are overcoming the forces of evil to the accompaniment of drums and tambourines. 282. As he leaves the school and turns from the playground into the grubby and unlovely street on which it abuts, the visitor passes a class who, seated on boxes in a quiet, sunny corner, are listening to their teacher telling them the story of Rumpelstiltskin. 283. The next school is a junior mixed school on the outskirts of the city in an area that was not long since one of fields and copses and which has been developed since 1950. The school building is light and spacious with ample grass and hard paved areas around it and one of the old copses along its borders. The children are well cared for and turned out and a high proportion of them go on to grammar schools. The visitor finds his way into a fourth year B class (the school is unstreamed in the first three years) and finds a teacher who is a radio enthusiast. The children, under his guidance, have made a lot of apparatus and have set up a transmitting station. They have been in touch with another school 80 miles away and sometimes talk to their teacher's friends who are driving about in their cars in various parts of England. While the visitor was present, part of the class disappeared into another classroom and there broadcast through a home-made microphone a number of poems chosen by themselves and all dealing with winter. In a drear-nighted December, When icicles hang by the wall and This is the weather the shepherd shuns were clearly and sensitively spoken and closely listened to. In another classroom the children had been asked to make models at home which showed how things could be moved without being touched. They had brought to school some extremely ingenious constructions, using springs, pulleys, electromagnets, elastic and levers and they came out before the class to demonstrate and explain them. When the visitor left they were preparing to describe their ideas in their notebooks. A random sample of these books showed that accuracy and careful presentation were as characteristic of the less able children as of the obvious grammar school candidates. 284. During break some of the children went into the hall and listened to the headmaster's wife playing the C major prelude. In another room the chess club was meeting and the visitor saw a Ruy Lopez and a King's Pawn opening and the school champion lose his Queen. In yet another room the natural history club was meeting to discuss its programme for the coming year, while outside the school football team was having a short practice. The library was [page 105] filled with children. The visitor was interested to notice that there was no contrast between this rich and varied out of school life and the life in school hours which offered just as much choice and stimulus. The library, for instance, was in constant use throughout the day, and at many different points in the school were to be found examples of good glass, pottery, turnery and silver, all of a standard higher than would be found in most of the children's homes. With all the children the visitor found conversation easy. They had much to tell him and many questions to ask him and they seemed to have every encouragement and no obstacles to learning. 285. The third school, a three teacher junior mixed and infant school, is in the country. It was built in 1878 by the squire and since 1951 it has been a Church of England voluntary controlled school. The church is a few yards away. The original building, with its high roof and window sills and its tiny infants' room, has been made over by the LEA, the infants' room being now a cloakroom and there is a big new infants' room at the back. This has encroached on the now very small playground, but there is a meadow just across the lane where the children play when it is dry enough. The village has grown and there are many commuters of varying social background who travel to the big country town nine miles away. 286. When the visitor arrived all the children in the first class were either on top of the church tower or standing in the churchyard and staring intently upwards. The headmaster appeared in the porch and explained what was happening. The children were making a study of the trees in the private park which lay 100 yards beyond the church. The tower party had taken up with them the seeds of various trees and were releasing these on the leeward side, and were measuring the wind speed with a home-made anemometer. The party down below had to watch each seed and measure the distance from the tower to the point where the seed landed. The children explained that ten of each kind were being released and that they would take the average distance and then compare the range of each species and calculate the actual distance travelled. When they had finished they went back to school to record their results, some in graph form, in the large folders which already contained many observations, photographs and sketches of the trees they were studying. The visitor was interested to notice a display of materials from which children were going to learn about their village, and social life generally, at the time the school was opened. They included photostats of pages in the parish registers, the school log book and a diary kept by the founder, as well as a collection of books and illustrations lent by the county library. 287. The second class of sevens to nines were rather numerous for their small room, but had spread out into the corridor and were engaged in a variety of occupations. One group was gathered round their teacher for some extra reading practice, another was at work on an extraordinary structure of wood and metal which they said was a sputnik, a third was collecting a number of objects and testing them to find out which could be picked up by a magnet and two boys were at work on an immense painting (six feet by four feet) of St Michael defeating Satan. They seemed to be working harmoniously according to an unfolding rather than a preconceived plan. Conversation about the work that the children were doing went on all the time. 288. In the large new infants' room, too, many different things were going on. Some children were reading quietly to themselves; some were using a recipe [page 106] to make some buns, and were doubling the quantities since they wanted to make twice the number; a few older children were using commercial structural apparatus to consolidate their knowledge of number relationships; some of the youngest children needed their teacher's help in adding words and phrases to the pictures they had painted. The teacher moved among individuals and groups doing these and other things, and strove to make sure that all were learning. 289. These descriptions illustrate a point perhaps not often enough stressed, that what goes on in primary schools cannot greatly differ from one school to another, since there is only a limited range of material within the capacity of primary school children. It is the approach, the motivation, the emphasis and the outcome that are different. In these schools, children's own interests direct their attention to many fields of knowledge and the teacher is alert to provide material, books or experience for the development of their ideas. Recommendation 290. Surveys similar to that carried out by HM Inspectorate to assess the quality of primary education for the Council should be undertaken at ten year intervals. 1. These and other statistics in this chapter are taken from the appropriate Annual Reports of the Board, the Ministry of Education and the Department of Education and Science, or from the 'Statistics of Education'.
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