Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

As a pre-Plowden primary teacher who queued to get my copy of that report in 1967 and as a contributory author to the Cambridge Primary Review (Alexander, 2009) forty-two years later I can claim, not an authoritative nor a detached perspective, but at least an informed view of the recent history of English primary education. That view infused my writing of chapter 3 of the Cambridge Primary Review, which like all historical sources needs and deserves to be challenged.

The Review as a whole provides three perspectives on primary education. Rather than its cumbersome, instantly forgettable title, Children, their World, their Education I would have preferred English Primary Education: what was, what is and  what could be - a title that echoes Edmund Holmes' classic text of 1911 (Holmes, 1911) and which reminds us that the Review relates not to the universal system of primary education but to our ‘local' (English, not even UK) system...