Plowden Report Revisited: Individuality, equality and discovery | News Plowden Report Revisited: Individuality, equality and discovery 24th January 1997 at 00:00 Share this English primary education badly needs appreciating in two senses of the word - a favourable recognition of its achievements and a sensitive understanding and appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses; Children and their Primary Schools (the Plowden Report) provided both for in the Sixties. Its celebration of achievement may have been over the top, its appraisal may have been flawed in important respects, and the trends it identified may have failed to materialise, but it stands as a significant landmark in the history of primary education and one which inspired (or frustrated!) many primary teachers. The Consultative Committee of the Board of Education in 1926 first officially recommended the establishment of primary and secondary education as two distinct stages to replace the notion of elementary education. It was the committee's second report in 1931 (The Primary School, known as the Hadow Report) that established a rationale for primary education and made recommendations on its curriculum, teaching, organisation and staffing based on what was known of children's physical and mental development.

It viewed the curriculum in terms of "activity" and "experience", but also in terms of "knowledge to be acquired" and "facts to be stored". It acknowledged "the great and special virtues" of class teaching but pointed out that there were "limits to its flexibility and therefore its usefulness" because of the "varying needs of children or the natural movement of their minds". If the rest of philosophy can be regarded as footnotes to Plato, then in a very real sense Plowden provided the footnotes to Hadow, with its developmental emphasis and with its eclectic approach to curriculum and pedagogy. In the intervening period, between the publication of the two reports, there were many significant events - not least a world war and, in education, a new Act (1944) which formally established primary education as a distinct stage in the English educational system. Post war, government's chief concerns for the new sector related to problems of teacher supply, "roofs over heads" for the fast-burgeoning population of young pupils and the replacement of "all-through" schools by primary and secondary provision (a process not completed until after the publication of Plowden).

In very many areas junior schools and the junior departments of newly established primary schools were in thrall to the selection examination at 11-plus. Those schools large enough to stream pupils by ability did so. For older primary pupils in particular, the developments advocated by the Hadow Report largely went unrealised; their curriculum remained dominated by the teaching of reading, writing, number and "intelligence" in preparation for the selection examination. However, with younger children a long-established developmental tradition did increase its influence on practice after the Second World War. In many,though not all infant schools, the rigidities of the timetable were dispensed with; work related to centres of interest or topics was introduced; children were given more choice of activity and encouraged to take a measure of responsibility for their own learning; classrooms were reorganised along "informal" lines; more individual and small-group teaching took place; and there was an increasing emphasis on methods involving discovery, creativity and first-hand experience. Such approaches also began to affect junior-aged pupils in schools in a number of local education authorities such as Oxfordshire, the West Riding and Leicestershire.

It was developments such as these that Plowden sought to publicise, celebrate and disseminate for the benefit of all pupils up to the age of 12 (its recommended age of transfer). There are a number of important points to be made about the report. First and foremost it was a serious attempt "to consider primary education in all its aspects". It took more than three years to complete; it involved commissioning a great deal of research; it drew on a survey by HMI of all English primary schools; it called on oral or written evidence from a very wide range of interested parties; it also involved a small element of comparison with primary education overseas. The Plowden committee amassed facts, canvassed opinions but was not afraid to make generalisations, judgments and recommendations on the basis of the evidence it had collected. The report provided a rich, detailed, comprehensive appreciation of a developing sector. Allied to this was the principled approach adopted in the report. It made its underlying values very explicit: equality of opportunity, compensation for handicaps, respect for individuality and a commitment to the highest education standards" involving "special stress on individual discovery, on first-hand experience and on opportunities for creative work".

It treated research findings with caution; it revealed the wide spectrum of opinion it solicited but was not frightened to make its stand in favour of the "developmental tradition". It asserted, rather too confidently as it turned out, that "the gloomy forebodings of the decline of knowledge which would follow progressive methods have been discredited". But most amazing of all to the reader who revisits the report after 30 years was its positive, affirmative tone. Not only was the future of English society viewed optimistica lly, but teachers, schools and, above all, children were valued both for what they had achieved and what they could achieve in the future. The report praised rather than castigated, celebrated rather than derided, encouraged rather than carped. In a number of places its plaudits verged on the hyperbolica l and made many readers sceptical of the judgments of the committee and of the representativeness of the practice it characterised - "English primary education at its best .. . is very good indeed. Only rarely is it very bad. The average is good" (my italics). Partly because of its very positive stance, the report was criticised by many practitioners (including me) for being far too utopian.

With its composite vignettes of "good practice" and its inevitably selective use of illustrations to support its aspirations it presented a view of practice far removed from the reality of very many primary teachers toiling with classes of more than 40 in urban contexts, coping with the demands (and backlash) of the "11-plus" and very often still imbued with the attitudes, expectations and practices associated with the elementary school tradition.To many, Plowden's aspirations, both for them as teachers and for their pupils, appeared utterly remote and unrealistic. To use Sixties' language, it probably put off more teachers than it "turned on". In too many cases its advocacy of what it considered excellent practice militated against the generality of practice advancing towards what it would see as good. One of its most appealing features, its purple prose, proved a mixed blessing since phrases taken out of context could be, and were, seized upon by its critics and its uncritical devotees.

"The child is the agent in his own learning", the "danger sign" of "too much time spent on teaching" and the all-too-confident assertion that "finding out" has proved to be better for children than "being told" were seen by some as implying an abdication of the teacher's responsibility to teach. Both the critics and the zealots conveniently forgot other passages: "from the start there must be teaching as well as learning" or "we certainly do not deny the value of 'learning by description' or the need for practice of skills and consolidation of knowledge". The devil can quote scripture to suit his purposes; that was also true of both the antagonists and the protagonists of Plowden. The effects of the report are difficult to summarise. For some teachers it provided, and still provides, a perennial source of inspiration - a view of what might be possible "in the best of all possible worlds". Its support for individuality and creativity led to some outstanding work by individual schools or teachers which demonstrated how untapped by conventional schooling is the potential of so many children.

It provided powerful support for the abolition of selection (already gaining ground for other reasons) and it helped remove the widespread practice of streaming by ability and the inequalities and waste that system of internal organisation had wreaked. It transformed the physical layout of many schools and classrooms. But it had other effects, too. The value it placed on the individual led, in too many schools, to an undue emphasis on individual learning, impossible to implement effectively in all but very small classes, and denying too many children sustained interaction with the teacher and other pupils. A minority of teachers did effectively abdicate their responsibilities for teaching. Too often more attention was paid to the niceties of classroom layout, display and learning environment and not enough attention to the content of the curriculum or the means by which it might be taught. The laissez-faire curriculum of the Seventies and early Eighties owed much to the lack of a clear lead from Plowden. Having said that, there was no significant "primary school revolution" along Plowden lines; the "quickening trend" it identified failed to materialise. The publication of the Plowden Report in 1967 contributed to an exceptional context in which primary schools operated, albeit for a short time only.

For a few years primary education was regarded by government as a particularly important stage in the educational system and primary teachers were made to feel valued and good about themselves and their profession. Those two conditions had not coincided before; they have not coincided since; they show no signs of coinciding in the future. In retrospect it is clear that Plowden's optimism was misplaced, but far better that misplaced optimism than the misplaced pessimism that so weakens and demoralises primary education today. Colin Richards is a former HMI,a professor of education and a consultant working in primary schools and higher education Subscribe to get access to the content on this page. If you are already a TES/ TESS subscriber please log in with your username or email address to get full access to our back issues, CPD library and membership plus page. Not a subscriber? Find out more about our subscription offers. Plowden’s progress | The Economist Leave feedback Return to beta website. Plowden’s progress The “progressive” revolution in Britain’s schools is being reversed. Why did it happen, what went wrong, and will the new approach be any better?

Jun 18th 1998 Tweet ONE day, almost 30 years ago, when The Economist's current education correspondent was a primary-school pupil, he walked into his classroom to find that it had changed. Instead of facing the front in rows, the desks had been bunched together in groups. From then on, the teacher spent less time talking to the whole class, and pupils spent more time, alone or in groups, pursuing projects such as “communication through the ages”, at their own pace. A revolution was sweeping Britain's primary schools—or so it seemed. A few years earlier, in 1967, the Central Advisory Council for Education—better known as the Plowden committee after its chairman, Lady Plowden, a former magistrate—had urged all primary schools to embrace such “progressive” teaching and to abandon traditional, whole-class “chalk and talk”. All these years later, there is a continuing debate over why the great expectations of the Plowden era were not fulfilled. Where progressive methods failed, was it because they were fundamentally flawed or just badly enacted?

Such questions are of more than historical interest because now a concerted attempt is being made by ministers and their advisers to replace many Plowden-era orthodoxies, where they are still to be found, with a new orthodoxy which owes much to the “traditionalist” thinking that preceded Plowden. Earlier this year, all primary schools were sent detailed advice on how to teach pupils to read. In particular, it calls for more whole-class teaching and the systematic teaching of phonics (breaking words down into their constituent sounds). The Plowden report expressed disapproval of whole-class teaching; though it was more cautious on phonics, progressives nevertheless persuaded many schools to drop it on the grounds that it was too dull and thus hampered children's progress. In this section Reprints Today, the new orthodoxy's proponents argue that their drive for more phonics, more whole-class teaching and so on is firmly based on the latest research on how children learn and on the “best practice” observed in schools around the world. Ironically, these are precisely the claims made by the Plowden committee to support its drive for progressive methods.

The committee began work shortly before Harold Wilson's Labour government came to power in 1964, promising an end to “13 wasted Tory years”. The 1960s were swinging, and the egalitarian mood of the times was nowhere more in evidence than in education. There was growing unease about the perceived unfairness of the “11-plus” exam, taken by pupils at the end of primary school to decide whether they went to academically oriented “grammar” schools or more practically minded “secondary moderns”. Studies showed that it tended to be the richest, rather than the smartest, children who passed the 11-plus. This provided a convenient economic rationale for opposing it: inefficient selection meant wasted talent. So, in 1965, while the Plowden committee was still sitting, local-education authorities were told to start preparing for the abolition of the 11-plus. Plowden welcomed this, arguing that primary schools would no longer need to drill their pupils for the exam and thus to divide them into separate streams of those more or less likely to pass it. This, it was hoped, would mean fewer children being written off prematurely as dunces.

Evidence that streaming produced better results overall than mixed-ability classes, in spite of its drawbacks, was noted but quickly passed over by Plowden. The committee also argued that the end of selection would “liberate” primary schools from teaching facts and figures by rote; they could then switch to progressive, or “child-centred”, methods where there was a lot less teaching and a lot more learning by discovery. The committee called such ideas modern, though it noted their long pedigree, traceable back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 18th-century philosophy and the 19th-century views of an American educationalist, John Dewey. Let the children play In Britain, there had already been one attempt—the 1931 Hadow report—at bringing such thinking into schools. Its first impact was slight but, after the second world war, support for progressive methods was encouraged by studies (later shown to be unreliable) suggesting that they worked better than whole-class teaching. A few local-education authorities reorganised their schools along progressive lines, most notably West Riding County Council, whose chief education officer, Alec Clegg, became the movement's high priest.

By Plowden's day, only about 10% of primary schools had been changed; but the progressive priesthood by now dominated the education establishment. The Plowden committee developed this emerging orthodoxy by adding another key influence: Jean Piaget, a Swiss social scientist. Piaget argued that children progress, at their own pace, through four distinct stages of learning. Taking this rather to extremes, Plowden argued that children should therefore be left to do their own thing: “Until a child is ready to take a particular step forward it is a waste of time to try to teach him to take it.” Plowden scolded fuddy-duddy adults who could not accept this, and expected teachers to teach. They should realise that “Play is the principal means of learning in early childhood.” The report's most memorable passage is a Dewey-eyed description of the ideal progressive school where the children are “playing with sand, water, paint, clay, dolls, rocking-horses and big push-toys,” and where “learning is going on all the time, but not much teaching.” Doubters might accept that such an approach would be suitable in nursery classes—but Plowden was talking about the education of children up to age 11.

Taking this further still, Clegg argued that teachers, as well as pupils, should do their own thing. They should be their own “educational architects” and resist being prescribed what and how to teach. This encouraged teachers to insist on devising their own lessons (not always good ones), instead of simply adopting tried-and-tested ones. Plowden saw the teaching of punctuation and grammar as a hindrance to creativity: “Teachers must not burden their pupils with the observance of out-worn conventions. Correctness should be sacrificed rather than fluency, vigour or clarity of meaning.” An official report on grammar teaching, published this year, reveals that such thinking was based on remarkably shaky evidence. Absurdly, much emphasis was placed on one unpublished PhD thesis, whose evidence simply did not support the conclusion by its author that teaching grammar might harm pupils' progress. With Plowden's blessing, such ideas were propagated enthusiastically by local-education authorities and teacher-training colleges. Reading lists for post-Plowden trainees often included the works of Michael Young, a sociologist and Plowden committee member who argued that much knowledge was an artificial construct designed to justify the advancement of certain groups in society over others.

The progressive approach already had its critics by the time of Plowden, and the report acknowledged some of their concerns. It admitted that “a lazy, unsympathetic or muddle-headed teacher could fail in this approach, no less than in the traditional one.” It accepted that children might discover only trivial ideas and inefficient methods if left entirely to their own devices. But these cautious notes were rather like the health warning on a cigarette carton, which fails to counter the alluring message of the rest of the packaging. Though progressivism had become the orthodoxy by the mid-1970s, things did not turn out in the way that the Plowden committee had intended. Teachers tried to emulate the idealised progressive primary but soon found that children could not be left to learn for themselves. A return to teaching the whole class was impractical now that pupils of all abilities were mixed together. But abandoning mixed-ability classes was unthinkable because of the strong anti-streaming rhetoric from the education establishment—rhetoric which pre-dated Plowden but was reinforced by it. So a peculiarly inefficient, hybrid form of teaching emerged.

Children were set to work on individual projects, alone or in groups, while the teacher dashed around the class trying to help each in turn. In his book “Crisis in the Primary Classroom” (David Fulton Publishers, £12.99), Professor Maurice Galton of Leicester University reckons that, until recently, primary-school teachers typically spent 77% of their time doing this. He also points to studies showing that by the 1980s, only 10% of primary schools were doing proper learning-by-discovery—the same as in 1967. The UnPlowden reports Whether or not the changes in the classroom were what Plowden really intended, doubts about them quickly emerged. In 1969, the first in a series of self-styled “Black Papers” was published by a group of academics and writers, blaming progressive methods and the end of the 11-plus for lowering standards and causing indiscipline. At first, these critics were seen as a bunch of old crusties over-reacting to a few student protests. But then came a crisis that seemed to prove them right.

In 1974 a new head teacher, Terry Ellis, arrived at William Tyndale Junior School in Islington, north London, and set about wholeheartedly embracing progressive ideals—indeed, he thought that even the Plowden report was too reactionary. The school adopted an extremely informal style in which pupils could do what they liked: mathematics or football, English or tie-dyeing. Chaos ensued and, with the newspapers full of lurid stories about it, and parents moving their children to other schools, a public inquiry was launched. The inquiry's report, in July 1976, blamed personalities rather than teaching methods. But the fiasco added to politicians' fears over progressive teaching. Three months later, James Callaghan, then prime minister, made a speech at Ruskin College, Oxford, in which he questioned progressive methods, saying that they “seem to produce excellent results when they are in well-qualified hands but are more dubious in their effects when they are not.” Perhaps it was the outrage among teachers that greeted this attempt by a mere prime minister to comment on how they did their jobs.

Or perhaps it was just that Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government had other things on its mind in the early 1980s. Whatever the reason, it was not until the late 1980s that the Tories applied their reforming zeal to the education system. The national curriculum and the accompanying national tests for pupils aged 7, 11 and 14 were introduced in the 1988 Education Act as a deliberate move away from what was seen as a Plowden-inspired philosophy of “anything goes”. Ministers' determination to make such changes, despite the squeals of teachers and education officials, increased in 1991 when a study showed that a £14m ($26m) project to improve primary schools in Leeds had actually led to a fall in standards. The study partly blamed this on the local council's imposition of learning-by-discovery. The government responded by asking the author of this study, Professor Robin Alexander of Warwick University, along with Chris Woodhead (then in charge of the national curriculum, now England's chief inspector of schools) and Jim Rose (a senior schools inspector) to conduct an urgent review of the evidence on teaching methods.

They were dubbed the “Three Wise Men”, and their report concluded that standards seemed to have fallen slightly in recent years, blaming the “highly questionable dogmas” prevalent among teachers. Curiously, the Three Wise Men exonerated the Plowden report itself—suggesting that it may have been misinterpreted and misquoted. But the highly questionable dogmas that they highlighted were straight out of Plowden: mixed-ability classes; the rejection of whole-class teaching and the obsession with children's individuality; wide-ranging, unstructured “projects” instead of individual subjects; and, above all, Piaget's ideas, which had depressed teachers' expectations of what children could achieve and had discouraged them from active intervention in pupils' learning. Until the creation in 1992 of Ofsted, a new inspectorate that Mr Woodhead now heads, inspections of primary schools were rare. Since then, most primaries have had inspectors calling, and Mr Woodhead has used the evidence from their reports to continue his campaign against what he sees as sloppy, progressive-inspired teaching methods. This evidence has shown that schools' success can vary drastically even though their pupils are drawn from similar areas with similar problems.

And inspections of the underperforming ones often find that they make insufficient use of whole-class teaching, phonics, or other traditional methods. Such evidence was one influence behind the big shift in the Labour Party's education policies after Tony Blair became its leader in 1994 and appointed David Blunkett as education spokesman. Soon afterwards, Labour stopped claiming that schools' problems were mainly down to a lack of money, rather than their teaching methods or the way they were run. Mr Blunkett says he is a “fundamentalist” on education: “I believe in discipline, solid mental arithmetic, learning to read and write accurately, plenty of homework, increasing expectations . . .” Labour is now intervening in schools far more actively than any previous government, Labour or Tory. Those, such as Mr Woodhead, who call for Plowden-era orthodoxies to be abandoned, are not short of critics. But it is now hard to find unabashed progressives who maintain that Plowden got it just right. Mr Galton reckons that 35% of the primary-school day is now spent on whole-class teaching, up from 15% a few years ago.

Progressive thinkers such as Piaget and Young have been squeezed out of the teacher-training curriculum, as first the Tories and now Labour have insisted that courses put more emphasis on practical teaching tips. So, is progressivism dead? Not quite. Although learning-by-discovery is being phased out of schools, the government seems prepared to accept that it is right for nursery pupils: ministers are said to have noted that in the successful education systems of Switzerland and Hungary, pupils start in the nursery with play-based education and then switch to traditional teaching at the age of six or seven. New lessons With ministers and their experts setting out with the very best of intentions, as did Lady Plowden and Co, to bring about an educational Utopia, what lessons can be drawn from the failure of progressive teaching to live up to expectations? First, be careful about how you use research. Although the quality and quantity of educational research has improved vastly since the 1960s, it is still far from conclusive—and furthermore, today's research findings may become outdated (for example, because of developments in computer-based learning), just like the research on which the Plowden report was based.

There is also something important to be learnt from the way progressive orthodoxy was rushed in across the board, despite the doubts of many teachers at the time. However well a new style of teaching has worked in the hands of enthusiastic, well-trained staff, it is much less likely to succeed when imposed on those who suspect it and do not understand it. Whole-class teaching has been shown to work well where the teacher asks challenging questions to ensure that all the pupils are keeping up; and where direct instruction is carefully blended with individual practice (eg, in solving equations). But done badly, whole-class teaching can indeed be dull and ineffective. And above all, do not abandon things that work in the quest for wholesale change. In their enthusiasm for learning-by-discovery, progressive teachers sometimes forgot that some skills (eg, basic arithmetic) are too important to be left for pupils to stumble across by chance. Now, in the drive to ensure that all children learn the basics, it is easy to imagine some schools forgetting to foster their skills at finding creative solutions to unfamiliar problems: one of the few things British pupils are generally thought to be quite good at, compared with counterparts in Asia or elsewhere.

Ministers and their advisers would insist that all these lessons have been learnt: a chain of training centres has been set up to ensure that teachers get to grips with the practicalities of new, officially approved schemes such as the daily “literacy hour”. The government has promised not to be dogmatic about the teaching methods it pushes, but to live by the maxim that “what counts is what works”. Furthermore, it has pledged to intervene in schools in inverse proportion to success. If these promises are kept, there is a good chance that the mistakes of the progressive era can be avoided. But the revolution in Labour's educational philosophy is still incomplete in one crucial respect. The anti-elitism and suspicion of selection that underpinned Plowdenism lives on. Last weekend Mr Blunkett announced that schools with more applicants than places will no longer be allowed to give preference to the most academically able pupils, or to those whose parents share the school's educational and ethical values. But such schools are oversubscribed because they are successful—London Oratory, the west London school that Tony Blair sends his own sons to, is an example.

If the philosophy underlying Labour's new approach to education is “what counts is what works”, why is Mr Blunkett meddling in successful schools? Next in Finance and economics X Next in Finance and economics X Next in Finance and economics X Next in Finance and economics X Next in Finance and economics X Next in Finance and economics X Next in Finance and economics X Next in Finance and economics X Next in Science and technology X Next in Science and technology X Next in Science and technology X Next in Science and technology X ERIC - Plowden's Concern for Standards, Education 3-13, 1978 Plowden's Concern for Standards Education 3-13 , 6, 1, 30-3, Apr 78 Stresses the concern for individual standards which pervades the Plowden report. Suggests that some of the report's professional advice, regarding inservice education, inspection and diagnostic testing, is more timely and relevant now than when it was first offered.

(Editor/RK) the plowden report the plowden report Derek Gillard describes the context and content of the 1967 Plowden Report 'Children and their Primary Schools' and assesses the criticisms that have been made of it in the years since it was published. He argues that it is still an important document which should be read widely today. contents: introduction - backround to the plowden report · what plowden said about the curriculum · the plowden report - a chequered history · criticism of the plowden report · plowden today · bibliography · links · how to cite this article Introduction: background to the Plowden Report In August 1963 the then Minister of Education, Sir Edward Boyle, asked the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) 'to consider primary education in all its aspects and the transition to secondary education.' The Council, under the Chairmanship of Bridget Plowden, presented its report to the Secretary of State for Education and Science, Rt. Hon Anthony Crosland, in October 1966.

The Central Advisory Council for Education (Wales), under the leadership of Professor CE Gittins, produced a similar report for Wales which included a valuable chapter on bilingualism. (The translation into Welsh occupied four professors for nine months and sold 26 copies). There had not been a thorough review of primary education in England since Sir Henry Hadow's Report of 1931. (And there hasn't been another one since Plowden). Of her Committee Lady Plowden has said, 'Some of us were professionals, a few of us were not. We were guided in our enquiries by HMIs [Her Majesty's Inspectors] who directed us to those parts of the country where what they considered the best practice was taking place' (Plowden 1987). The Committee's wide-ranging membership was expected to pass judgement critically and professionally. 'It was thus to be an exercise in policy analysis' (Kogan 1987) - one of the first of its kind. The context in which the Committee worked was characterised by an increasingly liberal view of education and society.

'Plowden's membership and terms of reference were a product of the optimism and belief in social engineering of its time' (Kogan 1987). Selection for secondary education (the 'eleven-plus') was being abolished, freeing primary schools from the constraints imposed by the need to 'get good results'. Streaming (sorting children into classes on the basis of ability or overall intelligence) was being abandoned. Sybil Marshall (Marshall 1963) was writing about the creativity of primary pupils in 'An Experiment in Education'. Comprehensive schools and middle schools were being established. Teacher-led curriculum innovation was being actively encouraged. Plowden was very much a product of its time, full of enthusiasm and optimism. The psychological basis of the Plowden Report - Chapter 2 'The Children, their Growth and Development' - is based firmly in Piagetian theory. This is hardly surprising as 'during the 1960s this work by Piaget and his colleagues was at the peak of its influence. It was very widely known and very widely accepted' (Donaldson 1978).

The chapter begins with what many regard as the essence of the whole report: 'At the heart of the educational process lies the child.' It goes on to describe Piaget's theory of developmental sequence, that is 'events which are fixed in their order but varying in the age at which the sequence begins.' It argues for the existence of a 'developmental age' which applies to physical and motor development and probably to emotional and intellectual development. Piaget's four sequential stages in intellectual development (sensori-motor, intuitive thought, concrete operations, formal operations) underpin the report's contentions that 'a child cannot read without having learned to discriminate shapes' and 'until a child is ready to take a particular step forward it is a waste of time to try to teach him to take it.' The Plowden Report emphasises the need to see children as individuals. 'Individual differences between children of the same age are so great that any class, however homogeneous it seems, must always be treated as a body of children needing individual and different attention.' The chapter also deals with testing, especially the question of IQ (Intelligence Quotient) tests, which were often used in eleven plus selection procedures.

While it does not dismiss IQ scores out of hand, it does warn that they 'should not be treated as infallible predictors. Judgements which determine careers should be deferred as long as possible.' The psychological basis of the report has been questioned by some educationists. Kathy Sylva, for example, has written that 'Plowden's reliance on Piaget's theory and its insistence that discovery learning is always best haven't stood up well to subsequent research' (Sylva 1987). She acknowledged that the idea of children learning by their own active efforts comes from Piaget but noted that 'what the authors of the report suggested was the notion that teachers could and should facilitate constructive learning through everyday classroom practice.' She pointed out, too, that during the 1970s and 80s there had been 'a gradual lessening ... in acceptance of [Piaget's] view of cognitive development.' Her view was shared by Margaret Donaldson. 'Children are not at any stage as egocentric ... [nor] so limited in ability to reason deductively as Piaget and others have claimed' (Donaldson 1978).

What Plowden said about the curriculum The Plowden Committee applauded the curriculum freedom which teachers had had in increasing measure since the ending of the payment by results system in 1898 and the Elementary Code in 1926. This freedom was being further extended at the time the report was being written by the introduction of comprehensive schools and the abolition of secondary selection - of which the Committee approved. However, it was not entirely convinced that schools had made the most of this freedom. 'The force of tradition and the inherent conservatism of all teaching professions made for a slow rate of change'. In relation to the curriculum, the Plowden Report was clear.

'One of the main educational tasks of the primary school is to build on and strengthen children's intrinsic interest in learning and lead them to learn for themselves rather than from fear of disapproval or desire for praise.' The report's recurring themes are individual learning, flexibility in the curriculum, the centrality of play in children's learning, the use of the environment, learning by discovery and the importance of the evaluation of children's progress - teachers should 'not assume that only what is measurable is valuable.' The Plowden Report - a chequered history The history of Plowden has been chequered, to say the least. With Prime Minister Jim Callaghan's Ruskin College speech of 1976, it became clear that politicians wanted to take greater control of the school curriculum. The Central Advisory Councils (which had produced the Plowden Report) were themselves abolished, a move which disturbed Maurice Kogan: 'It seems clear that educational life needs some antidote to the increasing power of political action and the decreasing willingness of the DES, both ministers and officials, to listen to outside thinking' (Kogan 1987). Political forces began to shape curriculum thinking and development.

Notions of core, common and national curriculum all seemed to have at their root the idea that children were to be fitted for the service of the state or at least to fill their allotted roles in society. 'Since school education prepares the child for adult life, the way in which the school helps him to develop his potential must also be related to his subsequent needs and responsibilities as an active member of our society.' (DES 1981) Significantly, Plowden's view that 'At the heart of the educational process lies the child' was abandoned in favour of 'The school curriculum is at the heart of education' (DES 1981). However, not everyone agreed. Kathy Sylva commented that 'Education is about nurturing the moral, aesthetic and creative aspects in children's development, not about "getting the country somewhere"' (Sylva 1987). In fact, in the twenty years following publication of the report, almost every document on the primary curriculum contained echoes of Plowden to a greater or lesser extent.

A Framework for the School Curriculum (DES 1980a), for example, stressed the need 'to help pupils to develop lively, enquiring minds, the ability to question and argue rationally.' The Swann Report (DES 1985) asked for 'a powerful commitment to see children as individuals' and A View of the Curriculum (DES 1980b) talked of 'individual differences and common needs' The report continued The school curriculum must allow for differences ... it must contribute to children's present well-being whatever the age and stage of growth and development they have reached ... The development and use of local opportunities, the special skills of teachers and the enthusiasm of children should be used to enhance the quality of work beyond what might come from a simple uniformity of practice. (DES 1980b) Such statements could have come straight out of Plowden. In the early 1980s schools were more likely to be criticised for not taking on board the lessons of Plowden rather than the reverse. 'In a majority of schools, over-concentration on the practice of basic literacy and numeracy unrelated to the context in which they are needed means that these skills are insufficiently extended or applied ...

Pupils are given insufficient responsibility for pursuing their own enquiries and how to tackle their work' (DES 1985). And again, 'Teachers ... have often tended to emphasise the content of their subjects instead of their importance as ways of experiencing and knowing the real world ... the curriculum needs to fit the child' (Schools Council 1981). Criticism of the Plowden Report Hostility to Plowden's philosophy of primary education had been growing since the 1970s. The writers of the 'Black Papers' and their followers criticised much of what the primary schools were doing and blamed the Plowden Report at least in part for what they saw as undesirable trends. Roger Scruton, for example, suggested that there were three main reasons for 'the educational decline we have witnessed in recent years' (Scruton 1987). He blamed television, the attitude of parents and 'the rise and triumph of the "educationalists".' He viewed Plowden as a landmark in this process. Scruton's arguments (like those of his friends) did not stand up to critical scrutiny.

There was no research evidence to show that educational standards had declined; indeed, all the evidence suggested that standards, especially of literacy and numeracy, had risen steadily since the end of the second world war. It should also be noted that Plowden warned against excesses. The tabloid press notion that education was now to be all play and no work was mischievous. Lady Plowden has written: We wrote that we "endorsed the trend towards individual and active learning" ... yet we gave a warning: "we certainly do not deny the value of learning 'by description' or the need for practice of skills and consolidation of knowledge".' And again, 'Teachers must select those of our suggestions which their knowledge and skill enable them to put into practice in the circumstances of their own schools.' (Plowden 1987) The 'William Tyndale affair', however, gave critics a field day. (William Tyndale was a north London primary school where, in 1974, some of the staff espoused an extreme form of romantic liberalism which eventually resulted in chaos). A careful reading of the report on the affair shows clearly that it was a case of mismanagement.

It was nonsense to suggest, as some did, that this was the inevitable outcome of Plowden-inspired progressive education policies. It was the outcome of incompetence. Even in the late 1980s there were still voices raised in support of Plowden's philosophy. In 1987, Benford and Ingham wrote in the Times Educational Supplement (6 March) about the findings of a House of Commons Select Committee Report Achievement in Primary Schools. In their article 'Another Leap Forward' they suggested that it was a pity that more schools had not acted upon Plowden's suggestions in a thorough and well-prepared way and concluded that 'Inaction by [the teaching] profession necessitated the translation of Hadow (1931) into Plowden (1967). Each was welcomed in its own time. Each was subsequently neglected where it mattered most: in the classroom.' On the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the Plowden Report, a leader in the Times Educational Supplement (6 March 1987) summed up the situation well.

'The Plowden Report has been misquoted, misunderstood, over-simplified, torn to shreds by academics and used by a few schools to justify some fairly mindless practice.' Plowden's philosophy played no part in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's educational agenda. Her Conservative governments, from 1979 onwards, sought to turn the public education service into a market-place. The culmination of this process was the 1988 Education 'Reform' Act, which, with its imposition of a subject-based National Curriculum and associated regime of testing and published league tables, forced schools to train pupils to get good test results so as to compete for pupils. 'Under the combined pressures of the National Curriculum, HM Inspectorate and OFSTED exhortations and criticism from across the political spectrum, primary schools are returning to formal, whole-class teaching methods and are teaching knowledge organised within traditional subject categories in a didactic manner. For many contemporary critics of primary education their bete noire is the Plowden Report' (David McNamara, Professor of Education at the University of Hull, The Times Educational Supplement, 21 March 1997).

Regrettably, New Labour has continued to embrace this approach to education with even more tests, targets and divisive elitism. It has also sought to control not just what teachers teach but how they teach it. The Literacy Hour and Numeracy Hour spell out in detail exactly how children are to be taught reading, writing and arithmetic. Plowden today Despite all the criticism and hostility, there is still considerable interest in what Plowden had to say. My own 1987 piece 'Plowden and the Primary Curriculum Twenty Years On' has been read on my website 9,000 times in the past four years and I regularly get emails - mainly from student teachers - asking where they can find a copy of the report or what it says about various issues. There are hopeful signs that the educational pendulum may now be beginning to swing away from the sterility of the National Curriculum and back to a greater awareness of the importance of creativity and spontaneity in children's learning. Award-winning author Philip Pullman has been campaigning to get creativity back into the school curriculum. (All around you is silence, The Guardian, 5 June 2003) And it seems to be working.

At a conference on creativity in schools in June 2003, Education Secretary Charles Clarke and Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell both affirmed in unequivocal terms the place of the arts in the curriculum. Theatre director Jude Kelly has argued that 'We cannot hope to be original or imaginative in civic and commercial life if we do not nurture creativity in school' (Britain needs creative people, The Guardian, 29 June 2004). Primary schools are being urged to improve pupils' speaking and listening skills. Education correspondent Rebecca Smithers (Teachers to work on pupils lost for words, The Guardian, 13 November 2003) described the scheme as 'the first such programme in the world'. In fact, training in oracy skills was seen as vital by Plowden almost forty years ago. David McNamara has suggested that universities are embracing some of the progressive educational methods recommended by Plowden.

'At the very time when educationists and political commentators line up to condemn progressive teaching methods in primary schools, those self-same methods are being actively encouraged in our universities to foster student learning.' (Plowden's message is alive and well - in the universities, The Times Educational Supplement, 21 March 1997). So perhaps, after years of criticism - much of it unfair, the Plowden Report is finally being rehabilitated. Plowden is a voice from the past but one which urgently needs hearing again today. When politicians realise that what is measurable is not all that is valuable, when teachers begin to notice that children learn nothing by being tested, when parents are sick of their young children suffering from exam-induced stress, when the public begins to realise that the results of national tests can always be manipulated to achieve politicians' targets, and when decent people decide to stand up against the name-and-shame culture of failure, then someone, somewhere, is going to remember that 'at the heart of the educational process lies the child.' The Plowden Report still stands as an invaluable analysis of the needs and possibilities of the primary school.

References Benford M and Ingham A (1987) Another Leap Forward The Times Educational Supplement 6 March 1987 Central Advisory Council for Education (1967) Children and their Primary Schools ('The Plowden Report'), London: HMSO. The full text of the report will be available on Derek Gillard's website. Department of Education and Science (1980a) A Framework for the School Curriculum, London: Department of Education and Science. Department of Education and Science (1980b) A View of the Curriculum, London: Department of Education and Science. Department of Education and Science (1981) The School Curriculum, London: Department of Education and Science. Department of Education and Science (1985) Better Schools, London: Department of Education and Science. Department of Education and Science (1985) The Swann Report, London: Department of Education and Science. Donaldson, Margaret (1978) Children's Minds, London: Fontana. Kogan, Maurice (1987) 'The Plowden Report Twenty Years On', Oxford Review of Education Vol. 13, No. 1.

Marshall, Sybil (1963) An Experiment in Education, London: Cambridge University Press. Plowden, Bridget (1987) '"Plowden" Twenty Years On', Oxford Review of Education Vol. 13, No. 1. Schools Council (1981) The Practical Curriculum, London: Methuen. Scruton, Roger (1987) 'Expressionist Education', Oxford Review of Education Vol. 13, No. 1. Sylva, Kathy (1987) 'Plowden: history and prospect', Oxford Review of Education Vol. 13, No. 1. Links Derek Gillard's website : The Education Archive includes The Plowden Project. The full text the Report is now on-line. Lady Plowden . Obituary by Anne Corbett (The Guardian 3 October 2000) Consensus-seeking committee chairman whose controversial report changed the course of primary education. A Tribute to a Kind, Thoughtful, Intelligent President . Tribute to Lady Plowden by Peter Clyne, ex-Chair of the NIACE Executive Committee. Death Of An Unsung Heroine .

Tribute to Lady Plowden by Professor Trevor Kerry, Research Professor in the International Educational Leadership Centre in the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, and Senior Vice President of the College of Teachers. Derek Gillard taught in primary and middle schools in England for more than thirty years, including eleven as a head teacher. He retired in 1997 but continues to write on educational issues for Forum magazine and his own website. How to cite this article: Gillard, D. 'The Plowden Report', the encyclopaedia of informal education, . © Derek Gillard 2004 Hosting by Memset Dedicated Servers [CarbonNeutral®]. Plowden article by AH Halsey and Kathy Sylva AH Halsey and Kathy Sylva 1987 Introduction to the special Plowden Twenty Years On edition of the Oxford Review of Education Volume 13 Number 1 1987 ï¿½ Copyright 1987 Carfax Publishing This article was first published in the Oxford Review of Education Vol. 13 No. 1 1987.

It is reproduced here by kind permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd , owners of Carfax Publishing, and with the approval of the authors. Page numbers are from the journal. [page 3] AH HALSEY & KATHY SYLVA POLICY That this Review should revisit the Plowden Report after twenty years was a suggestion not to be refused. Children and Their Primary Schools was the last delivery to government from the Central Advisory Council for Education. Anthony Crosland, the Secretary of State at the DES, surprised me on the day after publication in 1967 by confident assertion that it was the last of the line. His confidence was based on the instinct of an outstanding politician that the amiable reflections of an essentially amateur Establishment of the 'great and good' were too unwieldy and too slow to be of service to modern government. He already had the notion that planning backed by economic and sociological research could be internalised into DES administration in such a way as to enable an energetic Secretary of State to link social scientific knowledge to political and popular opinion as it expressed itself in Westminster.

I, as his part-time adviser, needed no persuasion then, being an enthusiast for the potential capacity of social science to raise the level of political debate and, in the mood of the 1960s, ambivalent if not hostile to the role of the establishment as a benign brake on the engine of progress towards democratic socialism in Britain. Crosland was right: there have been no CACE reports since Plowden and the apparatus has now been dismantled. Whether both Crosland and I were wrong in our optimism that the relation between government and social science could be developed as a powerful source of guidance to policy and thus as a means to promoting the wealth and welfare of the nation is a more difficult question to which we hoped commissioned papers might contribute answers. THE CONTRIBUTORS So we sought contributors of two kinds - those who knew the subsequent political and administrative history of education and those who had been involved in subsequent research in and on schools. Some key figures, alas, we could not ask. Anthony Crosland and Edward Boyle among politicians, Derek Morrell and Ralph Fletcher among DES officials, Sir Lionel Russell among Chief Education Officers and Alan Little among researchers have all in the meantime died.

But we were able to turn to Lady Plowden herself, to Maurice Kogan who was the Secretary to the Committee, to George Smith who had joined the EPA Action-Research Programme in 1968 and has maintained his interest ever since, to David Winkley who is distinguished for his heroic pragmatism in the running of an ethnically mixed inner city primary school and to Roger Scruton* who [*The article by Roger Scruton is not currently online.] [page 4] has emerged in recent years as the leading voice of what was called the 'black paper' view in the early Plowden years. For classroom research we turned to Neville Bennett and Maurice Galton, both skilled investigators of life inside classrooms and its effects on pupil performance. For a 'balance sheet' on current practice and teacher education we turned to Philip Gammage, and to Andrew Wilkinson for specialist knowledge about the contribution of Plowden to language teaching. Finally, we sought from Karl Gruber* the views of a European on the impact of the Report on educational debate and practice outside Britain, in this case Germany and Austria. Thus our contributors range in their discussions from global perspectives on policy formulation to the microanalysis of teacher-pupil interaction.

It is not our purpose here to rehearse the arguments and descriptions on either the policy or the research side which are set out in the papers. Our intention is, rather, to offer a context in which the papers may be read. FORMATION OF POLICY First we must offer some remarks on the formation as distinct from the content of policy. In the 1960s, whether or not Plowden was to be the last CACE report, the issue might have been taken to be settled. Education, and especially compulsory primary education, was firmly established as a state enterprise. Its policies were to be settled by the testing and dissemination of ideas and innovations in a decentralised system of comparatively autonomous schools and local education authorities loosely surveyed by a national inspectorate with traditions of advisory support rather than conveyance of central direction. Of course financial and legal control was ultimately in the hands of the Secretary of State answerable to Parliament. And, of course, party political policy could make its way through parliament back through the bureaucracy and the inspectorate to the schools. But, at least after the 1944 Act, the system was remarkably detached from partisan politics - a central-local-professional partnership rather passively coordinated by Whitehall.

Occasional review by a CACE fitted naturally to such a system. Experiments in the incorporation of social and psychological science have intermittently marked the subsequent history of policy making. The Schools Council, the Educational Research Board of the SSRC (now ESRC), the development of a planning division in the DES, the use of advisers to the Secretary of State and the increased frequency of reports by HM Inspectorate have all had mixed fortunes in what can be thought of as an evolution of the relation between social science and political administration. Yet most observers will share the dissatisfied verdict of Professor Kogan that the CACE tradition is 'inadequate for the far more complex challenges of the 1980s'. We agree and would also concur that 'a more detached and expert entity capable of analysing the state of education is needed'. We would, moreover, stress both expertise and independence. Education, we suggest, needs a National Academy or Institute for policy research. Such a body should have no monopoly: indeed political parties, the professional teaching associations and the universities and polytechnics which train teachers all need the support of their own policy research if they are to function effectively. The DES must have its in-house accommodation for research in the service of policy and planning.

A national institute for policy studies might well take commissioned research from any of these governmental and non-governmental organi- [*The article by Karl Gruber is not currently online.] [page 5] sations but should be controlled by none of them. Its responsibility would be to monitor education, to carry out empirical enquiry, to act as a forum for policy debate in the light of social and psychological knowledge and to disseminate the results of both research and debate. It would be the point at which social science and government would meet to negotiate their mutual interest - the one in objective enquiry, the other in usable knowledge. THE SUBSTANCE OF POLICY With respect to the content of policy we may begin with the reminder that Plowden belongs to the post-war period of the thirty years in which Britain enjoyed steady economic growth (albeit with a less burgeoning plenitude than that of other Western European countries) and a political consensus concerning the balanced pursuit of freedom and equality in which both the democratic state and the school were assumed to have a large part to play. The oil crisis of 1973-74 brought that period to an end and ushered in recession and retrenchment.

There followed rising levels of unemployment, a long agony of industrial reconstruction, mounting social and economic problems in the cities which had been built on classical industrialism, growing doubt and criticism about the efficacy of the central state and of organised education as means to the ends of wealth and its fair distribution and finally a sharpening of political conflict centring on the revival of doctrines of economic liberalism. None of these developments was anticipated or could seriously have been expected to be anticipated by the authors of the two volumes presented to Crosland by Lady Plowden. It was not so much that there were no economic difficulties, and indeed Crosland's persuasion of the Cabinet to give ï¿½16m for buildings and enhancement of new school buildings in educational priority areas was considered a considerable coup at a time when the national economic plan of the Labour government of 1964-70 was failing and the Chancellor of the Exchequer was playing his customary role as a watchdog of the ambitions of spending ministers. Nor was it that cheerfulness about the efficacy of social reform towards less inequality through educational reform had been thrown into doubt as it was later to be in the wake of the failed hopes of the American war on poverty and the attack mounted by such writers as Christopher Jencks.

The difficulties were thought of more in terms of limits to the rising proportion of GNP spent on education in competition with the demands from other fields of social policy including housing, health and social services. Moreover the programme of expansion in higher education launched before but associated mostly with the Robbins Report of 1963 made Crosland and his circle aware that a very large commitment of public expenditure had already mortgaged educational policy for the 1970s. The binary system has to be understood in these terms. And there was still the unsolved problem of private schooling which Crosland fended off, against my passionate advice, with yet another commission of enquiry.

In this context the Plowden Report seemed to me at the time to be a welcome push in the direction of solving the central problem of educational inequality through its concern with the mainstream of state-provided schools for the vast majority as distinct from concern with the superstructure of higher education - a stage by which social inequality through selection was not directly remediable - or with the declining fringe of marketed education for the well-to-do which could, I thought and think, be dealt with by a combination of improving standards in the state system and a bargain with [page 6] the 'public' or 'commercial' schools that their continued existence is tolerated on condition of per capita resources equal to those spent on equivalent forms of education in the public mainstream. THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLICY It was against this background that some of us took up the main policy messages of Plowden, i.e. positive discrimination through an EPA area policy, the development of pre-schooling in the same terms, and third, the fostering of the idea of the community school so that a new partnership between parents and teachers could emerge as a force enabling every EPA community to stand on its own feet like any other and rejuvenate its own world. At first things went well.

Michael Young had been an inventive and persistent proponent of these ideas in the Plowden Committee and had become the Chairman of the SSRC. Crosland was sceptically enthusiastic about the idea of action research in EPAs to develop in the British context what he hoped might become a viable geographical theory of social deprivation. Together we devised an EPA programme for a three-year cycle of action research funded jointly by the DES (action) and SSRC (research) based independently in the Department of Social and Administrative Studies in Oxford and located in four deprived districts in England as well as an associated project in Scotland where LEA cooperation was secured. Enthusiastic staff were recruited, notably Eric Midwinter in Liverpool, and thus a programme conceived in Curzon Street, born in Oxford and brought up in Deptford, Birmingham, Liverpool, the West Riding and Dundee was finally returned as a mature set of findings and recommendations to Mrs Thatcher, the newly arrived Secretary of State at the DES under the Heath government.

One of my most vivid memories is of a long discussion with Mrs Thatcher of the concept of positive discrimination from which I learned in 1972 that the political redefinition of an expansive idea could be transformed back towards restrictionism by way of emphasis on selection in the distribution of public funds to those most in need. But at that time the Conservative administration was still thinking in expansionist terms and had yet to develop the overriding resolve to subjugate all social policy to the overriding imperative of a reduced total public expenditure. Mrs Thatcher's White Paper of 1972 had the title Education: A Framework for Expansion (CMND 5174) and clearly reflected our Plowden/EPA influence. Nevertheless the reflections were vague, muted and partial. We had called for a particular type of pre-school programme and the government promised a Plowden level of provision. But the schedule was a slow one. The Plowden target was not to be reached until 1981 and the sums made immediately available were extremely modest. We asked for positive discrimination and Mrs Thatcher decreed 'priority will be given in the early stages of the programme to areas of disadvantage'. That was far too vague.

It ought to have been written in terms of precise measurement and as an explicit financial formula. There was hopeful reference to the experience of the urban programme which used the techniques of phasing and further grant aid only after inspection. But again, a positively discriminatory programme had to have close central control. It was dangerous to leave too much to local councils. We wanted and advocated local diagnosis before plans were made for pre-school provision but within the framework of firm control at the centre for grant aid and a strong central [page 7] organisation to ensure that the pre-school resources flowed to where they were most needed. This could not happen unless the DES was prepared to set up a division concerned with what Mrs Thatcher had invented, viz pre-schooling as a new stage of education at the foundation of the system. It also required that, for pre-schooling to flourish, there should be firm inter-departmental arrangements between the DES and the DHSS. As a result of our EPA experiences we advocated local diagnosis and avoidance of standard national formulae as to the organisation and curricula of nursery education and the response of the White Paper was that 'the government attaches importance to a full assessment of local resources and needs, and will welcome diversity'.

We advocated the hybrid vigour of professional nurseries and parent-involved play-groups and the government announced that it would guide and encourage local authorities to equip voluntary groups and provide them with qualified teachers, recognising that 'the maturity and experience (of mothers) are important assets' and that 'nursery education probably offers the best opportunities for enlisting parental understanding and support for what schools are trying to achieve'. There was no doubt that our post-Plowden EPA pronouncements had found their way into the White Paper and to a circular to local authorities as a result of our discussions with Mrs Thatcher and the civil servants in the DES. But Mrs Thatcher had been careful to define needs in terms of parental wishes - a recipe for negative discrimination or, in other words, the traditional social process of skimming. And again, diagnosis could easily and fatally be left to unguided and unaided local government interests. The educational anthropology which we had advocated as the basis for deciding on forms of provision required task forces to work with the local interests, both statutory and voluntary and both educational and social service. THE LESSON OF PLOWDEN The key words in both Plowden and the EPA reports were 'community' and 'equality'.

For realisation they had to be set in a viable theory of community and a realistic appraisal of the role of education in social change. In the early years of EPA and CDP attempts were made to forge a theory and to develop realistic views of the possibilities of social change through education. We learnt painfully that educational reform had not in the past and was unlikely in the future ever to bring an egalitarian society unaided. Plowden policies in effect assumed fundamental reforms in the economic and social institutions of the country at large. Given these reforms, which include the devolution of power to localities, democratic control by community members over national and professional purveyors of expertise in planning, health, employment and education, income and capital equalisation, coordinated employment policies and well planned housing and civic amenities, realistic demands can be put on the education system. The schools can be asked, in partnership with the families they serve, to bring up children capable of exercising their political, economic and social rights and duties in such a society. They can be so constituted as to socialise children in anticipation of such a society: but to do so without the wider reforms is to court frustration for individuals if not disaster for the social order.

We learned in other words the complexity of social policy for a rich, fair and educated society. We learned the limitations of unaided school reform. We learned the frailties of the connection between social science knowledge and political action. And [page 8] we learned the limitations of area policies as distinct from policies targeted on individuals and their needs. Is it possible now to take up again the Plowden vision? The papers which follow may be read as an appraisal of the advances made in research as well as in thinking about public policy mechanisms which might give a more secure base for action than that which was possible for us in the pioneering days of the late 1960s and early 1970s. AH HALSEY

Question: With what was the 'Plowden Report' concerned?
Answer: EDUCATION