Friends for doing so, that there is no additional allocation of money for going comprehensive, although of course authorities can and will use for the purpose the large amounts of Secondary school-building which they receive for basic needs and so on. So the abolition of selection is in no way a threat to the primary sector in terms of resources, and in every other way it is a positive boon.
Indeed, I would say that the Plowden Report and the comprehensive re-organisation to a large extent share the same objective, which is to give every child an equal chance. The picture of English primary education which emerges from the Report is, as the right hon. Gentleman has said, encouraging, on balance.
The Report sums it up by saying: English primary education at its best … is very good indeed. Only rarely is it very bad. The average is good.
There has been a clear improvement in standards over the years. It appears in many forms—the better relationships between pupils and teachers, the superb art and craft work often to be seen, the evidence of exciting creative writing quoted in the Report, and above all, as the right hon.
Gentleman mentioned, the steady improvement in reading standards. These improvements reflect enormous credit on the teachers, who have done wonders despite the successive waves of increased pupil numbers which have broken over the schools. In the light of these facts, I do not think that there is justification for extreme statements of the kind which are quite often made, and which give the impression that nothing is happening in primary education and that all the money is going elsewhere.
Nevertheless, there is an undoubted sense of neglect, and the Council was not satisfied with what it found. It summed the matter up in Paragraph Many of the points discussed in this chapter, however, reveal inequitable or even downright shoddy treatment. Primary education seems always to get the worst treatment—the largest classes, the oldest buildings, poor career prospects and the most restricted professional autonomy.
We must try to decide the reason for this feeling of neglect. Fundamentally it is a lack of money, teachers and buildings. During the first half of the s, expenditure per primary child in real terms scarcely rose—to be exact, it rose by only 3 per cent.
And in there were fewer full-time teachers in the primary schools than there were in However, the Report points out that we can now envisage "a substantial improvement on the recent past". I would like to give the House a brief progress report on the improvement so far in the two crucial sectors of buildings and teachers.
First, buildings. I need not point out to the House—all hon. Members know it from their constituency experience—what a deplorably large legacy we still have of slum or substandard schools. But we are making progress. Within this growing total, there has been a marked shift towards the primary schools. From to only 23 per cent. Their share then rose to 38 per cent. But in the second half of —68, which was the first programme for which this Government was responsible, the share rose to no less than 53 per cent.
I am glad to say that about one-third of these primary projects are for replacing sub-standard buildings. What matters to us in this context is precisely this element of improvement; it is this which gives the measure of our priorities. Taking the series of three building programmes up to —70, I estimate that they will provide at least , new primary school places over and above those needed for extra num- bers of children.
But on the secondary side I estimate that the equivalent figure will be about 60, new places. In other words, over this three-year programme for which the present Government have been responsible, we shall replace more than four times as many substandard primary places as secondary places and , primary school children will be in new schools who would otherwise be in old schools. So a definite shift in priorities has already occurred.
Teacher supply is also beginning to move in the right direction although, because of the rising numbers of children, we still have a hard slog ahead.
Here the position is as follows. From to , the number of qualified teachers in primary schools actually fell. But since then it has been rising quite rapidly.
In , it was , Last year, it was , This year, it is , Next year, I judge that it will be about , and the upward trend will continue strongly thereafter. Of course, these rising numbers of teachers have had in the last two or three years to cope with rapidly rising numbers of children. The right hon. Member for Birmingham, Handsworth was lucky in this respect at least—and I do not begrudge his luck—in that, over the decade ending in , the number of pupils in primary schools actually fell by over , In consequence, despite as I think a rather unimpressive performance in teacher supply, some dent was made in the problem of class size.
We are in a completely different and much more difficult situation because of the rising birthrate in the late s. Between and , the primary school roll increased by over , It rose by another 95, last year and will continue to rise by perhaps as many as , a year for some years to come. Yet even in the face of this large increase in numbers, I believe that we shall continue to improve the staffing ratio and, for all that forecasts are hazardous, I stick to my belief that, by , we shall be very near to eliminating completely primary classes of over I turn now to some of the specific Plowden recommendations.
Like the right hon. Gentleman, I will select only a few out of the and those of the most immediate interest. First, I will refer, as the right hon. Gentleman himself did first, to educational priority areas. I shall not summarise what the Report says about social and educational handicaps suffered by the children in these areas or the case for positive discrimination in their favour.
I will only say that I find this, as the right hon. Gentleman did, a most radical recommendation, utterly convincing and a very striking illustration of what Professor Titmuss and others have recently been saying—that we cannot rely on economic growth alone to even out gross social inequalities.
In the Department, we have already given a lot of thought to the problem of social handicap. Eighteen months ago, as I informed the House at the time, I set up a small standing group of Her Majesty's inspectors and officials to keep the whole subject under review and consider possible lines of action. We have published three in our series Reports on Education on the subject of education under social handicap.
A year ago, we held a very notable conference in Roehampton, described in last July's issue of Trends in Education, so we have done a good deal of preparatory work. The Plowden Council now says, and I wholly agree, that we must make a further positive effort. I cannot pronounce on all its detailed recommendations today as some involve major decisions about future public expenditure and I want to have the views of the associations, whose co-operation in this will be crucial.
But I can give some preliminary thoughts. First, the designation of educational priority areas. Although I am in agreement with the right hon. Gentleman and I wholly share the objective of defining the deprived or under-privileged schools, I see great difficulty in the particular administrative solution proposed for achieving it.
I would doubt, even with the range of criteria which Plowden proposes, whether we could, working centrally from the Department, designate these areas in a way which would be truly objective, and moreover many people would object in principle to the Government intervening by fiat in the responsibilities of local government in this way.
But I am not too disturbed about this because, even if central designation is not practicable, every local authority knows which are its own E. I propose to allocate about half of the —69 major school building programme to primary projects and I shall give priority within this allocation, when basic needs for new places have been met, to the replacement of primary schools in E.
Looking ahead, I shall try to keep each year a special reserve in the school building programme for allocation specifically to E. Secondly, I come to minor works which are obviously especially useful in relation to E. Incidentally, I thought that the right hon.
Gentleman was rather disingenuous in what he said, in referring to an article in the Birmingham Post, about "Mini-minor" works. He must know that we brought these under control because the amount spent on them in three successive years so far exceeded what he estimated that the account was hopelessly in the red, and they would have had to have been brought under control by any Government.
In any case, what matters is the total spending on minor works, however described and however allocated. So I hope that that will satisfy one point that the right hon.
Gentleman made. I have great sympathy with the idea of a special allocation of minor works for E. If the debate had come rather later in the Session, I might have had something to announce on the subject.
As it is, I can only say that we take this recommendation very seriously and I hope to make an announcement in due course. The same applies to a possible relaxation for the E. The difficulty here is partly the question of teacher supply and training, but partly of course money—and here again I can only say at the moment that I intend to give priority to E. The Report asks whether the quota arrangement might be used in any way to help the priority areas. I should like to consider this along with any other promising ideas and in consultation with the associations.
I therefore propose, if the other parties are agreeable, to call a special quota conference to see whether we can change the system in such a way as to help the E. Plowden also raised—and the right hon. Gentleman mentioned this—the question of salary differentials to help these priority areas. Of course some authorities already do a great deal to attract teachers to their difficult areas—London, Birmingham and the West Riding of Yorkshire are three examples.
They give travel allowances, help with housing, create additional posts of special responsibility, and in at least one case they have tried to build up a mobile force of teachers.
But the question of an explicit national salary differential of course raises far more complications and would be a matter of great concern to both teachers' and local authority organisations. It is naturally a matter for the Burnham Committee, but I think that I can give an assurance that the general question of possible differentials for E.
On the subject of Burnham, since it has been much mentioned in the House recently, I should add that I shall be meeting representatives of the associations on the Burnham Primary and Secondary Committee next Wednesday and I hope to be able to assure them that negotiations will shortly be possible. I turn now to the second major recommendation, which concerns co-operation between school and parent. Before the right hon. Gentleman leaves the subject of the E.
He has mentioned travel allowances. Will education authorities be allowed to pay travel allowances to teachers to go from a town to schools in the surrounding rural area or has a rural area no prospect of being designated an E.
In general, travel allowances are within the discretion of the authorities already and it is for them to decide. It is up to the authority in any area to decide what to do, and it will remain so. I now have to say something on the second recommendation about co-operation between school and parents. Here, again, I agree with much of what the right hon. This was perhaps the most imaginative and perceptive part of the whole Plowden Report.
We have known for a very long time the effect which home background and parental attitudes have on school performance, and the Report gives us a great deal of additional evidence. In the primary school especially the place of the parent needs to be made clear. Parents need to know what the school is trying to do for their children and the school needs to know how far it can rely on the encouragement of the parents, or how far it must make allowance for the lack of it.
Generally, parents have a right to know what is going on in their children's schools. The Report describes a "minimum programme. As the Report itself says, it is hard enough to cope with 40 children without taking on 80 parents as well. I certainly do not underestimate the load on teachers' time and energies which a more open school policy will involve.
But for all these difficulties—and there may be some financial difficulties as well—I am certain that it is right to pursue this policy.
Some of the detailed proposals such as the appointment of two deputy head teachers for schools which are used for out-of-school activities, will obviously need a great deal of thought, but we must move ahead in the direction of linking the school and the community more closely.
So I fully accept the recommendation that my Department should follow up this matter, by circular or some other means. To some extent, we have already done so.
The new Evelyn Lowe Primary School in Southwark, which I had the pleasure of opening recently, shows brilliantly how far suitable planning and imaginative staffing can help to make a school a welcoming place for parents to visit.
The next issue of Trends in Education will describe how a comprehensive school in Bristol is making itself the centre of its community, providing for a common use of library facilities, for example, developing a whole range of evening activities on the school premises involving staff, pupils and parents in association with the youth service and further education.
Up and down the country things are moving in the right direction, but we must encourage them still further. Next, there is the cluster of recommendations about "ages and stages", as they have come to be called.
The Council recommends a new national pattern of schooling based on nursery education from the age of 3 for those children whose parents want it, a single date of entry to primary school, half-day attendance at the parents' request up to the age of 6, transfer to junior or middle school at 8 and transfer to secondary school at These are essentially long-term recommendations.
The Council does not envisage the new pattern operating nationally until the late s. They would require decisions and legislation of a fundamental character.
As the Council itself implies, they would cost an unknown sum of money and they would be extemely controversial both in the education world and, I would have thought, in the House. We shall therefore have to give them a great deal of study. Personally, I have great sympathy with some parts of the suggested new pattern.
In particular, I share the general desire to move ahead with nursery provision, though we can do this only when we are sure that we shall not draw too many qualified teachers away from the primary schools; and that day is not yet.
Here I do not agree with the right hon. Opinion about the correct age of transfer is, as the Council admits, very evenly balanced. There is no overwhelming case for one age rather than another. We now have some authorities experimenting with 9 to 13 middle schools as well as 8 to 12 middle schools and this will give us a chance to test the viability of both types on the ground.
Moreover, many authorities have geared their plans for comprehensive reorganisation, or for raising the school-leaving age, either to 11 or to 13 and it would be intolerable now to throw them into confusion by enforcing a transfer age of Generally, it seems doubtful whether a single national age of transfer is so important once we abolish selection.
What made the age of transfer so crucial was that it coincided with selection, but, with selection gone and given a reasonably uniform curriculum for the 10 to 13 age group as a whole, whatever the type of school—and the Schools Council is about to examine this—it is less certain that we need national uniformity on age of transfer.
At any rate, no decision is called for in the immediate future and I hope that we shall have the widest possible expression of view. On the subject of ages and stages, the right hon. Gentleman has not said anything about the interim recommendation—not the long-term recommendation—for two entry dates a year into infants' school as compared with termly entry in the past. Can he make a statement on that? My hon. Friend the Minister of State will deal with a number of interim recommendations all concerning that part of the age group when she winds up the debate.
The fourth group of recommendations concerns ancillary help and teachers' aides. We have to remember that the amount of ancillary help of various kinds has increased remarkably in recent years. It now amounts to about 16, full-time and 70, part-time helpers, and the matter has moved forward since the Plowden Report was published. On 20th January, the local authorities and the teachers' associations published an agreed memorandum, which I greatly welcome, advocating the extended use of non-teaching staff.
The sentence read: We believe it is of the greatest importance, therefore, that Local Education Authorities should examine their arrangements for the employment of ancillary helpers in order that the qualified teaching staff shall be able to conserve their energies and time for those duties which they alone can undertake.
Generally, this memorandum gives us all a reasonable formula to work on for the present, and I would not like to go beyond it without further discussions with both employers and teachers. Next, the Council makes a number of recommendations designed to improve the status of primary school teachers both in the education system and in the community at large. I sometimes doubt whether their status in Britain is in fact as low as they often say it is.
Unlike many other countries, we have in Britain a uniform basic salary for all teachers. We have a common form and length of training for all teachers and, of course, teachers in Britain, without the constraints of a centralised curriculum, have much greater freedom to teach what they want.
However, perhaps status is to some extent what the people concerned think it to be and in any case I agree with much of the Plowden argument on this matter. The Report suggests a number of measures. It proposes, for example, more generous provision of ancillary help—and I have already made it clear that I accept this. It proposes certain changes in respect of school management and the relationship between teachers and local authorities.
I shall hope to say something about this on a future occasion. It proposes that the maximum size of primary classes should be the same as that in the first two or three years of secondary school. The Labour Party has long accepted this and I reaffirm it again today, though the Report has the honesty to admit that both that class size is becoming a less satisfactory measure of the staffing position as we develop new methods of team teaching and the like, and also that no formal change in maximum class-size would have any practical consequence, since class-size depends not on regulations, but on the supply of teachers.
Furthermore, some authorities are preparing to establish, as I have already said, middle schools which straddle the age range 8 to 12, or 9 to 13, and it would be unwise to amend the regulations in any inflexible way until we have more experience of these middle schools.
There are only two other specific points in the Report which I want to mention. The first is religious education. I would judge from our debates last autumn on the Education Act, , that the Plowden recommendations probably represent the consensus, though not the unanimous view, of the House.
That is, we do not want now to disrupt the settlement, reached with such patience and difficulty, or to re-open the whole question which bedevilled English education, and distracted so many energies, over so many decades. But we should, on the other hand, make much clearer to parents their children's right to be excused from religious instruction and the act of worship.
We should encourage more flexibility and freedom in interpretating the law on the act of worship, and we should do much more to familiarise teachers with modern thinking on religious education. On corporal punishment, I am wholly on the side of the Report.
I do not believe in it and never have. My only doubt is whether the Report does not make altogether too much of an issue of it. What stands out is the steady change in the climate of opinion, and the steady diminution in the amount of such punishment which goes on. It was interesting that only 3 per cent. I am sure this problem is on the way out, and that both schools and authorities will note what Plowden has to say. I would certainly commend it, and I would think that hon.
First, we have much to be proud of in our primary schools, and we must not write down their achievement by unnecessary self-criticism and denigration. Secondly, however—and I quote from the Report— …there is a strong feeling that primary education, more than any other sector of education, is failing to secure its share of educational and of national expenditure. Since it takes a matter of years to switch priorities, this is essentially a judgment on the long period during which the Party opposite was in power.
Thirdly, therefore, we have a long uphill task to do all that we want for the primary schools. I have shown how we are starting the task in terms of school buildings and teacher supply. It will not be an easy task, since it coincides with a period of quite exceptional increase in the numbers of primary school-children.
These numbers were perhaps 3 million in ; they were about 4. By the early s, they will be approaching 5 million. This shows the tremendous size of the task in front of us.
But despite the difficulties, this Government accept the philosophy of the Plowden Report, and are determined to improve still further the standards of British primary education. I hope that it will be thought a fair comment on the interesting speech to which we have just listened from the Secretary of State for Education if I say that he was speaking in a minor key.
He was perfectly frank with the House in saying that there were a number of recommendations in his mind, and indeed he took what I might describe as the unprecedented course of giving us a very broad hint about two of them, clearly indicating that he was inhibited, for other reasons, from announcing them today. Those who are interested in this Report, and who hoped that this debate would produce major announcements will be disappointed.
I must gently correct the right hon. Gentleman on one point. It is not a very important matter, but he was seeking to chide previous governments about action taken on previous Reports by drawing upon the dates when those Reports were debated. As my right hon. Boyle made clear, the Minister has no responsibility and can take no credit for this debate.
The fact that we are debating this Report reasonably quickly is entirely due to the Opposition. It does not lie in the mouth of the Secretary of State to take any credit whatever for the speed by which this matter has come to he discussed on the Floor of the House.
Since my hon. Friend has properly seen fit to put the Secretary of State in his place on that point, would he also point out that the figures he gave in his closing sentences absolutely cut from under his feet the grounds of his objection to the priorities which my right hon.
Friends have given in terms of places, when the figures for children in primary education were quite different? I am sure that my hon. Friend is right and will, I hope, catch your eye, Mr. Deputy Speaker, and be able to develop this matter in a much more vicious way than I would normally do.
The report online The Plowden Report was published in two volumes: Volume 1: The Report pages contained the report itself, consisting of 32 chapters, notes of reservation, three annexes, a glossary and an index. Volume 2: Research and Surveys pages contained the research and surveys which underpinned the report.
The text of each volume is presented in a single web page, with the tables, 60 diagrams and 46 photographs embedded in the text where they were in the original. Some of the tables are shown as images. In Volume 2, I have not attempted to reproduce the layout of some of the questionnaires and forms. However, there are examples to show how they were set out in the original.
In Volume 1 the footnotes are numbered. In Volume 2 the symbols used vary from appendix to appendix. In all cases the numbers or symbols shown here are as in the printed version. Anything added by way of explanation is shown [in square brackets].
The many recommendations in the Report, some of far-reaching significance, will be studied with the greatest care by the Government and, I am sure, by all the other interests concerned. There can be no doubt that the work done by the Council, with so much diligence and public spirit, will enable decisions to be reached on a more informed basis by those who are charged with securing the best development of English education within the resources available.
I most warmly thank Lady Plowden and her colleagues for this valuable Report. The Central Advisory Council for Education Wales were given identical terms of reference and we understand that they, too, will report soon. We have been able to keep in touch with their work through the members appointed jointly to both Councils.
Anthony Crosland, P. Appointed January Mrs M Bannister, Housewife and Parent. Appointed February The Hon. Each recommendation is discussed with convincing arguments backed by research findings.
The Start Right report argues for integrated provision and for expansion of funded places for children five-years-old and under. Sir Ball is a strong advocate of continued learning and enabling parents to retrain and have economic independence through work — this is a central element of the report. The challenge to the government at the time was to implement the findings and fund the progress.
Early years educators can track the policy changes made since , for example:. Paul Chapman: London. HMSO: London. The Rumbold Report of the committee of inquiry into the quality of the educational experiences offered to 3-and 4-year olds.
National Commission on Education: London. Sign up for our newsletter and keep up to date with Early Years education, process and events! We promise we won't spam you! Register Sign in. Features Pioneers: Plowden, Rumbold, Ball. Key points Lady Plowden, Dame Angela Rumbold and Sir Christopher Ball were authors of three of the most influential modern assessments of early education Their work continues to be a source of inspiration, review and critique of the early learning culture and effective practice Practitioners should familiarise themselves with the contents of the reports: Start Right: The Importance of Early Learning ; Children and their Primary Schools ; Starting With Quality: The Rumbold Report of the committee of inquiry into the quality of the educational experiences offered to 3-and 4-year olds Note: This article was first published in the February issue of eye The three advocates of early education discussed in this article represent different and significant reports commissioned at quite different times in recent history: Children and their Primary Schools , better known as the Plowden report in Starting With Quality , better known as the Rumbold report in Key elements in the report Diversity and equality; social inclusion; educational priority areas for children in disadvantaged communities to raise standards; child-centred curriculum framework the child at the centre ; learning through play.
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