Primary education in Britain: past, present and future The system’s core ideas, values and practices examined Encounters with teachers and teaching, children and learning The five studies in this book span the tumultuous period from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, a time when the dominant ideas and practices of the previous two decades were being questioned as primary teachers and children were catapulted from the Plowden era into the very different ethos of the National Curriculum, Ofsted inspections, and the educational market-place. Some of the research in this book itself contributed to the revaluation. The book portrays and examines the culture, ideas, practices and dilemmas of primary teaching, explores their complex historical roots, and shows how they have been shaped by external events. The book also combines broad-brush analysis with close empiracal study, drawing on a sequence of classroom researches in which the actions and interactions of teachers and children are subjected to close scrutiny in the pursuit of deeper insight into the complexities of teaching and learning. The book ends by offereing critical reflections on the capacity of current policies and structures for primary education to meet the needs of the next century, and identifies the questions which must now be addressed if the quality of this most important phase of education is to be improved. Of this book one reviewer wrote: the latest publication from what is probably the most thorough and thoughtful series of researche studies about primary education produced in the last thirty years. As a body of work it has the merit, unique to my knowledge, of providing both immensely detailed observation and analysis of the processes and practices of primary schools and classrooms groounded in a deep understanding of the theoretical and empiracal literature, and at the same time an acute awareness of and comentary on the educational context within which schools exist, and the social, economic and political environment with which the education system as a whole interacts’. Also by Robin Alexander and published by Routledge: Policy and Practice in Primary Education: local initiative, national agenda (1997)