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HMI: Curriculum Matters 1 English
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Curriculum Matters (1984-9) HMI Series London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1984-9
Notes on the text
They covered most areas of the school curriculum - though, strangely, not science. (For a statement of mid-1980s thinking on school science, see Science 5-16: a statement of policy published by the DES in 1985). The Curriculum Matters booklets were published as Margaret Thatcher's Tory government was preparing the ground for the 1988 Education Reform Act, which was to impose the National Curriculum on schools. (The Prefaces from booklet 9 onwards indicate what was happening). The booklets all had similar covers (the last is shown above) and were known - in my school at least - as 'raspberry ripples', since the colour was reminiscent of a type of ice cream popular at the time. All their titles included from 5 to 16 except for Modern foreign languages to 16 - presumably because it dealt only with the years from 11 to 16. All the booklets in the series are presented here, each in a single web page. Links are provided to the main section headings so you can either scroll through a whole document or go straight to a particular section. The formatting of the text (bold, italics, centred etc) is a reasonably accurate representation of the printed version. However, please note that the pages presented here are not exact facsimiles of the original printed version: the font (Times, Arial etc) and size of print - and therefore the number of words to a line and lines to a page - are determined by the settings you have chosen for your web browser. Most of the booklets contained a few printing errors: I have corrected those I (or my spell-checker!) spotted. The booklets refer to the years of compulsory schooling in secondary school as years 1 to 5. Since the introduction of the National Curriculum these have been designated Years 6 to 10. 
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Curriculum Matters was a series of 17 booklets published by HMI between 1984 and 1989. They were intended as a contribution to the 'Great Debate' about the nature and purpose of education begun by Prime Minister Jim Callaghan in his 1976 