Plowden (1967)

Volume 1 The Report

Preliminary pages (i-xxii)
Foreword, Membership, Contents

Part 1 Introduction
Chapter 1 (1-3)
Introduction

Part 2 The growth of the child
Chapter 2 (7-26)
The children: their growth and development

Part 3 The home, school and neighbourhood
Chapter 3 (29-36)
The children and their environment
Chapter 4 (37-49)
Participation by parents
Chapter 5 (50-68)
Educational Priority Areas
Chapter 6 (69-74)
Children of immigrants
Chapter 7 (75-94)
The health and social services and the school child

Part 4 The structure of primary education
Chapter 8 (97-115)
Primary education in the 1960s: its organisation and effectiveness
Chapter 9 (116-134)
Providing for children before compulsory education
Chapter 10 (135-152)
The ages and stages of primary education
Chapter 11 (153-157)
Selection for secondary education
Chapter 12 (158-166)
Continuity and consistency between the stages of education
Chapter 13 (167-173)
The size of primary schools
Chapter 14 (174-181)
Education in rural areas

Part 5 The children in the schools: curriculum and internal organisation
Chapter 15 (185-188)
The aims of primary education
Chapter 16 (189-202)
Children learning in school
Chapter 17 (203-261)
Aspects of the curriculum
Chapter 18 (262-265)
Aids to learning and to teaching
Chapter 19 (266-272)
The child in the school community
Chapter 20 (273-295)
How primary schools are organised
Chapter 21 (296-304)
Handicapped children in ordinary schools
Chapter 22 (305-308)
The education of gifted children

Part 6 The adults in the schools
Introduction (311-312)
The role of the teacher
Chapter 23 (313-323)
The staffing of schools
Chapter 24 (324-338)
The deployment of staff
Chapter 25 (339-367)
The training of primary school teachers
Chapter 26 (368-376)
The training of nursery assistants and teachers' aides

Part 7 Independent schools
Chapter 27 (379-386)
Independent primary schools

Part 8 Primary school buildings and equipment; status; and research
Chapter 28 (389-409)
Primary school buildings and equipment
Chapter 29 (410-422)
The status and government of primary education
Chapter 30 (423-427)
Research, innovation and the dissemination of information

Part 9 Conclusions and recommendations
Chapter 31 (431-459)
The costs and priorities of our recommendations
Chapter 32 (460-485)
Recommendations and conclusions

Notes (486-495)
Notes of reservation
Annex A (499-503)
A questionnaire to witnesses
Annex B (504-521)
List of witnesses
Annex C (522-536)
Visits made
Glossary (537-541)
Index (545-555)

Volume 2 Research and Surveys

Preliminary pages (i-v)
Foreword and Contents
Appendix 1 (1-50)
Teachers' questionnaire
Appendix 2 (51-89)
Health of school children

The 1964 National Survey:

Appendix 3 (90-178)
1964 National Survey
Appendix 4 (179-221)
Regression analyses
Appendix 5 (222-242)
Data from the schools
Appendix 6 (243-259)
Infant starters
Appendix 7 (260-266)
Standards of reading of 11 year olds
Annexes (267-289)
to the National Survey

Appendix 8 (290-346)
Social services and primary education
Appendix 9 (347-400)
The Manchester Survey
Appendix 10 (401-543)
National Child Development Study
Appendix 11 (544-594)
School organisation and effects of streaming
Appendix 12 (595-600)
Gypsies and education
Appendix 13 (601-616)
Management of primary schools
Appendix 14 (617-633)
Variation in LEA provision

Articles

written in 1987 on Plowden's twentieth anniversary.

AH Halsey and Kathy Sylva
Plowden: history and prospect
Maurice Kogan
The Plowden Report twenty years on
George Smith
Whatever happened to educational priority areas?
David Winkley
From condescension to complexity: post-Plowden schooling in the inner city
Neville Bennett
Changing perspectives on teaching-learning processes in the post-Plowden era
Maurice Galton
Change and continuity in the primary school: the research evidence
Philip Gammage
Chinese whispers
Andrew M Wilkinson
Aspects of communication and the Plowden Report
Bridget Plowden
'Plowden' twenty years on

A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England)

London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office 1967
© Crown copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the Queen's Printer for Scotland.

Notes on the text

The Plowden Report was published in two volumes.

Volume 1: The Report (556 pages) contains the report itself, consisting of 32 chapters, notes of reservation, three annexes, a glossary and an index.

Volume 2: Research and Surveys (633 pages) contains the research and surveys which underpinned the report.

The full text of both volumes is online, including the diagrams, graphs, tables and footnotes which appeared in the original.

The formatting of the text (bold, italics, centred etc) is a reasonably accurate representation of the original. However, please note that the pages presented here are not exact facsimiles of the 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.

Anything added by way of explanation is shown [in square brackets].

Tables

The two volumes of Plowden contain more than 400 tables, 60 or so diagrams and 46 photographs.

In this web version, some tables and diagrams are embedded in the text. Others, especially the larger ones, are shown as links in the text - clicking on one opens a new window displaying the relevant table or diagram. (The Tables and Diagrams can also be accessed from the Contents list in the Preliminary pages).

If you normally have your browser set to display a large font size, you may find that some tables look better if you reduce the font size.

I have presented most of the tables in grids - I think this makes them easier to read on a screen.

Photographs

The photographic plates which appeared between pages 264 and 265 in Volume 1 can be accessed from the Contents list in the Preliminary pages and at the end of Chapter 18.

Plowden Twenty Years On

Also online are the following nine articles, all written in 1987 on the twentieth anniversary of Plowden's publication. They first appeared in the Oxford Review of Education Volume 13 Number 1 1987 Special Issue: Plowden Twenty Years On:

Plowden: history and prospect
AH Halsey and Kathy Sylva
In this introduction to the special Plowden issue of the Oxford Review of Education Professor Halsey writes about the Central Advisory Councils and their role in education policy making and Kathy Sylva examines the use Plowden made of Piagetian theory.

The Plowden Report Twenty Years on
Maurice Kogan
Maurice Kogan considers the membership, terms of reference and assumptions governing the work of the Plowden Committee, evaluates criticisms made since of its proposals and findings and relates the Committee's conclusions to possible change models and to forms of policy analysis that might have been used.

Whatever Happened to Educational Priority Areas?
George Smith
Educational Priority Areas (EPAs) were a key proposal in the Plowden Report - one which received immediate and widespread support. George Smith looks at why the EPA programme faltered in the 1970s and suggests that in the 1980s there was a revival of interest in the role of education in the inner city.

From Condescension to Complexity: post-Plowden schooling in the inner city
David Winkley
David Winkley suggests that the Plowden Report underrated the seriousness of race and cultural issues in the inner city, and argues for greater institutional consciousness and a more sophisticated philosophical grasp of cultural and racial meanings.

Changing Perspectives on Teaching-learning Processes in the Post-Plowden Era
Neville Bennett
Neville Bennett considers the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of three approaches to studying teaching-learning processes as a context from which to consider the utility of the model of teaching prescribed in the Plowden Report.

Change and Continuity in the Primary School: the research evidence
Maurice Galton
Maurice Galton reviews the findings of the ORACLE project (Observational Research and Classroom Learning Evaluation), carried out between 1975 and 1980, which suggested that the kinds of practice endorsed in the Plowden Report were only partially implemented.

Chinese Whispers
Philip Gammage
Philip Gammage charts some of the actual changes personally observed over the twenty years following the Report and suggests that Plowden's inspirational qualities should not be overlooked.

Aspects of Communication and the Plowden Report
Andrew M Wilkinson
Andrew M Wilkinson notes that the influence of a document is not confined to what it purports to say. It has sociolinguistic meanings related to its status, power, context, timing and reader receptiveness He argues that in Plowden these meanings were benign.

'Plowden' Twenty Years On
Bridget Plowden
Bridget Plowden gives her own account of how it seemed to her that some of the main 'Plowden' recommendations or comments had worked, twenty years on.