Plowden

Plowden is upon us — 556 pages, 197 recommendations and over three years of investigation and enquiry. After Crowther, Newsom, and Robbins we have at last arrived at what is the chronological and logical starting point. Newsom drew sufficient blood perhaps to soften the impact of the report — Children and their primary schools, not half but our whole future. Nevertheless, under the bland prose is presented both an indicment of our present educational foundation and a hope for its strengthening. To educationalists and those in higher and further education it is of just as much importance as to the five‐year‐old child about to enter infant school. Not only will it remind them of the precise grounds on which their work is eventually based, but it will also provide a welcome boost to progressive educational thinking via the precepts implicit in it.