Research Review (synoptic)
Supported 2015-16 by the Trust
Project team:
Professor Kathy Hall, University College Cork
Professor Kamil Øzerk, University of Oslo
This review will briefly summarise the evidence and analysis in the Cambridge Primary Review, which tracked growing government centralisation, interventionism and micromanagement since the 1980s and an increasingly punitive quality assurance regime (Ofsted), and then track such developments in English primary education since then: e.g. the differential freedoms available to local authority maintained schools, academies and free schools; government promises of freedom tested against the post-2010 reforms of curriculum and assessment; the rise of PISA as standards benchmark and the use and misuse of international evidence to shape the school system; the relationship between government and the teaching unions; the use of high stakes testing and inspection as instruments of accountability and control; changes in the Ofsted inspection regime.
Further information
Children, their World, their Education, chapters 16, 17, 23
The Cambridge Primary Review Research Surveys, chapters 14, 15, 26, 27, 28 and 29