British Educational Research Journal, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1998 43

Classroom Practice and the NationalCurriculum in Small Rural Primary Schools

MAURICE GALTON, LINDA HARGREAVES & CHRIS COMBER, School ofEducation, University of Leicester

ABSTRACT With the introduction of the National Curriculum primary teachers havecome under increasing pressure from the Office for Standards in Education and othergovernment agencies to change the ways they teach. However, the research evidence isequivocal as to the changes which have taken place at Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 overthe last 5 years. This article argues that part of the problem stems from the way thatcharacteristics of classroom organisation, such as whole-class teaching, have beendefined in various studies. From case studies of nine rural schools in which systematicobservation and pupils' diary records were collected, an attempt is made to chart thechanges in classroom practice over a decade and to compare these findings with otherrecent studies.

Introduction

Whole-Class Teaching, Small Rural Schools, and the Primary Curriculum

In recent years following the publication of the discussion paper commissioned by thethen Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Clark, the so-called 'Three Wise Men's'report (Alexander et al., 1992), primary teachers have been 'officially' encouraged, as ameans of delivering the National Curriculum effectively, to engineer a basic shift inprimary teaching methods towards greater specialisation and more whole-class teaching.In small rural primary schools, with fewer than 100 children on roll, where multi-ageclasses are a necessity, and particularly where there are only two full-time staff, thesedemands can present some problems. Nevertheless, this message has been continuallyrepeated by the Chief Inspector for the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED),Chris Woodhead, one of the authors of the report, for example, in his discussion paper(OFSTED, 1994) and his much publicised lecture to the Royal Society of Arts(Woodhead, 1995). The Chief Inspector has argued from the evidence of inspections andfrom research that large numbers of primary teachers have resisted his call to change theway they teach and at one point has called for the sacking of those who through theiradherence to 'trendy teaching methods' are failing their pupils (see, for example, LondonEvening Standard, 5 February, 1996).

0141-1926/98/010043-19 ©1998 British Educational Research Association

44 M. Galton et al.

Yet the research evidence concerning the effects of the National Curriculum onprimary classroom practice in general appears equivocal and is sometimes difficult tointerpret. Sammons et al. (1994), reviewing the work of the PACE (Primary AssessmentCurriculum and Experience) researchers at Key Stage (KS) 2, concluded that althoughthere is greater structure to the planning and teaching overall, the findings did notsuggest that the learning experience for children was any more positive. Evidencepublished more recently by the PACE team concludes that 'compared with earlierresearch, whole-class interaction has increased and the overall proportion of teacher-ledsituations has grown significantly'. These researchers point to a contradiction betweenteachers' perceptions of an increase in whole-class teaching between 1990 and 1991, anda decrease in observed levels of whole-class interaction. This perception gap is explainedby the teachers' tendency to overemphasise 'explicit whole-class teaching sessionsplanned specifically in relation to the content of a National Curriculum subject whilsttraditional whole-class components of early years' teaching such as stories and newstime were under emphasised' (Pollard et al, 1994, p. 159).

In contrast, Alexander's (1995, p. 256) CICADA (Changes in the Curriculum—Asso-ciated Discourse and Pedagogy) project, which analysed lesson transcripts, supplementedby an observer's coding of each activity, concluded that 'there was no strongly markedshift in the balance of whole class, group and individual teaching' over the period1988-92. Alexander identified two strong clusters not unlike the individual monitors andthe class enquirers of the ORACLE studies (Galton et al., 1980). In the 1988 sample theproportion of whole-class interaction in the latter type of cluster was 11.0% while in the1992 sample it was 14.7%. Although these differences were relatively small, Alexanderdid record similar changes to the PACE researchers in the frequency of certaininteractions, with increased amounts of feedback and questioning, and a greater degreeof teacher direction when setting tasks.

Webb (1993), however, claims that there has been a definite shift towards whole-classteaching as a result of the National Curriculum, and questions the recommendation bythe then National Curriculum Council for any further shift in this direction. In hersurvey, 50% of the observed lessons were classified as whole-class teaching and 92.5%of all the observed lessons involved some whole-class teaching. These high figures maybe explained by means of closer examination of definitions of 'whole-class teaching'.Webb defines two categories of what she calls whole-class teaching. The first (Category1) was where the teacher 'interacted with the whole-class for the majority of the lesson',for example, whole-class discussion including activities such as teacher demonstrationsand teacher questioning. Webb reports that around 19% of observed lessons wereorganised in this way. The second whole-class teaching style described by Webb(Category 2) was observed in 32% of lessons, and consisted of an introductory input ofabout 15-20 minutes, after which pupils were set to work on the same or similar tasks,what American researchers such as Brophy & Good (1986) describe as 'seat work'.During these parts of the lessons, the teachers observed by Webb would 'periodicallyrequest(ed) the attention of the whole class in order to provide further instructions,comment on work in progress, to ask children what they had done with their peers andto seek evaluative comments on their work (Webb, 1993, p. 41). Only 7% of the lessonsobserved were characterised by cooperative group work, although pair-work and individ-ual work occurred simultaneously within some of Webb's other lesson categories.Unfortunately, however, her classification confounds classroom organisational strategieswith curriculum organisational strategies.

Webb's definition of whole-class teaching differs, however, from that used in previous

Classroom Practice and the National Curriculum 45

studies of the primary classroom. Where she examines the organisational strategy interms of the task arrangement, other researchers have generally defined it in terms of theaudience (e.g. Mortimore et al, 1988; Tizard et al., 1988; Galton & Patrick, 1990).These observation studies stretching over two decades have concluded that aroundtwo-thirds of class time is generally devoted to individual work. A typical example ofthis would be where the teacher introduced a new mathematics topic and then movedaround the classroom interacting with individual children as they answered questions ontheir worksheets. The periodic teacher-class interactions which lead Webb to place suchlessons in a category of whole-class teaching, consist chiefly of utterances concerningtask management or feedback rather than involving task or informational content. Suchinterruptions to the children's individual work would not normally be regarded aswhole-class teaching. Applying Webb's analysis to this process, however, would resultin categorising the entire activity as a 'whole-class lesson'. However, by reanalysingWebb's findings, a somewhat different interpretation of her work is possible and onewhich more closely accords with the findings of these earlier studies.

According to Webb, most of these seat work lessons contained an introduction and ashort concluding period totalling around 15-20 minutes, in which the teacher interactedwith the whole class. By making the assumption that most of the lessons observed lastedabout 1 hour, these periods constitute approximately 30% of a lesson, if the intermittenttask-management transactions referred to by Webb (1993) are ignored. If, as Webbreports, instructional times comprises 32% of the lesson time, only around 9%, in thisalternative interpretation of the data, would be classified as having been directed at thewhole class. If this figure is added to the 19% of lessons reported by Webb aswhole-class discussions (Category 1), the overall total for class teaching comes to around28%. Furthermore, Webb defines a lesson as 'whole-class' on the basis of the majorstrategy being used in each session. It is likely, therefore, that the proportion of observedtime which comprised whole-class interactions was not very different from that found inprevious observational studies. Although Webb's findings are based on KS2 classes,whereas Pollard's concerned KS1, these figures are not too different from those providedby Mortimore et al. (1988, p. 82), prior to the National Curriculum, who found 23% ofclass teaching in the second year of junior school, rising to 24% in the third year.

Even allowing for the uncertainties involved in the calculation from Webb's figures,it would appear that during the first 2 years of the National Curriculum there have beenonly modest changes in the patterns of interaction within primary classrooms, particu-larly at KS2. There may, however, have been more significant change in the patterns ofclassroom and curriculum organisation. This present article looks at changes in taskarrangement and classroom practice in small rural primary schools during the implemen-tation of the National Curriculum. Our evidence has been collected by means of a varietyof measures, including direct observation together with records kept by pupils usingstructured picture diaries. First, however, it would seem necessary, given the apparentdivergence of views among researchers, to list the several potential sources of infor-mation which can be used to study the classroom process when reporting on such mattersas the balance between whole-class, group and individual teaching.

Sources of Observational Information on Classroom Process

Attempts to compare research findings to determine how far classroom practice haschanged as a result of curriculum innovations such as the National Curriculum canpresent problems, because it is not always clear that researchers are using terms such as

46 M. Galton et al.

'whole-class teaching' in similar ways. When the focus of observation is the teacher,researchers usually categorise classroom organisation in terms of the teachers' audience(whether it be an individual pupil, or a group or class of children). At its mostfundamental, whole-class teaching consists of those interactions when the teacher iseither talking to the whole-class or is involved with a public conversation with anindividual child such that the child's responses are meant to be shared by the wholeclass. When, however, the focus of the observation is the pupil, it is also necessary todenote the context of the pupil's activity because in a typical primary classroom, withover 30 pupils, an individual child will rarely be interacting with the teacher other thanas part of the class. If only a sample of pupils is observed, the usual practice, then therecorded levels of pupil-teacher interaction will tend to overemphasise the proportion ofwhole-class teaching. To put such data in context researchers, therefore, also record thechild's base, which is defined by the pupil's location in the classroom, and the pupil'steam, which is determined by the task activity and informs the class how they areexpected to work.

Children may be assigned individual places, seated as part of a pair or group—membership of which is determined by the teacher—or brought together as a class, aswhen sitting on the carpet or in front of the teacher's desk. In the latter two examplespupils can choose where to sit except occasionally for a troublesome child who may betold by the teacher to 'come next to me'. Team distinctions, unlike that of base, maysometimes appear rather more subtle and fine grained. Children may be sitting on thefloor in front of the teacher's desk while the teacher reads them a story. This would bedefined as 'class' base. However, if there was no requirement for the children tocollaborate but simply to listen to the teacher read the story, the team would be coded'individual', whereas if during the story the teacher continually breaks off to askquestions designed to aid comprehension, then team would be coded 'class'. This isbecause, although individual pupils were answering the questions, part of the teacher'sintention would be to improve every child's understanding. Alternatively, a child's teamwould be coded as 'class' but their base would be coded as 'individual' or 'group' ifchildren were dispersed, for example, around the school's grounds to collect exhibits formounting as a class display. Distinctions between base and team can, therefore, beimportant when attempting to make sense of "pupil observation data on classroom andcurriculum organisation for comparative purposes. Finally, whole-class teaching is alsosometimes defined by the child's curriculum task such that all the pupils are doing thesame or a similar activity. Examples include cases where the whole class is doingmathematics, although pupils may be on different pages of the same mathematicsscheme.

In analysing and commenting on classroom organisation, it is, therefore, important tospecify the criteria used to define terms such as whole class teaching because differentcriteria may give rise to conflicting conclusions. The National Curriculum has producedmore formal timetabling of the kind often seen in the secondary phase so that the styleof teaching where groups of children work at different tables on different curriculumsubjects has declined (Webb, 1993). In terms of curriculum task, there are now morewhole-class lessons where children do mathematics, English and science, and althoughwithin this curriculum structure it is still comparatively rare for the children's location(base) to be other than group, within such groups it remains likely that pupils will beworking individually (Pollard et al., 1994). Within this team setting, however, it will beopen to the teacher either to interact with an individual pupil or to stop the class andrefer to some aspect of an individual pupil's work as a form of feedback to all pupils

Classroom Practice and the National Curriculum 47

or to a group of pupils. Whilst Webb (1993) has included such feedback in her secondcategory of whole-class teaching, many of these interactions become possible only whenall children are working on the same or similar tasks, Interactions of this type appear tohave increased but not dramatically (Alexander, 1995).

Classroom Practice and the Small School: pre-National Curriculum

Studying changes in classroom practice in small schools rather than schools in generaloffers certain advantages of continuity. Since the early 1980s there have been severalmajor studies of small school practice. The two largest of these were undertaken at theUniversity of Leicester. The first, entitled the PRISMS Project (Curriculum Provision inSmall Primary Schools), provided considerable information concerning classroom inter-actions in a variety of curriculum subjects (Galton & Patrick, 1990). Two of the nineparticipating local authorities were urban authorities with small schools, where small wasdefined as schools with fewer than 100 children on roll. The second, entitled the RuralSCENE project, was the National Evaluation of the Education Support Grant (ESG) pilotprojects to improve the quality or breadth of the curriculum provided in rural schools.Although rural does not necessarily imply small, it was the case in this second projectthat all but one of the 14 participating authorities focused on schools with fewer than 100pupils on roll. The relevant findings of these projects will be summarised below.

The PRISMS Project

The PRISMS Project was carried out over a 3-year period beginning in 1983. Nine localauthorities, including two city authorities, were involved and in each authority a stratifiedrandom sample of between 5 and 11 small primary schools was taken. Every teacher in68 schools was observed, with nearly 60% of the schools having three or more full-timeequivalent teachers. A total of 188 classes containing approximately 3600 pupils wasvisited and 1200 pupils were observed on at least five occasions, giving a total of 24,000observation records on pupils.

This number of observations was of the same order as those collected during theearlier 5-year ORACLE project (Galton et al., 1980). Comparing the two sets of datashowed that practice in small schools (defined as all-through primary schools with 100or less pupils) was very similar to that in larger ones. Since classes in these small schoolstended to be smaller than the larger ones in the ORACLE study, pupils interacted morefrequently with teachers, but much of this additional attention had to do with instruction.There was slightly less pupil/pupil interaction in smaller schools, but what there wastended to be on-rather than off-task. The patterns of classroom organisation were alsovery similar to that found in London junior schools by Mortimore et al. (1988),particularly the concentration during any one teaching session on not more than twocurriculum areas across the whole class. The integrated day was not widely used in smallrural schools. The PRISMS report concluded that in many respects small schools did notmaximise their advantage of small class size. Although PRISMS pupils got slightlylonger bursts of a teacher's individual attention in comparison with the ORACLE pupils,they also waited longer for this attention. Thus, overall, the relative amounts of attentionthat pupils received did not differ appreciably from those experienced by their counter-parts in larger suburban schools.

48 M. Galton et al.

The Rural SCENE Project

Towards the end of the 1980s, as a way of overcoming some of these difficulties andenhancing the general curriculum provision, the then Department of Education andScience offered special incentives for local authorities with large numbers of isolatedrural schools, as part of the ESG (Education Support Grant). Subject to the LEAsproviding 30% of the total grant, these authorities had sums of up to half a millionpounds over a 5-year period specifically to improve the breadth or quality of curriculumprovision. Most local authorities sought to effect these changes through bringing schoolstogether in clusters, and many employed advisory teachers to work specifically with ruralschools. The same research team was invited to evaluate this ESG programme andconcluded that after 5 years there were signs of changes in practices, particularlyincreases in the amount of pupil/pupil collaboration compared with the earlier PRISMSstudy (Galton et al., 1991). This was especially true in those authorities where ESG wasused to fund advisory support teachers in rural schools. The advisory teachers introducedthe idea of greater collaborative work, especially in science and technology, andsupported teachers in adopting this organisational approach.

During the period of this ESG programme evaluation, KS1 of the National Curriculumwas also being introduced into primary schools. The evaluators noted that in groups ofschools where clustering was more advanced, those teachers involved in planning for theNational Curriculum typically expressed fewer concerns about their capacity to copewith the changes. Following the conclusion of this ESG evaluation, it was therefore alogical step to study the shift from planning to implementation of the NationalCurriculum within a sample of these small rural schools. By collecting similar data tothat obtained from the earlier research, it became possible to look for shifts in practiceduring lessons based upon the content of the National Curriculum, so monitoring aprocess of change over a decade.

Implementation of the National Curriculum in English Rural Primary Schools

The main objective of the Leicester-based project, the Implementation of the NationalCurriculum in Small Schools (INCSS), was to monitor changes in classroom organis-ation resulting from the introduction of the 1988 Education Reform Act. The data usedto fulfil this purpose were drawn from a questionnaire survey of small rural primaryschools in the East Midlands of England and from case studies of nine schools. Theschools in the questionnaire sample, which included the case study schools, had at leastthree full-time class teachers, including the headteachers, and less than 100 children onroll. The case study schools ranged in size from 53 to 97 children (mean number onroll = 72). Amongst other measures, data obtained through classroom observation andthe collection of children's picture diaries of their day's activities are the subject of thisanalysis. Evidence of change is based, therefore, on comparable observation datareported in Galton et al. (1991) and Hargreaves (1990).

The Children's Diaries

The year 3 children in these nine target schools were shown how to keep a record oftheir curriculum activities as 'picture diaries'. These were completed daily for 1 week inthe middle of each of three school terms. Older and younger children in classes whichwere of mixed age also kept picture diaries at the teachers' discretion. The 'diaries'

Classroom Practice and the National Curriculum 49

consisted of a single page of 66 icons grouped in subsets which represented curriculumareas, the children's specific tasks and the resources and equipment used. Spaces werealso provided to record other aspects of activity (e.g. whether the pupil had worked withother children or whether they needed the teacher's help etc.) The children circled asmany of the icons as they needed to describe their chosen activities.

The Observations

Classroom observations were made of six of the year 3 children in each class in the ninecase study schools, on three half-days throughout the year. The six children (three boysand three girls) were selected according to Standard Assessment Tasks (SATs) achieve-ment levels. Semi-structured observations were used whereby the observer tracked eachchild twice on each of the three visits. The observer recorded specific pre-agreed aspectsof the children's and teachers' classroom activity during five consecutive 1-minuteintervals. Coding of these observations was, in most cases, comparable with the previouscurriculum observations devised for the PRISMS observation schedule. This includedclassifying activities into five categories, namely: curriculum area; task demand; theresources needed; the equipment used; and the information medium (reading, listening,writing, drawing etc.) required. A sixth category, cognitive demand (e.g. problem-solv-ing, creating, copying, hypothesising) was recorded where this could be determined.

The smaller number of observations in the INCSS study precluded a detailed study ofall curriculum areas. In order to study a cross-section of curriculum provision, observa-tion visits were arranged, originally to coincide with sessions including mathematics,science and some geography or music. In the event this objective could not be realised.Despite the intention to focus observations on these target curriculum areas, the schooltimetable was often organised in ways which tended to emphasise the 'core' areas. Therewas a clear division of curriculum areas into 'morning' and 'afternoon' activities. Thus,73% of the observations of English, 79% of mathematics and 63% of science took placein the morning, whereas 75% of the geography observed took place in the afternoon.Cross-curricular tasks, that is topics which involved a combination of subjects, occurredin only one-sixth of all observations and in almost all of these cases only twocombinations of subjects were observed. Carrying out a morning's observation wouldtherefore include English but no geography. Choosing an afternoon often meant missingobserving mathematics or science. As a result English, although not originally selected,eventually accounted for 27% of the observations. Of the subjects requested, mathemat-ics was the most frequently observed (19%) followed by the remaining core curriculumarea, science (9%).

Since the pattern of classroom organisation varies between subjects, differences incurriculum balance between PRISMS and INCSS make the interpretation of comparativedata on base, team and pupil-teacher interaction more difficult. In PRISMS 37% of allobservations took place during English lessons. For mathematics the figure was 23%. Artaccounted for 15% of PRISMS observations, three times the figure recorded for INCSS.Previous studies such as PRISMS indicate that these three areas of the curriculum areassociated with group base and individual team involving a high proportion of relativelyshort individual teacher-pupil interactions (Galton, 1995). If this pattern has beenmaintained into the post-National Curriculum era, then compared to PRISMS, the INCSSdata would tend to overestimate the proportion of whole-class teaching, particularly sincemusic, which tends to be a whole-class activity, accounted for 11% of INCSS observa-

50 M. Gallon et al.

tions but only 6% in the case of PRISMS. This caveat should be borne in mind whenevaluating the data presented in the following sections.

Classroom Organisation and the National Curriculum

We begin by looking at team and base arrangements. Previous research, stretching overtwo decades, has clearly established the asymmetric nature of primary classroomorganisation. For most of the time, children sit in groups but work individually on tasks.These arrangements are associated with relatively low levels of time-on-task and makeit difficult for teachers to engage in challenging questioning or to provide immediatefeedback, since they are required to spend most of their time moving from pupil to pupil,acting as a resource to enable them to continue their work. In this role, teachers eitherprovide routine instructions such as telling pupils what to do next or offer necessaryinformation so that children can continue with their task. In such circumstances, wherework is assessed, it is often marked without the child being present. The PRISMS project(Galton & Patrick, 1990) exhibited the asymmetric pattern shown in Fig. 1 (referencesto PRISMS findings here and throughout this article relate to the data for what was thenknown as the Junior phase [now KS2]).

In Fig. 1 we show the asymmetry between the base organisation (seating arrange-ments) and the team organisation (whether pupils were expected to work individually orin collaboration with others) compared to that found in the earlier PRISMS study(Hargreaves, 1990). Fig. 1 clearly demonstrates that although the pattern of organisationhas shifted between the two studies, there remains considerable disparity between theseating and task arrangements. For example, in the present study pupils sat alone for10% of the time (for ease of reading, percentages in the text and figures are roundedup/down to nearest whole number), and in pairs or groups for 64% (16% and 48%respectively). In terms of working arrangements, however, the picture was ratherdifferent, so that pupils worked alone for 58% of the time, and in pairs or groups for only16%.

Whole-class settings, on the other hand, were observed to be at a similar level for bothbase and team. In each case, just over a quarter of observations occurred when the classwas organised in this way, such as when the children sat on the carpet for a story or

team base team

INCSS

E3 solo EJ pr/grp tH class

FIG. 1. Differences between base (seating) and team (working) organisation (9iComparison of findings of PRISMS project with those of present study (INCSS).

of all observations).

Classroom Practice and the National Curriculum 51

English maths science geography music

E3 base [D team

FIG. 2. INCSS study: differences between base and team for pair/group work by subject (% of observationsin each subject).

moved to the hall for physical education or music. This relatively high figure comparedwith the PRISMS finding of around 10% may, as we have argued, be a consequence ofthe imbalance in English, mathematics and art in the two studies. There was alsorelatively more music represented in the INCSS study, a consequence of the fact that thissubject is now a compulsory part of the National Curriculum. Since music tended to beoverwhelmingly a whole-class activity (despite Programmes of Study which specificallyencouraged group work), any apparent shift towards more whole-class teaching reportedelsewhere may be a consequence of changes in the balance of curriculum activity. In thisstudy, if we exclude music, then the whole-class team figure is reduced to just below20%, although this lower figure is still considerably higher than that observed in thePRISMS study.

The base/team asymmetry can be even more clearly seen when we examine theINCSS data for mathematics and English separately. To take working in pairs and/orgroups as an example, in madiematics, 68% of all observations recorded children sittingeither in pairs or in groups, but only 39% recorded children actually working together.In English the difference was even more marked, so that in 79% of observations childrensat in pairs or in groups, but worked alone for 76% of the time. This pattern of disparitywas also seen in science and geography, although these represented relatively fewerobservations. Not surprisingly, given the comments above, the only subject not to followthe trend was music, where whole-class activities occupied 95% of all lesson time, andno pair or group settings were observed at all. Fig. 2 shows, for each subject, base/teamdifferences in pair and group work combined.

Although the general pattern of asymmetry between base and team seen in pre-National Curriculum studies has been maintained, there is some evidence here whichsuggests that there is now a change in classroom organisation in small rural schools.Base arrangements have altered little since PRISMS, but there has been a change in theway that children are expected to work, with a shift towards the use of more whole-classteam organisation. Such lessons appear to be the result of a change in curriculumstrategy whereby all pupils tend to be engaged on the same task. However, this shifttowards whole-class organisation does not necessarily imply an increase in the amountof whole-class interaction when this is defined in terms of a teacher's audience. To

52 M. Galton et al.

investigate this proposition requires a closer examination of the minute by minuteobservations during the course of these lessons. Particularly relevant to the investigationare the resources being used, the media through which information is disseminated andexpressed and the interactions between teacher and pupil and between pupils themselves.

Use of Resources in Rural Primary Classrooms

The use of a resource, other than the teacher, is an indication of the degree of autonomyexercised by pupils in their learning. In the PRISMS study, a resource was defined assome form of support which was necessary for a child to complete the given task. Thecategory was not used when the teacher's contribution was limited to giving instructionsabout the form the task would take or consisted of marking work. Describing the teacheras a resource therefore indicated that the completion of the task was impossible withoutthe direct involvement of a teacher. In the PRISMS study there appeared to be a shiftaway from the use of work schemes and to a greater dependence of pupils on the teachercompared to the ORACLE research (Hargreaves, 1990). Both Pollard et al. (1994) andAlexander (1995) found evidence of greater teacher direction in post-National Curricu-lum classrooms, and if this should also be the case in the INCSS study, it would beindicated by greater use of the teacher as a resource.

The results obtained, however, reveal that there has been little change post-NationalCurriculum. Fig. 3 shows a comparison of major resource use between the PRISMS andINCSS studies. The teacher remained by far the major resource, being involved in 30%of all observations, an increase of just 4% on the PRISMS figure (the largest differencein any resource use between the two studies). The next most frequently used resourceswere worksheets and/or published schemes (21%), followed by use of apparatus andequipment (14%). The use of information technology was very rarely observed, and thesame was true for the specific use of an indoor or outdoor environment as a resource.

Predictably, the use of resources varied with subjects. In mathematics, 54% of

40 T

teacher* refbook schemet equipmt envirnmt

PRISMS CD INCSS

* The teacher as a resource1 category was selected if the teacher was providing essential information toenable the child to proceed further with his or her work, t Work cards or published schemes.

FIG. 3. Major resources used (% all observations). Comparison of findings of the present study with thoseof PRISMS project.

Classroom Practice and the National Curriculum 53

observed activity involved the use of a published scheme, while 21% involved using theteacher as a resource. Again, although 14% of observations recorded the use ofequipment, these were largely subject-specific (such as the use of art equipment, musicalinstruments, physical education apparatus and so on). In English, reference books (14%)and worksheets (24%) together accounted for 39% of resources and the teacher only12%. In science, more surprisingly, the teacher was the major resource for 57% of theobservations, followed by the pupil's own work (21%), with only 7% devoted to the useof scientific equipment. In science lessons, the pattern, therefore, chiefly consisted ofrelatively short investigations followed by children writing up their results, with longperiods of teacher involvement either at the beginning of lessons when demonstrating orat the end when combining and interpreting findings.

Media of Information and Expression in Rural Primary Classrooms

An important concept of the curriculum in the PRISMS study was the identification ofthe media which pupils used to take in information, instructions and ideas and the mediawhich they used to perform their set tasks. Nine different ways of taking in informationand expressing results were coded by observers. Mathematics tasks involving writingonly numbers were not included in the PRISMS analysis but were in INCSS. In Fig. 4the six media most frequently used in PRISMS are compared with those for INCSS. InPRISMS these six categories accounted for 87% of all observations and in INCSS for77.2%. Of the remaining 22.8%, 'do maths', which was not included in PRISMS,accounted for 10.7% of observations. When this latter figure for mathematics wasexcluded from the calculation the overall combined percentage of the six most frequentlyused 'medium' categories was, therefore, roughly comparable. Examining each mediumin turn, the biggest increase was found in the use of the 'listening' category, up from24% to 33%, again providing further evidence of an increase in teacher directed lessons.'Writing' also increased by 8% while 'vocal' expression (speaking or singing) decreasedby 5%, but the percentages for 'observe' and 'draw' were fairly similar. Listening wasobserved most often in science (43%) while writing, not surprisingly, was highest in

35 ••

30 ••

read listen observe write vocal draw

|B PRISMS P INCSS

FIG. 4. Medium of information (% of observations in six most frequently used categories). Comparison offindings of the present study with those of PRISMS project

54 M. Galton et al.

English. There was, however, a considerable decrease in the amount of reading thatchildren engaged in across the curriculum (down from 18% to 7%). Reading wasrecorded in 18% of all English observations but infrequently elsewhere in the curricu-lum. While the fact that a smaller proportion of the curriculum observed in INCSSconsisted of English accounts, in part, for this reduction it also indicates the shift togreater teacher direction in science, history and geography and less demand for pupilsto use books as a resource compared to PRISMS where these subjects were more usuallytaught as part of a topic.

The evidence so far presented suggests that there appears to have been a shift inclassroom organisation with an increase in the use of team class arrangements, resultingin greater teacher direction in terms of the way information is mediated. One explanationfor this finding, when set against Alexander's (1995) conclusion that little has changed,is that while classroom strategies, defined in the original ORACLE study (followingStrasser, 1967) as 'the organisational and curriculum decisions' have changed since theintroduction of the National Curriculum, teachers' tactics, what Strasser called the'minute by minute exchanges between teachers and pupils through which strategies areimplemented' have remained relatively stable. This leads to an expectation that patternsof classroom interaction between pupils and teachers, both in the pre-National Curricu-lum PRISMS study and in the INCSS study, should be broadly similar.

Classroom Interaction in National Curriculum Lessons

In making comparisons between the patterns of interaction in PRISMS and in INCSS itis necessary to highlight differences in the methods of collecting the data. In PRISMSnine pupils were observed twice and the teacher once during the course of an hour'ssession. The pupil record consisted of 10 observations recorded every 5 seconds. Theteacher record had 14 columns. On each observation sheet the nature of the curriculumactivity was also recorded in great detail. In the present INCSS study, observationsconsisted of 5 minute continuous period for each pupil during which all the majorinteractions on which that pupil was engaged were noted at minute intervals. These werewritten in a verbatim account but based upon the original PRISMS observationschedules. Subsequently, these descriptions were coded to indicate the dominant formsof interaction which characterised each 5 minute period. In selecting one category ratherthan another, priority was given to those which, by reason of sampling, occurredrelatively infrequently. Thus, because in a class of over 30 pupils, the chances ofobserving the teacher engage in a one-to-one interaction with the target pupil is lesslikely than when the teacher is talking to a group which includes the target or to theclass, such one-to-one interactions were given the highest priority. The likely effect ofthis weighting is perhaps to have overestimated the extent of individual pupil-teacherinteractions.

An examination of the data from the two studies reveals that, even given thislikelihood of overestimating individual interactions, the general pattern of teacher-pupilinteraction obtained from pupil observations appears to have remained fairly consistent(see Fig. 5). In both studies, the majority of observed lessons were largely characterisedby a lack of such interaction, although in the present study interactions overall hadincreased somewhat from 24% to 35%. Whole-class communications, which featured in17% of observations in the PRISMS study, were recorded in only 11% of those in theINCSS research. Any shift between the two studies, therefore, appears to be the resultof an increase in teacher-pupil communication generally, with a slight move away from

Classroom Practice and the National Curriculum 55

Nointeraction

Tchr-Individual

Tchr-Class

E3 PRISMS OlNCSS

FIG. 5. Teacher-pupil interaction (% of all pupil observations).

whole-class interactions towards more one-to-one contact. Bearing in mind the effect ofthe weightings described above, however, the more likely picture is that the balancebetween teacher-individual and teacher-class interactions remains much the same.

In Fig. 6, a breakdown of these general categories shows that 27% of lesson time wasspent by the target children in listening to or watching the teacher, while in 10% theywere waiting to get the teacher's attention (for example, queuing at the teacher's desk).In 21% of observations the children received independent attention. Across subjects, thehighest levels of individual attention occurred during English (32%) followed bymathematics (21%) followed by geography (19%). Waiting for the teacher's attentionwas distributed almost evenly across all subjects, ranging from about 14% in science to11% in mathematics. English and mathematics were the two subjects where childrenspent the most time working on their own (29% in each case) without contact from theteacher.

Teacher responses to the pupils were also observed in the present study, and theoverwhelming number here concerned responding to children's requests for direct help(42%) or information (33%). Teachers as a source of information was highest in science(58%) while responding to pupils was highest in technology (87%), followed by

40-r

30--

tchr-pupil

tchr-group

tchr-class

pupillistens/watches

tchr.

pupilwaits for

tchr

FIG. 6. Breakdown of teacher-pupil interaction (% of all pupil observations).

56 M. Galton et al.

geography (63%) and English (51%). With the lone exception of music, there was littlerecorded observation involving teachers in whole-class question and answer sessions.

Pupil Perception of National Curriculum Lessons

Given that the observation data collected in the INCSS study are more limited than thatprovided in PRISMS, a degree of corroboration was attempted by asking pupils tocomplete picture diaries. Among the questions which were relevant to the presentdiscussion, one asked pupils to indicate how they worked (team arrangement) andanother asked who helped them (teacher-pupil interaction). Pupils were told to pick oneparticular lesson during each day in a designated week.

In recording the team arrangement pupils were given three alternatives: whether theyworked 'alone' with 'one friend' or with 'lots of friends'. It was felt that it was toodifficult for pupils of this age to distinguish between a group and the whole class so thatthe category 'lots of friends' could include some occasions when children engaged incollaborative group work as well as whole-class activity. Previous studies of pupil-pupilinteraction, however, suggest that even when groups of children are expected tocooperate, many of the interactions are between pairs of pupils. The likelihood,therefore, is that in the majority of cases 'lots of children' indicates whole-class activity.

Sometimes children ticked more than one category. This could mean that on someoccasions part of the lesson involved individual work while part required a degree ofcooperation. It could also have indicated unauthorised cooperative activity as in the caseof the intermittent workers in the ORACLE study who, when the teacher was engagedelsewhere, conversed with their neighbour, mostly on matters not related to the work inhand. In ORACLE, however, there were many examples of children working on theirown in mathematics but checking one another's answers (Galton, et al, 1980) and thiskind of behaviour might be described by a pupil as working alone but also at times witha friend.

Overall, 14% of 188 completed pupil responses coded a mixture of categories and ofthese, 9.5% of the combinations involved working alone, usually with one other pupil.If these mixed categories are eliminated, leaving 166 responses, then 51% involvedpupils working alone, 27% working in pairs and 22% working with lots of other pupils.Fig. 7 subdivides these totals for the various subjects. In order to provide a reasonablenumber of cases, technology (3% of the total) was combined with science (10%) andhistory (6%) with geography (12%). Too few cases of music were recorded for analysis.

Generally the patterns are not dissimilar from descriptions of primary practice whichemerge from the various classroom observation studies during the previous decade(Galton, 1995). Some 70% of the cases in art recorded pupils working alone, withmathematics the next highest at 68%. Pairing was highest in religious education (44%),geography and history (35%) followed by English (34%). Working with lots of childrenwas highest for physical education (49) followed by science (33%). This latter figure isdouble that recorded for art and English (17%), the subjects with the next highestfrequencies. Earlier it was shown that primary school science appeared to be very teacherdirected. There was little group collaboration and the teacher was the major resource for57% of recorded observations. Listening to the teacher was also highest in science(43%). The pupils' perceptions support the picture of science lessons which emergesfrom classroom observation.

Pupils were also asked how they were helped by the teacher, providing, someindication of the interaction patterns. Children were asked to say wJiethtd Bie teacher

Classroom Practice and the National Curriculum 57

Maths English So/Technology

I Alone • Pair B Lots

70 T

Art FE

[• Alone O Pair H Lots |

FIG. 7. Pupils' perceptions of who they worked with in various subjects.

marked their work, talked to them alone, talked to their group or that they did not needthe teacher's help. Here again it was possible for pupils to tick more than one categoryas when, for example, a teacher might offer a comment when sitting next to a pupil whileat the same time marking work.

Because of the asymmetric nature of teacher-pupil interaction, as a result of pupilssitting in groups but mainly working individually, a pupil received the bulk of a teacher'sattention as a member of a class or group. This is because the teacher has to divide thetime devoted to individual interaction among some 30 or more children. In PRISMS,since classes were often less than 30, some 24% of all the teacher's interactions withpupils involved an individual child, leaving 76% to take place with the whole class orgroup (65% class: 11% group). In INCSS the pupils recorded that the teacher talked withthem alone on 26% of the records and talked to a group on 67% of occasions. Thispattern, given the uncertainties in recording pupils' perceptions, is not too dissimilarto the PRISMS profile. On 42% of the diary records pupils ticked that they were havinga piece of work marked and on 27% of occasions they reported that they did notneed, the teacher's help. Primary pupils, from this perspective, are still very teacherdependent.

58 M. Gallon et al.

Summary and Conclusions

The patterns of teacher-pupil interaction recorded in the present study are, with a fewexceptions, very similar to those found in the earlier PRISMS study of small schoolswhich took place at the beginning of the 1980s and which were, in turn, close to thoserecorded by other researchers in studies of larger urban and suburban settings during thesame period. The beginnings of change which were discerned during the ESG SmallSchools Curriculum Enhancement programme (the SCENE project), particularly relatingto the use of a wider range of resources and the decrease in the use of the teacher as amajor source of information, appear not to have been maintained since the introductionof the National Curriculum. Although relatively few numbers of observations meant thatno attempt was made to disaggregate the data obtained during the first and second yearof the INCSS study, the patterns were similar and this consistency is borne out by theimpressionistic accounts of teaching which were noted by the researchers during bothsets of observation visits and on other occasions when data were collected in the school.

Once classroom organisation has been categorised by its base, team and interactioncomponents, then the picture of the primary classroom portrayed here seems, in manyways, to mirror that described by other researchers, particularly Alexander (1995). Thishelps to explain the concerns of those responsible for developing the implementationstrategy for the National Curriculum who wish to see greater emphasis on challengethrough the medium of whole-class interaction. Class teaching in both PRISMS andINCSS studies consisted mostly of teachers giving instructions and pupils listening insilence. Teachers, as other studies such as Webb's (1993) suggest, may have altered theircurriculum and team strategies to comply with the pressures being exerted by OFSTEDbut they appear not to have abandoned their preferred teaching tactics. Initially, duringthe early stages of implementation, National Curriculum officials attributed the failure ofteachers to 'change the way they teach' to their lack of subject expertise and a lack ofconfidence in teaching the new programmes of study. This, in particular, was said to bethe main reason why teachers were reluctant to abandon their roles as facilitators and toengage in more whole-class challenging interactions. More recently, Vulliamy et al.(1997) have reported that, for a variety of reasons, teachers in small schools havemaintained their prior values and practices more'readily than teachers in larger schools.

Although we did not measure the extent of teachers' subject knowledge in the presentresearch, we did ask teachers to rate themselves on how confident they were of teachingvarious National Curriculum subjects, and their estimate of their competence to do so(Hargreaves et al., 1996). Both confidence and competence levels of teachers wererelatively high and our study suggested that the pooling of expertise across the clustersdid much to enhance such feelings. Even before the introduction of KS1 many smallschool clusters already had well-established procedures for joint curriculum planning, incontrast to many larger schools. The task of planning the new programmes of study wasrapidly devolved to groups of teachers within the clusters. Equally important wereheadteachers of small schools, who were much more knowledgeable about the demandsof the National Curriculum than their counterparts in larger schools, because theythemselves had to teach a class. This accords with the findings of Webb (1994), who alsoreported that headteachers in larger schools tended to delegate the implementation andplanning of the National Curriculum to subject coordinators, in order to cope withadministrative demands, in particular the pressure created by the introduction of localmanagement of schools. Yet despite the expressed confidence of these small-schoolteachers, there was little evidence, during any of the three rounds of observation spread

Classroom Practice and the National Curriculum 59

over a school year, that they had done anything other than 'bolt' these new curriculuminitiatives onto their existing practice. For example, in English, where competence andconfidence was highest, there were few recorded interactions of a kind which bore anyrelationship to National Curriculum targets involving communication skills. In this studyat least, the explanation that a lack of confidence prevented teachers from changing theirpractice does not appear to hold.

Curriculum theorists, however, offer alternative explanations in accounting for thefailure of classroom practice to change as a result of major innovation. Fullan (1992),and others, note that there are strong impediments preventing teachers from changingtheir practice. It is argued that this is particularly so when curriculum change is imposed,or is not readily understood, or when the demands made are perceived to be unmanage-able, as was certainly the case with the National Curriculum (Campbell, 1993).According to Doyle & Ponder (1977) the introduction of any innovation, however largeor small, causes the 'practicality ethic' to operate. Teachers draw up a hypotheticalbalance sheet in which they place the perceived advantages of implementing innovationagainst the personal costs involved in introducing the required changes. The larger thescale of the innovation and the more centralised its development, the less capable anindividual teacher will feel of judging the educational effectiveness of any proposedchange. Accordingly, a greater emphasis will be placed on consideration of the personalcosts involved in such a process. Since initial costs centre on the additional time requiredfor planning, to be followed by a familiarisation stage during which the new contentneeds to be mastered, the additional and considerable efforts involved in reorganisingone's classroom strategies and tactics to accommodate the new curriculum are likely toremain a long way down the list of priorities.

National Curriculum officials, during the development of the programmes of study,were not slow to offer advice to primary teachers about the organisation of subjectmatter. Nevertheless, it was also repeatedly argued that the teachers, as experts, shouldbe left to determine the way that such subject matter should best be taught. Looked atfrom the teachers' point of view, however, the message was not one of preservingindependence but of 'dumping' on them the difficult bit of the reform. From theperspective of the 'practicality ethic' it was always likely that teachers would say'enough was enough', and having given up an enormous amount of time to planning andorganisation of the new curriculum packages, would decide to 'bolt on' this new contentto their existing practice. This appears to have happened in the classrooms of small ruralprimary schools and it seems reasonable to surmise that it has also happened in bothsuburban and urban classrooms.

As Fullan & Hargreaves (1992) observe, those who initiate centralised curriculumplanning appear to work upon the assumption that the classroom process is largely arational one. Given that the teaching profession, in general, accepted the need for aNational Curriculum, those responsible for its development inferred that teachers wouldimplement the new curriculum in ways which eliminated the concerns about practicewhich gave rise to its development in the first place. When this 'if-then' approach fails(as it usually does, because teaching involves the emotions as well as the mind, so thatclassroom decisions are not always rational), then developers have tended to move to an'if only' explanation for the lack of significant change in practice. Thus, part of currentcomplaint against the profession is based on the proposition that 'if only' teachers werenot imbued with false ideologies during their training, leading them to adopt individu-alised teaching approaches, then practice would shift in favour of more whole-classteaching and direct instruction.

60 M. Galton et al.

Proponents of this rational view, therefore, believe that eliminating these ideologicalinfluences, reducing the LEA's advisory role, and transferring the bulk of training awayfrom universities back into schools, will make it possible for practice to shift graduallyin the desired direction during the 5 years of the Dearing (1993) moratorium. Proponentsof the 'non-rational' approach, on the other hand, are less sanguine, believing that theemphasis on individualisation, which has remained relatively stable for two decades, ispragmatically rather than ideologically driven and stems from the need to cope withclasses of pupils with wide ability ranges, particularly in small schools where manyclasses span a 3-year age range.

If practice is not to continue as at present, with all the weaknesses that the researchhas identified, there must be a renewed determination by all those involved, trainers,headteachers and other support agencies, to work together. The first task must be toexamine their respective responsibilities during the last 20 years in failing to achievedesired and necessary changes in pedagogy and then to set clear targets, both short-termand long-term, by which future change could be effected. Crucial in this strategy is theneed to develop a middle level of support, but not to dictate 'best practice', as perhapssome LEA advisory teams did previously (Alexander, 1995, pp. 87-89)—but rather toact as mediators between policy-makers and those responsible for enacting policy atclassroom level. This 'mixed' approach to curriculum building advocated by the Councilof Europe's Innovation in Primary School Project (CDCC, 1989) requires teachers tounderstand the reasoning governing the 'themes' of policy, but also for policy-makers toappreciate and take into account the teacher's difficulties in seeking to implement thesepolicy themes at classroom level. Sadly, the history of the introduction of the NationalCurriculum would appear to bear testimony to the superior wisdom of our continentalpartners in matters of curriculum reform.

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the support of a grant from the Economic and Social ResearchCouncil (ESRC), reference number R000233383, in conducting the research on whichthe paper is based.

Correspondence: Professor Maurice Galton, School of Education, University of Leices-ter, 21 University Road, Leicester LE1 7RF, UK.

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