Introduction

Teachers of the youngest children at school were the first to bear the brunt of the policies to change the curriculum after the 1988 Education Act. What did the changes mean to them? How did they perceive their impact upon their work, on standards in the curriculum, on assessment and testing, and on their relationships with pupils and colleagues? How did they cope with stress, long working hours, intrusions into their home lives, and with change imposed from outside?

Authors' Insights

The authors capture in detail the views of thirty infant teachers and compare their subjective perceptions, dominated by a sense of massive change, with the objective record of both continuities and changes in their work.