Overall, though our treatment of the available evidence tries to be balanced rather than partisan, we are subjecting current assumptions, policies and conventional wisdom to particular scrutiny.

Evidence about what is (‘What is happening?  ‘How successful are we?’) will be combined with the development of a vision for what should be (‘What should we be doing?’  ‘How should things change?’). A retrospective enquiry is useful, but the more important task is to identify how the system should develop over the next few decades, what values it should embody, what goals it should seek to achieve, and how.

There are four main evidential sources and procedures. Two of these – the submissions and soundings – open the review to that range of voices, experiences and perspectives without which an enquiry like this would have little credibility as a truly national and democratic exercise; while the other two – the research surveys and official data searches – use published evidence of a more formal kind.  The four evidential strands seek to balance opinion-seeking with empirical data; non-interactive expressions of opinion with face-to-face discussion; official data with independent research; and material from England with that from other parts of the UK and from international sources. This enquiry, unlike some of its predecessors, will look outwards from primary schools to the wider society, and will make full but judicious use of international data and ideas from other countries.

See here for a progress report on the Primary Review.