About the Network

Background

The CPR National Primary Network is a direct response to requests from teachers and others who attended our regional and national dissemination events following publication of our final report in October 2009. The majority of those who attended these events supported our ideas and recommendations and indicated their eagerness to take them forward, but many expressed the fear that they could not do so without 'permission' from national agencies and local authorities. The CPR final report strongly criticises this culture of prescription, compliance and dependency - while of course acknowledging that it is certainly not universal - and calls for approaches to teaching, initial teacher education, continuing professional development and school leadership and improvement which work to re-empower teachers as thinkers as well as actors in the core professional fields of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

Although it responds to the way national educational policy has been conducted over the past two decades, our argument for re-empowerment is professional and educational rather than political: it rests on the belief that, in the words of our report, 'Children will not learn to think for themselves if their teachers are expected to do merely as they are told.' Hence the CPR National Primary Network, which is being supported for its first two years by the CPR's main sponsor, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, and has been given a boost by the new government's advocacy of greater professional freedom from external prescription and control.