EVERY child should have a secondary education from the age of 11 onwards. All the local authorities in the country had now to adapt themselves to that idea and work out that policy. Lord Eustace Percy said by secondary education he did not mean the sort of curriculum which had hitherto been associated with what they had known in the past. They would not have to work to a particular standard, set by a system of university examinations. Every child would enter a higher stage of education, such as would enable the rising generation to meet the increasing demands on it every day - by the professions, industry, commerce and the public services of the nation. They needed not merely one type of secondary school, but other more varied types.

50 years ago December 5, 1952

MAY I suggest to all your schoolboy readers that, although copying from one book is clearly “cribbing”, copying from two is “research”; and if one can get somebody else to do the copying, this becomes a “project”.

Mr FGG Carr, director, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. (Extract from a letter to The Times of December 3 on ‘Projects at School’.

25 years ago December 2, 1977

It has taken four months for Mrs Williams’s Curriculum Review circular to go through the consultation hoops - four months which, apart from adding questions about religious and political education, have done little to change its original form.

This has to be seen as the first step on a journey of uncertain length or direction. Those who say otherwise speak in ignorance.

The review will generate a lot of information and a lot of activity. With luck it may do some good, but not as much as Mrs Williams must now pretend. Nobody can say where it will end.