ABSTRACT
The body of men to whom was entrusted the task of examining and overhauling the Primary School included some of the finest and ablest educational minds in the country. They could already point to the fine job of work done in their own monumental “Hadow” report of 1926. The fact that only after a delay of five years did they start where they should have first begun may seem to indicate that their real interests lay elsewhere, yet they were experts, idealists, men with hopes for a future. They recognized that in England the Junior Elementary School, to give it its plain name, had led very much of an orphan existence from the start and that so far it had only defined itself in blurred form. They saw that its existing status was a chancy affair, shaped at the one end by the growth of the Infants’ Schools and at the other by the various developments of Post-Primary education after 1870. The indifference which had attended its so-significant birth did not, however, strike the Committee as in any way anomalous, nor does the possibility that their own findings were likely to be overshadowed by the previous Report seem to have occurred to them. They were quite clear, nevertheless, that the conception of a special school for children from 7 to 11 years of age was a new departure involving special problems and that this new school needed to find a character of its own. On the whole, the results of all their investigations constituted a noble and far-sighted recommendation, pregnant with wisdom.
