Primary school modern language teaching in England 1964-2014: the legacy of the Burstall Report
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Nuffield/Schools Council Pilot Scheme of the mid-1960s to 70s was the first concerted effort to teach a modern language in the primary schools of England. The results of this experiment were published in the final Burstall Report (1974), which concluded that teaching French to eight-to-eleven year olds was not feasible given the available resources. Therefore, the Pilot Scheme was written off as a failure. This study suggests that, far from failing, the Scheme prepared the ground and planted the seeds of today’s successful primary modern language teaching (PMLT). In viewing the Scheme in retrospect through the lens of current developments, it becomes apparent that its innovations shape much of present practice. Its use of classroom teachers, principle of inclusiveness, and introduction of technology into the modern language classroom are some examples. Moreover, its identification of major obstacles to good PMLT led to the fashioning of a new ethos which harmonises it with the Progressive philosophy of primary education.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".