Although children in primary schools engage in creative activities naturally and spontaneously, few primary teachers have either the skills or the confidence to enable this to happen to the degree that it should. This is often because they themselves will have abandoned the arts during their early years in secondary school. It follows that the initial teacher training in the arts of primary school teachers, where skills can be imparted and confidence restored, is crucial. Unfortunately this training is often woefully inadequate as an earlier report by the National Foundation for Educational Research indicated.

It was these considerations which led the Gulbenkian Foundation, in conjunction with NFER, to convene a seminar of HMIs, LEA advisers, teachers and teacher educators to share views on what was needed to improve the situation. This report summarises the case for the reform of the initial training of primary school teachers in the arts and sets out a number of recommendations concerned with improving both initial training and in-service provision.

Malcolm Ross was Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Exeter.