there was an overt and persistent attempt to impose or re-impose the teacher's voice as the centre of a transmission model of knowledge transfer: ‘… by 1979 many [members of the Conservative Party] had gained the impression that schools were chaotic and teachers were lax, or – worse still – militant egalitarians who used the classroom for subversive political activities. The right wing feared that schooling had ceased to be a means for promoting order and obedience, and had taken on the role of encouraging the young to be critical of authority and disrespectful … [In general the Tories expressed] a wish to return to traditional curricula and teaching methods’ (Lawton 1994:47, 147). In the mid-1990s there was also fierce debate … on the desirability of whole-class teaching. This tide of sentiment was joined by the Labour Party before the 1997 election: ‘The Labour Party intends to launch a back-to-basics drive in the classroom if it wins the next election. More emphasis on basic skills, classroom discipline and whole-class teaching will become part of a drastic overhaul of teacher training’ (Times Educational Supplement 31.5.96).

class teachers have long known that in the new communicative order it is extremely difficult to hold pupil attention with their voice as central, unchallenged, authoritative …