After teaching for 31 years in primary and middle schools, including eleven as head teacher, I retired (at the age of 52) in 1997 and a year later created my first website, which contained, in addition to an assortment of personal material, an education section consisting of the essays and dissertation I had written for my DipEd and MA courses at the University of London Institute of Education in the 1980s.
In 2001 I added the text of a lecture I gave to American teachers taking part in a summer school in Oxford. This became the basis of my history of education in the UK which, last revised in 2018, now comprises half a million words with links to the texts of almost 400 documents.
By the beginning of 2004 one of my essays – about the Plowden Report – was attracting a significant number of hits, and emails began to arrive asking where copies of the report could be found. As Plowden had long been out of print and was not available online, I applied for – and was granted – a licence from HMSO to put the text of the report on the website. I retyped the first thirty pages of the 1000-page report before a friend suggested that a scanner and some OCR software might be quicker! I took their advice and, by the end of October 2004, the complete Plowden Report was online.
I then started work on the six Hadow reports (1923-1933). By this time it was clear that the education section of the website was the only one achieving a significant number of visitors, so in May 2006 the other sections were removed and the site was renamed Education in England.
