This report examines the idea of culture as it has permeated policy-making, public debate, practices in schools and academic writing in the UK.

This review focuses on debates that have occurred in and around English education since 1944. It tracks a sequence of intense and continuing arguments about the proper meanings of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’, about their salience to education, and, through education, to wider issues of equality, democracy, economics and emancipation.

Who are the participants in these arguments? In the 30 years after 1944, the review identifies three main currents of thought and practice:

• a cultural conservatism for which tradition and authority are important reference points;
• a progressivism concerned with child-centred learning;
• and a tendency whose belief that ‘culture is ordinary’ led to an insistence that working-class and popular culture should be represented in the classroom.