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Fyfe - Primary Education (1946) 1946 Fyfe Report - Primary Education (text)
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The Fyfe Report (1946) Primary Education A Report of the Advisory Council on Education in Scotland Edinburgh: His Majesty's Stationery Office 1946 (reprinted 1963)
Background notes Historical context In The Advisory Council on Education in Scotland 1920-1961, his 1986 doctoral thesis for Edinburgh University, John Young argues that The Advisory Council was modelled on the Consultative Committee to the Board of Education in England, to act in an advisory capacity to the central Department. Unlike the Consultative Committee, however, the Advisory Council was generally unable to shake itself free from the close supervision of the central Department, producing notable reports on two occasions only, once soon after its establishment, and again at the end of the second World War, when the sixth Council produced four major reports. On both occasions, in the early 1920's and the late 1940's, the reports of the Council were highly regarded by the Scottish educational community, but were not adopted by the Department (Young 1986: abstract).  The Chair of the Council at the time of this report was Sir William Hamilton Fyfe (1878-1965).
Fyfe (pictured) had taught in several schools and had been Head of Christ's Hospital in Sussex. In 1930 he moved to Canada to take up the post of Principal at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, returning to the UK in 1936 to become Principal and Vice Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen, a post he held until he retired in 1948. The Report on Primary Education in Scotland contains this interesting comment on testing, which politicians would do well to note: Testing is not education. A pupil may be tested frequently without having a good education, and many people have been well educated who never sat an examination. All tests are at least interruptions, and must justify in some way the time spent on them (not to speak of the time spent in preparing for them) (Fyfe 1946:118). The report online The complete text of the 1946 Fyfe Report on Primary Education is presented in a single web page. I have corrected a handful of printing errors and modernised some of the punctuation. Otherwise the text shown here is as in the original printed version (which, incidentally, has no paragraph 330). I am grateful to Katja Lenz of Cologne University for alerting me to the existence of this report.
The above notes were prepared by Derek Gillard and uploaded on 5 February 2025. 
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