Talk about a fish out of water. With no admin experience, never having had an office or even a proper desk let alone a secretary, with some trepidation I turned up early in January ’69 at the Civic Centre. A receptionist told me that the Chief Education Officer ‘would like to have a word’. He wished me well and said that I had a free hand to do whatever I felt needed to be done, although primary school mathematics should be the first priority and the Nuffield Mathematics scheme was already under way in some schools. ‘Perhaps from time to time you would be good enough to let me know what you’re up to, no more than an A4 page would be fine. I’m Peter, by the way’. He showed me my empty desk on the ground floor, introduced me to two or three people including my secretary, and reminded me that as there had been no predecessor in the post I was starting off with a clean slate. And that was that.

Over the following fortnight various people took me round to a few of the 80 primary schools and the 16 secondary schools within the city, giving me space to breathe and take stock.

Looking back, I think the sixties and seventies was a wild and crazy almost frantic period for schools as well as being highly exciting and seductive for teachers and advisers alike. We really believed we were pioneering stuff that would change the face of British education for generations to come. There was no national curriculum, and at that time the only subject that had to be taught was Religious Education! But a QUANGO called the Schools Council set up in 1964 poured out a ceaseless succession of schemes and projects that drew us in, all over the country — history projects, humanities projects, science and mathematics projects, drama schemes — you name them, we embraced them. On top of those, independent organisations were also producing materials, such as the Nuffield Foundation and the Schools Mathematics Project (SMP).

Common to most of these initiatives was the belief in experiential learning. A slogan of the Nuffield Foundation was the Confucious saying:

I hear and I forget,

I see and I remember,

I do and I understand.

To grapple with all this teachers all agog flocked daily to the teachers’ centre where courses were put on by the likes of me and my colleagues in the advisory service, year after year. Supply teachers were readily available; books and materials just by ordering them — or so it seemed. More often than not we called upon selected teachers to contribute and later on to run courses. It was up to each school to work out how to use the new materials and it was all very exciting and innovative, even if somewhat confusing for some. Whether the children gained anything from all this is another matter. We hoped and believed that they would.

At least I had the satisfaction that by the time I left Southampton in 1974 for the enlarged Hampshire, in the mathematics curriculum all schools from infant to sixth form college were kept involved in what was going on and had adopted schemes that were compatible.

Although I sorely missed the classroom and the interplay with young people, my frequent contact with teachers was to some extent a compensation.

Anne and I gained several friends from within the education service during this time, people that we still enjoy meeting over 40 years since. Sadly, though, many of them have died.