What has happened is that people all over the country are waiting for the second issue to come out so that they can buy it, have a look through it and say, "Hmmm - not as good as it used to be!"Robert RuncieRuncie is praying for the strength to forgive Humphrey Carpenter.Humphrey CarpenterHumphrey is getting used to the same joke being told by everyone. What has happened? Has it gone into dentists' waiting rooms all over the country and carried on as before?Not quite. PunchThe first "new" issue of the "new" Punch magazine came out a few days ago Since then, nothing Nobody has been talking about it Nobody has said anything about it. Now there is increasing acknowledgement that the appreciation of such links depends upon the prior recognition that history, for example, is something different from geography. This is a very healthy development.The challenge now is to ensure, through the inspection of individual schools and the conclusions on the general health of primary education drawn from these inspections, that long-established belief and theories continue to be questioned in a robust debate which involves teachers and parents alike..

It's time to ask the big question again. Where are they now? Yes, it's time for another look at people and things who were once all over the headlines and have since totally vanished from our consciousness. People such as Graham Taylor and Terry Christian. Things like the Irish peace process and, um, lots of other things I can't remember.Here we go then, as we look back through the yellowing cuttings of yesteryear to look at what has happened to:Salman RushdieSalman has, for obvious reasons, spent a lot of time in the company of policemen in the last few years. He has become very impressed with their fortitude and patience, and, often, skill, and the more familiar he has become with police work, the more interested he has become in it. Finally, nine months ago, he took the plunge and actually joined the police. Normally they do not take people who are under threat of death, but it seemed that Rushdie would be ideal for undercover and plainclothes operations, as he would be more likely to preserve his cover than most people.The clinching argument, for the police at any rate, was that if Rushdie joined the police and became PC Rushdie, he would no longer need expensive full-time protection, as he would now be deemed able to look after himself PC Rushdie is at present stationed somewhere in Kent.

To expect every teacher to have total responsibility for each of the nine national curriculum subjects (plus religious education) is, indeed, a tall order.Recognising that the answer will differ from school to school, what, then, are the possibilities for specialist subject teaching? And to what extent does the traditional organisation of the curriculum into topics, facilitate the teaching and learning of the individual subjects? In the past, teachers have argued that what really matters are the links children are helped to make between different subjects. Again, this has never disappeared in good schools.This, in turn, implies that, irrespective of size, primary schools must continue to review how they can make best use of the particular subject expertise and enthusiasm that individual teachers possess. It will be argued that teachers employ and have always employed a mix of methods Fine, if this in fact is the case. I agree entirely that the ideal must be for the teacher to select the range of teaching methods which is most likely to ensure that his or her children master new knowledge and skills.The trouble is that the inspection evidence shows that this ideal is not as widespread as some would have us believe. If it were, we would not have more than a fifth of lessons judged by inspectors to be unsatisfactory or poor in quality.Second, and linked to this, it means spreading the understanding that primary education, like secondary, is about initiating the young into a body of knowledge which our culture deems worth transmitting from one generation to the next and which they would not otherwise master.