Katie Harris, 11, is telling me that she recently spent a lesson making paper aeroplanes and measuring how far they flew. What did she learn? “It was really enjoyable. It wasn’t just about one subject like maths, there was science in there as well,” she replied.

Katie is a pupil at Bursted Wood primary in Bexley, southeast London, one of eight schools in the borough at the forefront of a stampede back to “creative learning” and progressive teaching methods that were popular more than a decade ago.

Despite the bad press such methods got back then, when they were blamed for turning out thousands of children who couldn’t read or write properly, a survey of 115 primary schools last week revealed that four out of five are returning to teaching based around “topics” such as chocolate.

At Bursted Wood, traditional secondary-school style classes in subjects such as history, geography and maths have been ditched for topics planned out on “creative learning wheels”.

I look at one wheel, laid out on a card, with the school’s head teacher, Ely Prynne (pictured). The topic is The Groovy Greeks: children are encouraged to learn about maths, for instance, by studying patterns and right angles in Greek art and analysing graphs showing their favourite Greek gods.

Prynne is evangelical about the changes. “I find our children’s knowledge is being deepened,” she says. “Instead of doing half an hour of history, half an hour of geography, we take a theme. For example, one topic was called Time Travellers.

“It took an idea a bit like the Tardis and Dr Who, with the children travelling through time to visit the Tudors. We went to a local building where the children made candles and learnt Tudor dances.”

Like thousands of primary school teachers Prynne started her career, 30 years ago, teaching young children through themes and topics. It was all the rage at the time. But in 1992 a report commissioned by the then Tory education secretary, Kenneth Clarke, pinned blame for declining standards on such methods. The report followed the introduction of a national curriculum in primary schools prescribing which subjects had to be taught.

Jim Rose, Robin Alexander and Chris Woodhead, dubbed “the three wise men”, were the report’s authors. They discouraged the “playschool” approach and recommended more traditional teaching methods. Later in the decade a literacy and numeracy hour was introduced and English and maths standards started to rise.

Now it seems another wave of reform is taking place and the traditional methods are being jettisoned.

“The national curriculum was very constricting. Teachers felt they did not have ownership, now they do,” says Prynne, whose school is held up by government agencies as an example of good practice.

The change started, she says, four years ago when teachers were encouraged to break out of the straitjacket of the national curriculum and make lessons more imaginative.

The only problem is that test results for 11-year-olds at Bursted Wood, while still above the national average for maths and English, have fallen since 2003, when Prynne introduced the new timetable. Last week she said that the innovations had “nothing at all” to do with the dip in results, which compared two different groups of children. Meanwhile, 25% of 11-year-olds nationwide are still leaving school unable to read or write properly.

“It is not just about results,” she says. “It is also about things like confidence and a love of learning.” She adds that the “creative wheel” covers the content of the national curriculum and the school also still provides a literacy and numeracy hour.

However, David Hart, a former head of the National Association of Head Teachers, has warned: “Theme-based schooling will disadvantage pupils . . . and make the secondary teacher’s task much more difficult.”

Blair Chandler, 11, has been taught both ways. When he started at Bursted Wood there were separate traditional subject lessons. But in the last four years he has been on a “creative learning journey”.

“This is much funner,” he says. Perhaps. But is it more educational?

Teach science, history and geography – not chocolate

How much history or geography do your children know? Go on, ask them. Ruin the family Sunday. It isn’t their fault. Our children leave primary school in pitiful ignorance because teachers remain committed to half-baked notions.

According to a survey, four-fifths of state primary schools have abandoned traditional subject teaching in favour of what is known as “topic” work. Boring old history and geography have been replaced by exciting projects on, say, “chocolate”.

Time and again, back in the 1980s, I’d listen to a primary school teacher tell me that he or she “taught children not subjects”. Children don’t, the argument went, think in terms of history and geography. They experience the world in all its buzzing confusion, and, if school is to be “fun”, the artificial boundaries between subjects must be broken down to allow the child to experience the full interdisciplinary richness of human experience.

The fact that the boundaries are not artificial did not seem to cut much ice. Neither did the fact that children are unlikely to make much progress in, for example, science, if they are forever encouraged to think about how chocolate is made.

The national curriculum, improved things for a while, but now teachers seem to be slipping back to their old ideological ways. Prep schools will, of course, still teach history and geography and the gap between standards in state and private schools will widen further.

Chris Woodhead

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