The National Curriculum was designed to be broad and balanced, but teachers of 5-7 year olds were initially strongly resistant to a subject-based curriculum, despite evidence that showed their habitual way of teaching the curriculum separated literacy and numeracy, music and physical education from the rest'.teachers reluctantly abandoned their preferred cross-curricular, or thematic, approaches to planning curriculum content and delivering the arts and humanities within 'topics'. They learned to deliver the curriculum in subject-based ways. Increasingly, reception class teachers of 4-5 year olds (and therefore of non-statutory school age) were expected by headteachers to deliver the National Curriculum. Initial teacher training programmes for Key Stage 1 were reduced to delivering competencies and standards in subject knowledge.