In Britain, the years since the Second World War tend to have been presented as a period of revolution in primary education, as a time of dramatic changes. These have apparently occurred not just in educational practices but in the design of school buildings deemed necessary to accommodate these practices. This paper is a review both of the part which central government has played in encouraging changes in design, and of the supposed alterations in teachers' and children's behaviour on which such changes were said to be based. Consequently, in the review attention is focused on the relationship of the politics of education to architectural design.