One primary school which took the Plowden Report to heart was William Tyndale School, located just off Islington's Upper Street among the gentrifying terraces of Canonbury. In 1973, Terry Ellis became head, although he preferred the non-hierarchical title of "convener". His second-in-command was the generously sideburned Brian Haddow, later described by a colleague as "a hard person, a troublemaker and an ideologue". Together, Ellis and Haddow embarked upon an extraordinarily irresponsible two-year experiment that shocked the British public.

Haddow and Ellis saw traditional education as "social control", so they abandoned formal lessons and gave pupils complete choice over what they learnt. Even writing lessons were optional, as this skill was thought to be obsolete in the age of the typewriter. No effort was made to enforce school discipline, and when parents complained about their children being allowed to play truant and run onto the streets, the head answered, "What do you expect me to do? Make the school into a concentration camp to keep your children in?"

Stories began to filter through of William Tyndale pupils "bullying infants; laughing and swearing at teachers; and abusing the dinner ladies and playground supervisors", as well as throwing stones and spitting at pupils in the next-door infant school. In perhaps the worst incident, one boy climbed on top of the roof of the toilets and began hurling glass milk bottles at the infant school pupils below. The head's solution was to suggest that milk be delivered in cardboard cartons instead.

The school roll fell from 230 pupils in 1973 to 144 a year later, and by the summer of 1975 there were just 63 pupils. The Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) entered into a protracted battle to get the school shut down, so Ellis, Haddow and five staffroom allies went on strike. By this point, the William Tyndale affair was being closely followed by the national press. The Daily Express explained: "Here among the drama, comedy and absurdity of it all is sandwiched the future of British schools."

The public outcry was so fierce that a parliamentary inquiry was called. The Auld Inquiry interviewed 107 witnesses and spent £55,000; its report ran to 250,000 words and concluded that William Tyndale was an unfortunate but exceptional case. A remedial teacher from William Tyndale, Dolly Walker, disagreed, and wrote in response: "I venture to say that the debasement of education which [William Tyndale] exemplifies is a reflection of the very widespread malaise within education in the country today." 

By the late Seventies, the spread of progressive education was alarming figures on both Left and Right. The Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan was particularly worried, and questioned the efficacy of "informal" teaching methods in his influential 1976 speech on education at Ruskin College, Oxford. Callaghan was pushed to do so by Bernard O'Donoughue, an Islington resident and the head of his policy unit, who was concerned by the education received by his children at local schools. Donoughue was born into a poor family and raised by a single mother, but received a first-rate traditional education at Northampton Grammar School, making him highly sceptical of the innovations taking place in the nation's classrooms by the Seventies.

Later in life, Donoughue recalled the inspiration behind Callaghan's speech: "There was clear evidence that working-class parents and children wanted education and what they wanted was not the same as the middle-class Labour people from Islington, the trendy lecturers from higher education who wanted education at the expense of working-class kids. Jim and I talked about this. Whenever I heard those people talk I got very angry . . . Their thinking was based on Guardian-style ideologies and prejudices."