Bridget Plowden

Dame Bridget Horatia Plowden, Lady Plowden, DBE (née Richmond; 5 May 1910 – 29 September 2000) was a British educational reformer. She chaired the group which authored and published the 1967 Plowden Report on primary education in Britain, and was chair of the Independent Broadcasting Authority from 1975–80.

Lady Plowden became a co-opted Conservative member of the inner London education authority. As late as the 1980s she was fully involved in the annual National Residential Plowden conference. She networked to encourage the BBC and quality newspapers to feature primary education. The Ford Foundation funded the Anglo-American primary schools project, and published over twenty booklets in the United States. From the late 1970s onwards there was intense public debate about the merits of her policies. Her report emphasized the need for education through discovery rather than through instruction, and that creativity and adaptability were essential in a global economy. It insisted that parents had a right to annual reports and recommended objective testing of attainment.

Lady Plowden was born Bridget Horatia Richmond at Rounton Grange, East Rounton, Yorkshire, the second daughter and second child of the five children of Admiral Sir Herbert William Richmond (1871–1946), naval officer, and later master of Downing College, Cambridge, and his wife, Florence Elsa (1879/80–1971).

Her husband was Edwin Noel Auguste Plowden, GBE, KCB. He was first knighted in 1946, and later elevated. In 1959, he was made a life peer as Baron Plowden, of Plowden, Shropshire. The couple had four children: William Julius Lowthian Plowden (1935–2010), Anna Bridget Plowden (1938–1997), Penelope (b. 1941), and Francis (b. 1945).

She was appointed DBE in the 1972 Queen's Birthday Honours.

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