Despite the radical shifts in English national education policy in the postwar period, there has been a tradition recognized as ‘the British primary school’, characterised by ‘progressive pedagogies’ – a child-centred philosophy manifest in integrated, thematic and integrated curriculum, creativity and the arts and other broadly experiential processes of learning. Recent research (Thomson et al., 2009) suggests that long-serving English heads draw on their reservoir of understandings about the British primary school tradition to take up opportunities afforded by creativity policy agendas to recuperate/extend progressive pedagogies. This paper draws on life history interviews with five headteachers from the original CP research; they have all now retired. They were asked to reflect on the British primary school tradition and on the possibilities and constraints they had experienced during their time as leaders before and since the Reform Acts of/post 1988. The interviews affirm that the capacities of heads to read and translate policy are just as much connected to their accumulated intellectual resources as to the affordances of current policy. An unanswered question remains about what will happen to the British primary tradition once this generation of headteachers and their accumulated knowledges have left the system.