The first of a series of documentary films that have followed the lives of fourteen British children since 1964, when they were seven years old. Acting upon the venerable Jesuit edict 'Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man,' director Paul Almond and his team of assistants (including later director Michael Apted) selected a group of children to represent the range of socio-economic backgrounds in Britain at that time, with the explicit assumption that each child's social class predetermines their future