The Department for Education recently published a draft specification for a new national curriculum for history for schools. The subsequent media furore is testimony to the fact that history matters to all of us in a different way than other school subjects.
Fundamentally, we are our history. School history shapes what our nation is by telling us what it has been.
The stakes could not be higher. If we get school history right, it will make us a more knowledgeable, cohesive and prosperous nation.
If we get school history wrong, we will produce a more ignorant, divided and poorer nation.
Curriculum for Cohesion recently organised a roundtable event which included experts (crucially all of whom are current or former history teachers) from the Better History Forum, the Institute of Education, and Cambridge University. Leaving aside the seemingly rather shambolic process by which the specifications have been developed, all agreed that the final curriculum document leaves a lot to be desired. Its simplistic chronological sweep seems to suggest that children should have a six-year-old’s understanding of earlier periods of history but a 12-year-old’s understanding of later ones.
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