History in the National Curriculum

Boring and irrelevant... that sums up the kind of accusations often levied against history, but is it a fair accusation? With many teachers struggling to make national curriculum history teaching interesting, part of this may be that - at least at primary level - many have tended to follow the scheme of works (curriculum outline) that has been in place since the 1990s.

‘The advantage of this is that it sets out what you should do if you are a non-specialist teacher, which is common in primary schools,' says Andrew Wrenn, a secondary history teacher and member of the Historical Association. ‘The disadvantage is that teaching the topics becomes dull and repetitive.'

He says primary schools have begun to move towards a more topic-based approach to teaching the subject, which, although fine, can threaten history as a stand-alone subject in its own right. This is particularly worrying as there is currently a review of the whole primary curriculum, due to report next year, which is asking whether teaching at this stage should be entirely topic rather than subject-led anyway.

How relevant is history in the national curriculum?

Pupils may wonder, for example, how studying about the Vikings is going to help them in life, or why certain aspects of history seem to be totally missing from the curriculum menu.

‘Relevancy depends on how the school delivers the topic,' Andrew says. ‘There is plenty of choice on which figures to study, and effective teachers can make it relevant and exciting if they plan properly, draw parallels with today and choose things that interest the children, which you can do within the requirement to do something on local history.'

This has been the case with the attempt to tackle the depiction of ethnic minorities in the history curriculum. ‘It was felt that this was purely negative - the slave trade, showing black people as passive, might be the only bit of black history you came across' says Andrew.

An attempt was made to remedy this with the introduction of Black History Month in October 1987, and there is now a strong thread of black history in the new Key Stage 3 curriculum being introduced this September, for example looking at pre-colonial civilisations and what Africa was like before the slave trade.

The revised curriculum has international and thematic perspectives. ‘Before it was blocked into periods,' Andrew explains, ‘but now it is broken into teaching history through themes and being aware that there are links with local history and international history. So if you were teaching about the British Empire, for example, you must now do that justice by looking at migration and the impact on localities.'

‘It might sound clichéd,' Andrew adds, ‘but unless you know where you are coming from you don't know where you are going. The speed of change increases people's sense of insecurity and history helps to restore that.'

Everyday history

These ideas of connecting, belonging, relevance and identity are the important aspects of history which history-lovers such as Nadine Carr, founder of the History People, are striving to present to children.

‘We have got to get kids to see that history is all around them where they walk... people in the past have been there and built things, if you look past the modern buildings. They have to remember that it is about real people who felt the cold and got stressed out and ill and annoyed that they had to pay taxes! These people from the past are like you and me, only they didn't have electricity and cars,' says Nadine.

She adds: ‘We need to put a stop to this idea that history is boring and dull, and make it real. Wherever you stand in this country something has always happened there, that's one of the great things about this country, history is everywhere.'