Michael Gove has slimmed the scope of the history curriculum, but not its content
Michael Gove's explicit intention has been to "slim down" the national curriculum. His new history curriculum has clearly "slimmed" the scope of the curriculum, but not its content.
School history (apart from a cursory glance at ancient Greece and the Russian, French and American revolutions) will be about one state only: Britain. Although the preamble refers to "outlines of European and world history", international affairs are viewed through a British lens. It is Our Island Story for the 21st-century child.
Chronology is obviously high on Gove's priorities – and reasonably so, since the squeeze on history teaching time over the past decade has led to "period-hopping" in many schools. Reconciling the need to offer students the "big picture" of the past, while enabling them to understand key events, has been a conundrum for history teachers ever since the national curriculum was introduced. The 1991 national curriculum restored a sequential approach overall, but gave teachers choice and included in-depth topics, such as black peoples of the Americas, as a balance to the British history core.
Gove's curriculum has none of these subtleties. Primary school children need only study a huge list of "key dates, events and significant individuals", covering prehistoric man to the Glorious Revolution in just four years. This will be impossible in the time allocated in most primary schools but, in any case, few primary school teachers are prepared for teaching it. Can under-12s really digest the controversies of the English civil war (Levellers and Diggers included), never mind the significance of the Glorious Revolution? This looks like Ladybird book history – engaging introduction at best; superficial and simplistic at worst. The outcome will be a generation of children with a patchy understanding of history before 1700, skated over by a teacher pressed for time and lacking in enthusiasm.
The new curriculum, however, leaves a lot of room for the 19th and 20th centuries between the ages of 11 and 14. The industrial revolution, the emancipation of women and the two world wars are already on the curriculum, but with the addition of topics unlikely to engage teenage students – such as Gladstone and Disraeli, the second and third Reform Acts, the battle for Home Rule and Chamberlain and Salisbury. Having got through the repeal of the corn laws, does anyone fancy teaching tariff reform to 13-year-olds? Equiano and Seacole remain and 20th-century immigration to Britain has been introduced, but the curriculum is otherwise Anglocentric.
Researching the development of history teaching in England over the past 100 years, my co-authors and I found that a politician's pronouncement in Westminster does not automatically lead to change in the classroom. Teachers are the arbiters of the curriculum and, if they are not on board, the outcomes are usually rather different to those the minister intended.
Dr Nicola Sheldon is co-author, with David Cannadine and Jenny Keating, of The Right Kind of History: Teaching the Past in 20th-century England. A full version of this piece can be read at historyandpolicy.org.
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