The Schools History Project recently wrote to the Historical Association and the Department for Education to share our thoughts on the composition of the drafting team for the History curriculum. A copy of the email is at the end of this document.
Last week, Alex Ford and I met with Amerjit Basi, the Team Leader for Humanities at the Department for Education to discuss the issues that we raised. One of the outcomes of the meeting was that DfE proposed a series of roundtable discussions with a view to providing more input for the drafting team, to which SHP was asked to invite 10 representatives. We are currently in the process of drawing up that group. Our aim is to bring wider representation and make a clear case for how the curriculum drafting response to the CAR can promote inclusive, rigorous, engaging, accessible school history for all. The meetings will take place on February 26th and March 5th and we will share the outcomes shortly afterwards.
The Schools History Project would like to formally congratulate the Historical Association for being awarded the tender for the drafting of the National Curriculum. We were really pleased to see that the panel included history teachers and educators that share our passion for a really vibrant and rigorous history education for our young people.
In the spirit of constructive support, and in the hope that the Schools History Project can make a valuable contribution to the process, we wanted to share our reflections on the drafting team that has been selected to work on the History curriculum
1) Pluralism: We feel that it is important that the drafting team has a broad base in terms of phase (primary, secondary, university), expertise base (practice, research, current practitioners including Heads of History or Trust leads), diversity, institution, and perspective. The HA, like SHP is representative of many history teachers’ views on the purpose of history education and thus substantive content and pedagogy, and we would want this to be reflected on the panel.
2) Diversity: We strongly feel that the drafting team needs to be more representative of the wider history community and the student body that we teach. The Curriculum Review document states “that teachers can reflect the innate diversity of British history, including British Black and Asian history”, the panel should, at the very least, draw on representatives from those communities.
3) Primary: In a similar vein, considering that primary age students experience substantially more of the National Curriculum, there should be a wider representation of primary teachers on the drafting team and not in a tokenistic way (eg only one primary educator who could be isolated).
The Schools History Project, and specifically members of our Council, are very keen to support the Historical Association to create the best History Curriculum from KS1 to KS5 for our students. We would welcome the opportunity for SHP representatives to contribute to the drafting team and are happy to act as critical friends throughout the process.
