Well, it's that time of the year again when I get to have a trawl through the GCSE History results to see if there are any interesting trends. If you want to see previous entries in this series have a look at my blog on the 2024 results HERE and the pre-Covid years HERE.

As ever, I am dividing this into a series of questions with an aim of exploring what this year's GCSE History results might reveal about some of the main history specifications on offer for GCSE in England. 
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I will be addressing the following questions. Please do scroll down to what interests you. I have included my short takeaway answer as well as a longer analysis.

1. Are there any noticeable trends in entry numbers?
2. Which boards got the best results?
3. Which exams were the most and least accessible?

As ever, I am grateful for any comments or questions you might have, and am happy to chat further about any of this @apf102.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Before we begin, I should say that, as an SHP Fellow, I am of course connected with the OCR History B (SHP) specification. That said, I and the SHP Fellows do not set the papers, this is done by OCR. The aim here (as you will hopefully see) is to offer an honest analysis of the results for HoDs and others interested in exploring the bigger picture of the history exams over the past few years.

Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to AQA, who put all their data in XLS format online, and to Edexcel who kindly shared some of their own analyses.

​Looking back to 2019, most boards have moved in a positive direction in terms of accessibility. The one exception is OCR B, whose papers were more accessible in 2019, even though they have moved in a more positive direction this year.

However, compare all this to 2017, when the percentage of marks required for the old Grade G were upwards 20-23%, and you can see we have a long way to go to make these exams accessible for all (3-8).

Last year I did some unit by unit analysis, but I am afraid that took hours. If you want to see last years' you can do so HERE.

Concluding thoughts
Thanks so much for reading this far. I hope this tentative analysis is of some use to people as they start heading back to work and thinking about the GCSE results. As ever, if you have any questions, or just want to chat exams, please drop give me a shout on Bluesky Alex Ford (@apf102.bsky.social) — Bluesky

For more of my blogs on exams why not try:

Dealing with the disease: The urgent need for exam reform (andallthat.co.uk)
Examinations: The Gilded Age (andallthat.co.uk)

1. JCQ exams data: Home - JCQ Joint Council for Qualifications
2. AQA Grade Boundary Data: AQA | Exams admin | Results days | Grade boundaries
3. AQA Results Statistics: AQA | Exams admin | Results days | Results statistics
4. Pearson Edexcel Grade Boundaries: Grade Boundaries - June 2024 - GCSE (9-1) (pearson.com)
5. Pearson Edexcel Results Statistics: Grade Statistics-June 2024 (Provisional) International GCSE (9-1) Specifications (UK Only) (pearson.com)
6. OCR Grade Boundaries: Grade boundaries (ocr.org.uk)
7. OCR Results Statistics: Results statistics (ocr.org.uk)
8. Edquas Boundaries: Discover GCSE Grades Boundaries with Eduqas
9. Eduqas Results Statistics: Results Statistics Archive

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The government have just announced that they are to make the Netflix series Adolescence free to show in all secondary schools. The move reflects a wider concern about the waves of disinformation and radicalisation flooding the lives of young people. Radicalisation of young people is not a new issue. When I began my career, I can remember concerns being raised about pupils being drawn into post-9/11 Islamic terrorism, as well as racist movements such as the English Defence League. Indeed, I had to raise concerns about pupils on the latter front more than once in my time in the classroom. More recently we have seen the concern over the rise in toxic masculinity, the influence of Andrew Tate and online Incel communities. 

What is common in almost all of these groups is that they seek to ‘red pill’ those who fall into their orbit. By this, I mean that, they try to show why the world as most people experience it is a lie and attempt to ‘awaken’ their victims with a new set of truths – the ‘red pill’. These ‘truths’ commonly play on a victim’s existing fears and prejudices, encouraging them to abandon the complexities of the real world in favour of the simplified ‘red pill’ narrative and its equally simplistic (and often violent) solutions. These new truths quickly become embedded through repetition and connection with a community of likeminded people. A sense of belonging is engendered and the truths become enmeshed with a person’s sense of self.

Kier Starmer has already noted that there is no silver bullet, nor policy lever for preventing radicalisation. So, before I go further, I want to agree that history education and education in general cannot solve the problems of disinformation and radicalisation alone. But that does not mean they aren’t part of a solution. School history can play an important role in protecting young people from the mindsets around disinformation and radicalisation. Unlike Starmer I do think there are policy changes we could make which would enable this work to be more impactful. One such area is in the continued centrality of ‘mastery’ in the DfE’s stated direction for education. In this blog I want to reflect on how concepts like ‘mastery learning’ are enabling or hindering us in our broader work to prepare young people to meet the challenges of disinformation and radicalisation.


History teaching and the red pill
 
In my last blog, I noted that history education (and education more broadly) needs to take seriously its purposes and potential as a force for shaping young people’s lives and responding to their needs. One of those needs is helping young people navigate a world in which ‘red pilling’, whether by an Incel community, or just through the constant barrage of disinformation, is a reality. Having a clear sense of our educational purposes can guide and shape what our subject can do, but also guide us in the pedagogies we need to employ to achieve those ends.
 
At their best, history lessons offer the chance for young people to grapple with complex and sometimes divisive issues. They ask young people to engage with the concept of truth and recognise its complexity. They are a space for young people to explore their beliefs and ideas about the world; to engage with messiness and complexity in relative safety; and to evolve their thinking as they become adults. In a secondary context for instance, students in Year 7 might be asked to explore issues of why a woman’s legitimacy was denied in the case of Stephen and Matilda. In Year 8 pupils might be asked to grapple with the ways in which systems of enslavement and racial segregation were created and justified. Similarly in Year 9 pupils might be asked to unpick what the campaign for civil rights in Britain might reveal about past and contemporary inequalities. The history curriculum is rich with opportunities for young people to make sense of their worlds. History classrooms are places where pupils can explore ideas and concepts and work collectively to develop new understandings not just of the past, but the present and future as well (Lee, 2004; Nordgren, 2021; Rogers, 2009). 
 
However, this kind of work relies on careful attention being paid to how we learn as human beings – a topic which, in recent years has become very stuck in narrow concepts of memory and mastery (Alderson, 2019; Chapman, 2021; Ford, 2022; Harris, 2021b, 2021a). This excessive focus on master risks robbing the history education of its potential in preparing young people for the challenging world they are part of.

How do we learn and why does it matter?
 
Despite more than a decade of pronouncements from the DfE and Ofsted, if we look to the consensus in cognitive psychology, we see that learning is not so neatly defined as enacting a set of changes in memory through mastery (Department for Education, 2017; Ofsted, 2019; Spielman, 2019). Or rather, cognitive psychology recognises that learning is a complex process which involves our beliefs and prior knowledge, our interactions with external input, a range of affective dimensions, and the opportunities we have to make sense of all of these things (Ausubel, 2011; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; National Research Council, 2000; Sweller et al., 2019; Willingham, 2012). As the highly regarded National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s ‘How People Learn II’ consensus report notes:
 
“Each learner develops a unique array of knowledge and cognitive resources in the course of life that are molded by the interplay of that learner’s cultural, social, cognitive, and biological contexts.” (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018, p. 33)

This is vital because decades of research suggests that we integrate or reject ideas according to how well they connect with our existing beliefs. Where ideas don’t already fit with our existing knowledge and beliefs, we are prone to reject them. If educators want us to change or modify our beliefs and ideas, they need to provide space for us to consider any new knowledge, explore it, and wrestle with it in light of our existing ideas. Only then can be incorporated into or modify our existing beliefs and mental schemas.
 
To make this kind of effort, the consensus is that we need to have an emotional investment in what we are learning:
 
“Quite literally, it is neurobiologically impossible to think deeply about or remember information about which one has had no emotion because the healthy brain does not waste energy processing information that does not matter to the individual (Immordino-Yang, 2015)…People are willing to work harder to learn the content and skills they are emotional about, and they are emotionally interested when the content and skills they are learning seem useful and connected to their motivations and future goals.” (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018, p. 29)

Research suggests that emotional investment also comes from being part of learning communities where we feel we belong, have some agency, and have a sense of common purpose. In short, we make sense of things together.
 
“Motivation to learn is fostered for learners of all ages when they perceive the school or learning environment is a place where they “belong” and when the environment promotes their sense of agency and purpose.” (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018, p. 133)
 
What is interesting is that we see many of these traits of effective learning at play in instances of online radicalisation. Those who have been de-radicalised often talk about falling into the orbit of extremist groups and then being pulled in through a sense of shared beliefs and community. Unlike educational programmes however, radicalisers exploit victims’ prior beliefs and experiences, as well as their feelings of isolation to propagate their own agendas. Rather than helping their victims explore and challenge their beliefs they use the same tools of effective learning to reinforce and strengthen existing prejudices by adding more weight to them, isolating them through community connection and pulling discussions out of the light where such ideas might be challenged. 

How is ‘mastery learning’ disempowering history lessons?
 
As I noted at the beginning of this blog, I think history classrooms have the potential to contribute to insulating young people against disinformation and radicalisation because of the nature of our discipline. However, I have real concerns about the continued focus on ‘mastery learning’ as a one-size-fits-all approach for teaching across all subjects. This is because the ‘mastery’ concept is often at odds with good subject pedagogy in history, as well as wider research on what helps young people to develop their understanding. ‘Mastery’ as enacted in schools is often based on a problematic set of assumptions which:
 

• suggest that all subjects have an agreed-upon hierarchy of foundational concepts to ‘master’;
• maintain a deficit framing and tend to view pupils as vessels to be filled with the right kinds of knowledge by expert direct instruction;
• are interested almost exclusively in pupils’ prior knowledge of the required content, rather than their beliefs and prior experiences;
• place more emphasis on pupils grasping pre-determined concepts and demonstrating competence in testing, than on pupils connecting those ideas to their own beliefs and understandings;
• significantly limit pupil voice and time for interaction with materials outside of the parameters of what has been identified for ‘mastery’;
• end up being self-referential in history in identifying content, the ‘mastery’ of which only serves the internal logics of one school’s curriculum.

 
Where ‘mastery’ approaches are adopted wholesale in history departments, the focus of curriculum design is narrowed to the learning of core knowledge. Definitions are copied down, facts are memorised, consolidation questions (or exam questions) are answered. But the aim in all of these endeavours is to reproduce the knowledge which has already been decided upon in the curriculum. Lessons therefore collapse into rehearsals of correct answers rather than providing space for genuine explorations of history in conversation with the present. I have written more about the issues discussed here in my previous two blogs: HERE and HERE. Focusing solely on ‘mastery’ in history disempowers our subject in three important ways.

1. Failure to understand what impact our teaching is having on pupils
 
First, when we ignore the beliefs and worldviews pupils bring into school with them, and make no space for them to explore their developing ideas and beliefs in light of their learning, we lose all sense of what meaning pupils are making. For many pupils, the result is that their chances of remembering, or indeed taking anything from that learning will depend largely on how well it connects with their existing and unexplored beliefs and ideas. This in turn means missing out on opportunities to develop historical consciousness: understanding the present and the future through the past. More worryingly though, for others we cannot see how underlying racist or misogynist ideas end up being reinforced as they learn about oppressive regimes, encounter anti-Jewish propaganda, or learn about the Nazi methods for seizing power. In a small number of cases, these knowledge sets, untested and unexplored in community, become evidence to support the views they have been sharing with more nefarious communities online. If we make no space to genuinely discuss historical knowledge and pupils’ interactions with it, we will never know what is happening and leave underlying beliefs away from the light of challenge.

2. Leaving young people without a forum to explore their understandings
 
Second, in reducing history lessons to ‘mastery’ we are at great risk of losing one of the most important spaces we have for young people to wrestle with their understandings of the world. Classrooms are a vital space for young people to make meaning in community with their peers. They are a space where young people have to engage with people outside of their circle of family and close friends. A space where they will face challenge, but also have the opportunity to make sense of these challenges. A space where young people develop an understanding of what it means to learn, and try to integrate this with their sense of self. But they are also spaces where we can shut down discussion and debate and reduce learning to recall. Teachers who allow young people opportunities for genuine engagement with historical issues; who enable pupils to develop their own ideas and thinking; who encourage pupils to wrestle with their pre-existing beliefs; and who make space for meaning making meet a vital need for learning, growing and belonging. For some young people this sense of belonging may well be their only point of challenge to simplified narratives and disinformation they are encountering elsewhere. If we offer no space to do this, then young people will simply reject the information which does not fit with their view. When people are de-radicalised, we know that this is a long process and one which involves concerted effort, not only from those helping to do the de-radicalising, but also for the person being de-radicalised. It involves being exposed not just to uncomfortable truths but also being supported through a process of deep introspection and deconstructing of core beliefs. We can model this process every day in our classroom if we attend to the pedagogies of our discipline appropriately. 
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3. Setting up dangerous misconceptions about the nature of knowing 
 
Finally, if our classrooms become places in which the core aim is to embed a set of predetermined knowledge for pupils to ‘master’, then we do almost nothing to ensure that pupils make sense of it for purposes beyond our own assessments (internal or external). For many pupils this is simply boring, but the risks are actually far greater. History is complex and ever changing – a constant search for meaning (P. Lee, 2017; P. J. Lee & Shemilt, 2004; Seixas, 2015). When we reduce the complexity of the past, and the endless debates over it, to a set of ‘core knowledge’ to learn, we suggest that historical knowledge not a living discussion, open to change, but a list of  ‘important stuff to learn’. To borrow briefly from Durkheim, there is an attempt to create a school history as something sacred to be known, and to separate it from its profane complications as a disciplinary endeavour towards better understanding. As Faragher argues, it is impossible and indeed counter-productive to attempt to separate the sacred and the profane in school history (Faragher, 2017). To do so is a form of disciplinary violence. We create a false reality in which the identified curriculum knowledge masquerades as historical reality. Learning history is then reduced to a “declaration of faith in that past” (Lowenthal, 1985). In oversimplifying the nature of knowing in history we lead some young pupils to never question where their knowledge comes from at all, or just to lose interest. Again, Faragher argues that “the failure to fully engage middle and high school students in the contradictions between sacred and profane American history helps explain why kids lose interest in American history” (Faragher, 2017, p. 6). For others, the oversimplified world of historical facts is later blown apart when they encounter the counter narrative. It is no accident that Loewen’s ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’ and Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’ are two of the best-selling books on American history of the last half century. For many adults, Loewen and Zinn’s accounts were ‘red pill’ moments leading them to conclude that everything they had been taught at school was lies. These of course are quite mild ‘red pill’ experiences, but any time school history mischaracterises historical knowledge as fixed, it leaves pupils open to rejecting that framing and swapping it for an alternative simplification. History classrooms have to be places where young people get to see the sacred and the profane coexisting. To  quote Marc Bloch, we need to make the space for young people to ‘reflect upon [the] hesitancies…[and] incessant soul searchings of our craft’ as the only sure means to pioneer a path towards ‘truth and…justice’ (Bloch, 1992, p. 113).
  
Will the history curriculum stop young people being radicalised? No. But the ways we plan and enact curriculum; the ways in which we choose to give young people a voice in that curriculum; and the spaces we offer for young people to make meaning in schools can provide a pattern which can insulate them more from the risk or help them find a road back.



References

• Alderson, P. (2019). Powerful knowledge and the curriculum: Contradictions and dichotomies: Powerful knowledge and the curriculum. British Educational Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3570
• Ausubel, D. P. (2011). The acquisition and retention of knowledge: A cognitive view. Springer.
• Bloch, M. (1992). The Historian’s Craft (P. Burke, Ed.; P. Putnam, Trans.; New Ed edition). Manchester University Press.
• Chapman, A. (2021). Introduction: Historical knowing and the ‘knowledge turn’. In A. Chapman (Ed.), Knowing history in schools powerful knowledge and the powers of knowledge. (pp. 1–31). UCL PRESS. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6449963
• Department for Education. (2017). Evidence-informed teaching: An evaluation of progress in England.
• Faragher, J. M. (2017). “And the lonely voice of youth cries ‘What is truth?’”: Western History and the National Narrative. Western Historical Quarterly, 48(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1093/whq/whw196
• Ford, A. (2022). Why is ‘powerful knowledge’ failing to forge a path to the future of history education? History Education Research Journal, 19(1).
• Harris, R. (2021a). Disciplinary knowledge denied? In A. Chapman (Ed.), Knowing history in schools powerful knowledge and the powers of knowledge. (pp. 97–128). UCL PRESS. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6449963
• Harris, R. (2021b). Where are we and wherea re we going? A refelctionon current issues in the history curriculum. Teaching History, 185, 60–68.
• Lee, P. (2004). Understanding History. In P. Seixas (Ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness (pp. 129–164). University of Toronto Press.
• Lee, P. (2017). History education and historical literacy. In I. Davies (Ed.), Debates in history teaching (Second Edition, pp. 55–65). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
• Lee, P. J., & Shemilt, D. (2004). ‘I just wish we could go back in the past and find out what really happened’: Progression in understanding about historical accounts. Teaching History, 117, 25–31.
• Lowenthal, D. (1985). The past is a foreign country. Cambridge University Press.
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures (2nd ed.). National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/24783
• National Research Council. (2000). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/9853
• Nordgren, K. (2021). Powerful knowledge for what? History education and 45-degree discourse. In A. Chapman (Ed.), Knowing history in schools powerful knowledge and the powers of knowledge. (pp. 152–176). UCL PRESS. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6449963
• Ofsted. (2019). Draft Inspection Framework 2019.
• Rogers, R. (2009). Raising the bar: Developing meaningful historical consciousness at Key Stage 3. Teaching History, 133, 24–30.
• Seixas, P. (2015). A Model of Historical Thinking. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 0(0), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2015.1101363
• Spielman, A. (2019, March 16). Amanda Spielman’s speech at the 2019 ASCL annual conference. Ofsted.Gov.Uk. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/amanda-spielmans-speech-at-the-2019-ascl-annual-conference
• Sweller, J., van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Paas, F. (2019). Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design: 20 Years Later. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09465-5
• Willingham, D. T. (2012). When can you trust the experts? How to tell good science from bad in education(First edition). Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.

A few days ago, I wrote a blog responding to the DfE’s interim curriculum and assessment review. In it I expressed deep concerns that there was too little critical evaluation of concepts like 'knowledge-rich' and 'mastery learning', which continue to do enormous damage to meaningful teaching in subjects like history. One of the key places I see these concepts impacting is on the framing of historical enquiries in the classroom. They therefore strike at the very heart of history teaching itself.

In 2023, over a decade after the Gibb-Gove reforms began, Ofsted reported on the picture of history in schools. In their report, they noted that in too many schools, “pupils’ knowledge of history was disconnected or superficial” and “in most schools, pupils had misconceptions about how historians and others study the past and construct their accounts” (Ofsted, 2023, n.p.). The report further noted that "the teaching of disciplinary knowledge in key stage 3 was overly influenced by leaders’ interpretations of GCSE examination requirements. In most schools, pupils learned disciplinary knowledge that was either directly or indirectly connected to particular GCSE question types" (Ofsted, 2023, n.p.). These issues should also be seen alongside the common criticism that history is increasingly overloaded with content and a growing perception that it is inaccessible for lower attaining pupils, especially those with SEND. Meanwhile other reports suggest pupils from Global Majority backgrounds are significantly less likely to choose to study history beyond age 14, due to its perceived irrelevance in their lives (Atkinson et al., 2018). This is a travesty on a national scale.

Done well, school history has enormous potential to empower all young people to think critically about the world around them. It can help them to:
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• Understand themselves and others.
• Explore common and unique human experiences across time.
• Engage with- and understand the importance of- truth processes.
• Develop their own ideas and make meaning of the past in local, national, global, and of course personal contexts. 
• Embrace uncertainty and complexity in safe and meaningful ways (Dawson 2018). 

 
One of the key tools history teachers have used to empower young people through history lessons is historical enquiry, and specifically the enquiry question. Indeed, Ofsted’s research review noted the importance of historical enquiry in curriculum planning and pedagogical decision making, and even Michael Young (2016), whose work was so central to the Gibb-Gove reforms, has written about the importance of historical enquiry as a vehicle for 'powerful knowledge'. However, the meaning of enquiry itself in the context of the history classroom seems to be changing, to the point where is is being robbed of its potential to deliver on the goals of empowering young people through history education.

Enquiry as empowerment
The concept of historical enquiry has been embedded in school history teaching in  

England since the advent of the National Curriculum. Building on the pioneering work of the Schools Council History Project (later Schools History Project), framing history as enquiry has long been viewed as the means to develop pupils’ historical knowledge through careful engagement with modes of historical thinking (Chapman, 2024; Dawson, 2015, 2018; Sylvester, 1976). In ‘A New Look at History’, David Sylvester (1976, p.36-37) outlined the radical potential of historical enquiry to ensure school history was an intellectual valid apprenticeship in powerful modes of historical thinking:

"Studying history involves the activity of enquiring into the past, and is not the passive acceptance of information gathered by others... The sources of history are mere dust and dry bones until teachers and pupils make them come alive. History in this sense involves a perpetual act of resurrection in which pupils, teachers and historians reconstruct the past and so make it become real and “present” to them...History in school should involve the active enquiry of pupils into the various kinds of primary and secondary sources which make up the raw material of history....[A] major activity should be the reconstruction of the past [which]...involves the making of an imaginative response to the evidence from the past as well as the intellectual one implied in R. G. Collingwood's remark that 'all history is the history of thought.'"

Riley’s (2000) ‘Into the KS3 history garden’ perfectly captures the vital role which enquiry plays in developing young people’s historical knowledge and consciousness through real and engaging historical questions. The concept of an enquiry question has become central in the discourse around effective history teaching in England and internationally. For Riley (2008, p.8), the ideal enquiry question needs to:
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• Capture the interest and imagination of pupils.
• Place an aspect of historical thinking, concept or process at the forefront of pupils’ minds.
• Result in a tangible, lively, substantial, enjoyable ‘outcome activity’ through which pupils can genuinely answer the enquiry question.

For Riley, and many others, the key drivers of enquiry questions are first and foremost related to specific pupils being taught in specific school contexts. The key questions for teachers and departments are then framed with pupils at their centre. For instance:

• How can help this enquiry on Partition in India connect with my Year 9s and fire their imaginations late in the summer term?
• How will I enable my Year 7s to engage in debate and have a voice in responding to our enquiry about why the legitimacy of medieval queens was ignored?
• How will my Year 8s develop their historical thinking and consciousness through our enquiry on the campaigns for suffrage, so that they understand themselves and their world better?

How have we robbed historical enquiry of its power?
At the beginning of this blog I claimed that historical enquiry has been the victim of the 'knowledge turn' in education. I stand by this point. Historical enquiry is currently framed as best practice almost universally, and seems to have been adopted more widely than ever before. Ofsted (2023, n.p.) noted that in most school "historical topics were structured by overarching enquiry questions." Yet all the evidence seems to suggest that the enquiry approach is doing little to counter the problems of superficiality, inaccessibility and alienation already identified. Why should this be the case?

Part of the answer, I think, lies in the fact that historical enquiry is being interpreted and approached very differently now than it was when Riley was writing, twenty-five years ago. If we compare Riley's approach to historical enquiry with some of the discourse around enquiry questions in recent years, we find some stark contrasts. Instead of beginning by asking about the needs of pupils, much energy is now expended in deciding first upon the core knowledge which pupils need to grasp through their enquiry. Indeed, Ofsted (2023, n.p.) identified effective enquiry questions as those which "wove together specific substantive and disciplinary knowledge" so that "pupils developed detailed and secure knowledge that enabled them to answer the enquiry question meaningfully." The use of "answer" here is interesting in its own right, but that is maybe for another blog. While there is nothing wrong with considering the substantive and disciplinary knowledge carefully, it elevates knowledge selection to the place in curricular thinking normally occupied by aims and purposes. It also begs the question: how should this knowledge be selected?

Building on the ‘knowledge-rich’ (Gibb, 2015; Hirsch, 2006) or ‘powerful knowledge’ (Young, 2016; Young & Muller, 2010) agendas set out by the last government, the advice for knowledge selection has tended to be for teachers to look to external authorities. In the best cases this might mean looking at the work of historians in setting the knowledge parameters of an enquiry. There is some merit in this of course, and many exciting and powerful enquiries have had real historical debates at their heart. In the worst cases however, it has meant defaulting to a vague concept of what might class as ‘cultural capital’ (Alderson, 2019; Ford, 2022). In addition to this, there has been a tendency to focus primarily on the substantive knowledge at the expense of the disciplinary thinking that ultimately shapes pupils' relationships with- and understandings of- that substantive knowledge (Harris, 2021; Smith & Jackson, 2021).

When historical enquiry makes the selection of knowledge its primary aim, the main role of the enquiry question is transformed too. With other purposes sidelined the enquiry question becomes primarily a tool to guide students in acquiring the identified content as a neat package. This effectively boils down to a process of sequencing the knowledge over time into manageable chunks to master. Again, having a clear sense what knowledge we ideally want pupils develop, and how we intend to sequence these encounters, are of course important considerations for any enquiry. However, I would argue they should not be the primary concerns. Two really important aspects of historical enquiry are lost in this process of externalising knowledge selection and reducing enquiry planning to acts of sequencing.

The first casualty of this approach is the teacher being cognicent of how pupils’ needs, experiences and thinking might interact with and be shaped by the knowledge they encounter. The trend in recent years has been to use the moniker of ‘powerful knowledge’ as a catch-all term to suggest that knowledge acquisition is valuable where it underpins future curricular learning, or provides the ‘cultural capital’ which is might be necessary for young people to be successful in professional careers (Ofsted, 2019; Young & Lambert, 2014). However, the knowledge pupils encounter through school history has far wider reaching potential to enlighten or enrich and has value far greater than these two narrow aims suggest.

The second casualty has been, the opportunity for pupils to develop their own thoughts and ideas in response to historical enquires. This seems rather odd considering a core purpose of the enquiry framing is to enable pupils to respond meaningfully to the question set. However, the excessive focus on securing a narrow set of knowledge-based outcomes seems, in too many cases, to render the enquiry just another tool to deliver this knowledge to memory. Again, this is partly because empowerment in the ‘knowledge-rich’ framing has become synonymous with the acquisition and securing of ‘cultural capital’ rather than empowering pupils to interact with and make meaning of the knowledge they encounter, nor to develop their historical consciousness (Lee, 2004; Smith & Jackson, 2021). Many historical enquiries framed in the ‘knowledge-rich’ way therefore pass by opportunities for pupils to puzzle over, discuss or debate content, for risk it might corrupt the pre-identified ‘powerful knowledge’. Nor is there space offered for pupils to consider their reactions to the knowledge they encounter or develop an historical consciousness which connects their present with the pasts they are studying. Indeed this is very often dismissed as somehow ahistorical or moralising (Ofsted, 2023).

In fact, there is also a third casualty, in the form of teacher autonomy. By looking to external sources of authority to set the parameters of an enquiry we also underplay the hugely important role of the teacher in knowing and understanding their pupils and context. History teachers should not be simple conduits for disciplinary or substantive knowledge, their professional expertise is in seeking the understanding their pupils need. This is an authority we should not give up lightly.

​The need for a radical reset
There are of course a number of clear exceptions to the rather grim picture I have painted. I could list a large number of exciting enquiries which do begin from the needs of pupils, or offer genuine opportunities for pupils to think about their responses. There are too many to list in one blog, but they are still out there, and we need to be sharing them with one another (more on the Curriculum PATHS project which aims to exactly this later). I do want to mention two particular inspirations for me in recent years. First, I want to note the hugely important role of Mohamud and Whitburn’s ‘Justice to History’ project (Mohamud & Whitburn, 2016, 2019, 2021) in helping revitalise our understanding of historical enquiry as an ethical endeavour. Equally I have been much inspired by the importance placed on beginning with pupils' own life experiences and knowledge bases which has been central in Jason Todd et al.'s work with the Centre for Empire Migration and Belonging (McIntosh et al., 2019; Todd, 2019).

Despite these rays of hope, I think it is important to acknowledge that historical enquiry in England has been trending towards greater control and narrowing its purposes to focus almost exclusively on knowledge acquisition for a long time now. It is difficult to know how the trend might be reversed when the good models which do exist seem to have limited impact. My suggestion therefore is that we maybe need to think more radically about re-finding the lost potential of historical enquiry. A radical reset if you will.

But what would this look like? Certainly I think we want to revisit the original SCHP (SHP) conception of the role of historical enquiry in the classroom, but bring this into conversation will all that we have learned in the intervening years. In fact a good starting point would probably be Mohamud and Whitburn's (2019) 'Anatomy of an enquiry'. Equally we might look to the work of other jurisdictions. If we gaze across the pond we can see how the Canadian Historical Thinking Project (Seixas, 2008), which was also inspired by the work of SHP, has developed its own approach to historical enquiry. Unlike in England, this has been much more focused on the importance of allowing pupils to make sense of the enquiries for themselves. A really helpful framing for this can be found in Gibson and Miles’ work on enquiry questions (Gibson & Miles, 2020). They suggest that a core decision in enquiry planning is to consider how much autonomy pupils should get through the enquiry process. This of course depends on the expertise of the pupils, and the aims of the teacher. It is a framing I have used with my own trainee teachers for some years now.

​In the English context there has been (with some mild justification) a great moral panic over allowing pupils too great a set of freedoms in their learning. I don’t use ‘moral panic’ lightly either. More than once I have been told that allowing children to choose some of what they might want to study is the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’. The panic itself has so exceeded the risk that pupils are now routinely locked out of any autonomy in their learning – killing interest and motivation in the process, and ironically trampling over much of the cognitive psychology of effective learning (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2018; Sweller et al., 2019; Willingham, 2012). 
 
The result of this panic has been that, in the English context, we have increasingly tended to control all aspects of historical enquiry. Although I have focused on recent examples up to this point, I think it is also fair to say that historical enquiry in English schools had begun to be clipped and limited, even before the advent of Gibb and Gove. There is a longer tradition of history teaching discourse which is critical of enquiries that place too much emphasis on pupil autonomy for instance. In most historical enquiries set in English classrooms:

• We set the question (and in the worst cases know the answer we expect).
• We select the information and sources (and in the worst cases use them as illustrations rather than engaging with them as evidence).
• We set the modes of analysis and dictate the debates (and in the worst cases scaffold the thinking to the point that it is just repetition).
• We dictate the outcome product without ever asking pupils what implications it has for them (and in the worst cases just link it to a GCSE question).

 
While this level of control can be helpful when apprenticing pupils, we cannot keep that control indefinitely if we also want young people to become critical historical thinkers in their own right. In fact, in the long run this excessive control will have a stifling effect on pupils’ engagement with history, as we are seeing play out across the country right now. Why carry on with the pretence of engaging in an historical puzzle when in fact you are just reproducing the arguments the teacher had always planned for you to make? In fact we end up with the "exuberant voiceless participation" discussed by Rupert Knight (drawing on Segal and Lefstein) in his recent presentation at the HTEN conference.
 
There are other perverse impacts of the high level of control too. In some cases, it means teachers, as enquiry planners, setting themselves up as experts in topics on which they have limited knowledge, while ignoring pupils’ own family and community knowledge of those same histories. I have seen this many times in Bradford and Leeds as the British Empire in India, or Partition are taught on the assumption that all pupils are ‘novices’ in relation to these histories. Nothing could be further from the truth; and nothing is more likely to persuade a child of Indian or Pakistani descent that history education in England has nothing to offer them, than experiencing such staggering hubris.
 
Re-empowering young people through historical enquiry
So, what would it look like for us to change our approach to historical enquiries? To round this blog off I am going to try to summarise some of my reflections. These are based on a great many inspirations and I hope you will also see the work of the history teaching community shining through despite the gloom. 

1. Make our first focus the purposes of our enquiries, and ensure those purposes centre the needs and experiences of the young people we work with. One of the most important things we can do if we want historical enquiries to inspire and empower young people; to ensure their needs are met, and their voices are heard; is to put them at the heart of our planning decisions. Mohamud and Whitburn (2019) have already made a really powerful case for the importance of considering our Enquiry Ethic. This Ethic should guide not only our selection of content, but also our pedagogical approaches as well. There are now many teachers, trained through the UCL PGCE who are confident in thinking about this dimension in their planning. Their work was formational in inspiring the SHP Curriculum PATHS project, which has sought to identify seven broad ethical purposes for history teaching, all of which focus on the needs of young people. 
2. Consider how we are preparing children to think critically and historically. Just as Riley suggested, we need to consider how our enquiries are enabling young people to think in what Wineburg called "unnatural but essential" ways. This is not just a case of ‘doing source work’, it means making space for pupils to ask historical questions, pursue their own historical enquiries, and reach their own justified, but tentative, conclusions about the past. We need to consider how we can empower young people to understand that historical claims are rooted in evidence but are always tentative and provisional, to embrace complexities and uncertainties rather than seeking simple solutions. As the Jewish historian, Marc Bloch commented as he wrote from his cellar in occupied France in 1944: “it is a scandal that [in an age of fraud and false rumour] the critical method is so absent from our school programmes” (Bloch, 1992).
3. Make space for children to understand themselves and others. Whenever we plan enquires, we should reflect on where children will have opportunities to consider the identities and world views of people in the past, as well as their own identities and world views as individuals, and as members of wider communities. This process helps us also in not seeing pupils as empty vessels to be filled, but as people who come with their own sets of knowledge and metanarratives, as well as the preconceptions and misconceptions we have been trained to spot.
4. Focus on how we can develop pupils’ consciousness of the connections between the past, present and future, and empower them to consider how they might respond to these challenges. I have been reflecting a lot of late on the power of dialogue in the classroom. This dialogue does not always have to be in relation to unpicking the history itself. There is a great power in helping young people make sense of the present through the past, and in encouraging them to consider what the implications are for their own lives. This is what ensures history continues to be a living discipline and not a set of specimens on the pinboard of a butterfly collector.
5. Reflect on how we can make the power structures and processes, which have foregrounded some histories and sidelined others, visible. As Trouillot (2015) suggests, it is fundamental that we understand how power and history interreact and how groups and peoples become marginalised. This is no less true for our pupils. There is already a good body of work exploring how this might be done in the classroom (Lyndon-Cohern, 2023; Priggs, 2020).
6. Ensure that our enquiries are enjoyable, accessible and promote pupil agency. History is at its very best when it inspires pupils’ curiosity and encourages young people to want to find out more about the past. Children of all abilities and backgrounds want to feel they are part of building a shared understanding of the past (and the present) in which their voices matter. How certain are we that they feel this way? And what could we do to find out? To pick up on the idea of the puzzle for a moment, I am a great fan of Culpin’s phrase: “no puzzle, no history.” However, I wonder if framing history as a puzzle suggests it might itself be solvable, something we can reach certainty on. It might be better to say “no debate, no history” which it much closer to the uncertainties we want pupils to embrace in the classroom, and reminds us that we are always seeking to promote dialogue. 

 
Apologies for another long blog. There is so much to say on this issue, and I am sure I have not said half of it. However, after such a long exploration of what is going wrong in history teaching, I do want to focus on the hope that we have it within our power to make the changes and get this right. There are so many people out there who want to put the needs of their pupils at the heart of their work as history teachers. But if we really want to achieve this, we need to acknowledge when we have turned into blind alleys. Like many things, historical enquiry is not a universal force for good. It can be done in ways which empower and in ways which stifle pupils’ voices and deaden their love for history. But if we really want pupils who care about history and who feel empowered by studying it, then I still believe a radically reset version of historical enquiry, with careful consideration to its purposes and ethical dimensions, is our best vehicle for achieving this.
 
If you head on over to our Curriculum PATHS page you can access some amazing enquiries rooted in the needs of young people (and contribute or share your own too). We’d love you to join us. 
 
As ever, I would love to hear your thoughts and comments. Find me over at @apf102.bsky.social
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References

• Alderson, P. (2019). Powerful knowledge and the curriculum: Contradictions and dichotomies: Powerful knowledge and the curriculum. British Educational Research Journal. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3570
• Atkinson, H., Bardgett, S., Budd, A., Finn, M., Kissane, C., Qureshi, S., Saha, J., Siblon, J., & Sivasundaram, S. (2018). Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change (p. 122). Royal Historical Society.
• Bloch, M. (1992). The Historian’s Craft (P. Burke, Ed.; P. Putnam, Trans.; New Ed edition). Manchester University Press.
• Dawson, I. (2015). Enquiry: Developing puzzling, enjoyable, effective historical investigations. Primary History, 70, 8–14.
• Dawson, I. (2018). What do we want students to understand about the process of ‘doing history’? Exploring and Teaching Medieval History, 109–112.
• Ford, A. (2022). Why is ‘powerful knowledge’ failing to forge a path to the future of history education? History Education Research Journal, 19(1).
• Gibb, N. (2015). How E. D. Hirsch Came to Shape UK Government Policy. In Policy Exchange (Ed.), Knowledge and the Curriculum. A collection of essays to accompany E. D. Hirsch’s lecture at Policy Exchange (pp. 12–20).
• Gibson, L., & Miles, J. (2020). Inquiry doesn’t just happen. In Learning to Inquire in History, Geography, and Social Studies: An Anthology for Secondary Teachers (pp. 151–165). The Critical Thinking Consortium.
• Harris, R. (2021). Disciplinary knowledge denied? In A. Chapman (Ed.), Knowing history in schools powerful knowledge and the powers of knowledge. (pp. 97–128). UCL PRESS. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6449963
• Hirsch, E. D. (2006). The knowledge deficit: Closing the shocking education gap for American children. Houghton Mifflin.
• Lee, P. (2004). Understanding History. In P. Seixas (Ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness (pp. 129–164). University of Toronto Press.
• Lyndon-Cohern, D. (2023). Oral History. In R. Ball & A. Fairlamb (Eds.), What is History Teaching, Now? A Practical Handbook for All History Teachers and Educators. John Catt.
• McIntosh, K., Todd, J., & Das, N. (2019). Teaching Migration, Belonging, and Empire in Secondary Schools. 20.
• Mohamud, A., & Whitburn, R. (2016). Doing justice to history: Transforming black history in secondary schools.
• Mohamud, A., & Whitburn, R. (2019). Anatomy of enquiry: Deconstructing an approach to history curriculum planning. Teaching History, 177, 28–41.
• Mohamud, A., & Whitburn, R. (2021). ‘What is history’: Africa and the excitement of sources with Year 7. Teaching History, 181, 17–25.
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2018). How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts, and Cultures (2nd ed.). National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/24783
• Ofsted. (2019). Draft Inspection Framework 2019.
• Ofsted. (2023). Rich encounters with the past: History subject report. Ofsted. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/subject-report-series-history/rich-encounters-with-the-past-history-subject-report
• Priggs, C. (2020). No more ‘doing’ diversity: How one department used Year 8 input to reform curricular thinking about content choice. Teaching History, 179, 10–19.
• Riley, M. (2000). Into the Key Stage 3 history garden: Choosing and planting your enquiry questions. Teaching History, 99, 8–13.
• Seixas, P. (2008). “Scaling Up” the Benchmarks of Historical Thinking. A Report on the Vancouver Meetings. http://archive.historicalthinking.ca/sites/default/files/Scaling%20Up%20Meeting%20Report.pdf
• Smith, J., & Jackson, D. (2021). Two concepts of power: Knowledge (re)production in English history education discourse. In A. Chapman (Ed.), Knowing history in schools powerful knowledge and the powers of knowledge.(pp. 152–176). UCL PRESS. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6449963
• Sweller, J., van Merriënboer, J. J. G., & Paas, F. (2019). Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design: 20 Years Later. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-019-09465-5
• Sylvester, D. (Ed.). (1976). A new look at history. Holmes McDougall.
• Todd, J. (2019). HA Update: Thinking beyond boundaries. Teaching History, 176, 4–7.
• Trouillot, M.-R., & Carby, H. V. (2015). Silencing the past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press.
• Willingham, D. T. (2012). When can you trust the experts? How to tell good science from bad in education (First edition). Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.
• Young, M. (2016). School Subjects as Powerful Knowledge: Lessons from History. In C. Counsell, K. Burn, & A. Chapman (Eds.), Masterclass in History Education (pp. 185–194). Bloomsbury.
• Young, M., & Lambert, D. (2014). Knowledge and the future school: Curriculum and social justice. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Young, M., & Muller, J. (2010). Three Educational Scenarios for the Future: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge: European Journal of Education, Part I. European Journal of Education, 45(1), 11–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-3435.2009.01413.x

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On Tuesday morning I managed to set aside some time to read the DfE’s interim curriculum and assessment review. It is a report so seemingly uncontroversial, that even Nick Gibb struggled to find problems with it when interviewed on the Today programme. Yet, as I reflected on it, I found it more and more troubling. I mean, it’s even made me dust off my login and blog for the first time in ages. It’s not so much what the report says, but what remains unsaid that worries me. Let me explain. 
 
What is said?
On the whole, I found the report to be measured and sensible. There are no sweeping claims about teacher blobs or Marxist teachers destroying the education of children. Nor does it make wild claims about a system in crisis, or the need for radical change. In fact, there is a welcome, if cautious, recognition of the challenges faced by pupils with SEND, and of the need for a slimmed down curriculum, even if it is unclear how these things will be addressed. There were even some nods buried deeper down in the document that there might be some appetite for a broadening of what curriculum entails. 

There were mentions of the need to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing society and the rise of AI (p27); the need to create “an inclusive and diverse learning experience” for pupils which “needs to do more in ensuring that all young people feel represented…[and] challenge discrimination” (p28); and the need for pupils to “experience a wide range of perspectives” (p29).  Barbara Bleiman and Andrew McCallum offer a really helpful analysis of the report for the English and Media Centre. If you have not yet read this, I would really recommend it.
 
What is unsaid?
However, just like Bleiman and McCallum, the report also leaves me with the nagging feeling that, for all its caution, the conclusions being drawn are in themselves quite risky because they leave certain concepts, which have become embedded in education discourse over the last decade, under-examined. For example, when talking about future ambitions for curriculum, the report brings out some key Gibb-Gove tropes:

• A "rigorous and knowledge-rich education.” (p19)
• The importance of “cultural knowledge stemming from the past." (p19)
• Curricula which are “coherently and logically sequenced." (p19)
• The need for “mastery of core concepts.” (p19) 

Indeed the concept of ‘mastery’ appears in the document twelve times, with ‘knowledge-rich’ making nine appearance, or twelve if you count the three references to 'cultural capital'.  Yet, despite a wealth of discourse around concepts such as ‘powerful knowledge’, ‘mastery’ and ‘knowledge rich’, which have been in the background of so much educational change in the last decade, little is done to question, or even problematise them in this report. This is troubling as these concepts are also closely associated with some deeply flawed framings of education, which attempt to reduce learning to cognitive processes of memory formation - collapsing curriculum purposes and pedagogies into a case of "just tell ‘em", as one prominent edu-blogger once put it. 

Does it matter?
I want to come back to Bleiman and McCallum's blog at this point, as frame the danger lurking below the apparent lack of  significant change so well, in addition to their concerns about the lack of focus on oracy, and the problematic references to 'mastery learning'. 

The commitment to ‘evolution not revolution’ is a worthy one on the face of it. However, there needs to be a recognition that in some areas of curriculum (English being one of them) there are very serious concerns and problems (for example, in relation to the content of the English Language GCSE and its assessment). These may require more than minor tweaks and should be considered at the earliest possible opportunity, to address the issues that have been causing severe damage to the subject and have been shown to be of great concern to teachers, students and universities. 

(Bleiman & McCallum, 2025, n.p.)
 
From a history perspective, I have a very similar range of concerns. As the Schools History Project have long argued, really great school history can:

• Put the needs and voices of children at the heart of the curriculum.
• Train and prepare children to think critically and historically.
• Enable children to understand themselves and others.
• Encourage children to be conscious of the connections between the past, present and future.
• Give children agency to respond to present and future challenges, which are rooted in the past.
• Encourage children to challenge silences in the past by centring marginalised voices.
• Be enjoyable, accessible, and promote agency.

 
However, current interpretations of concepts like 'mastery' and 'knowledge rich', continue to form significant barriers to achieving these aims.

Issues with the concept of ‘mastery’
The concept of ‘mastery’ finds itself fundamentally at odds with the study of school history. There are certainly aspects of the study of the past which might be mastered: some key tools for exploring the past, such as graphology for example. There are even some modes of thinking historically which might be 'mastered' if you agree with proponents of historical thinking like Sylvester, Shemilt, Lee, Wineburg or Seixas (Lee, 2017; Seixas, 2015; Shemilt, 2010; Sylvester, 1976; Wineburg, 2007). However, in terms of its content, history as a school subject is not one which tends towards clear answers, but rather raises questions and tends towards greater complexity. Even setting out a canon of historical content has proven to be almost impossible over the years the National Curriculum has existed. As I have noted previously, there is no simple formula for deciding which historical content needs to be ‘mastered’, and yet this is exactly how many commentators, and schools, have been interpreting ‘mastery’ in history. As a result, curricula risk being reduced to lists of core substantive content to master in the hope that it might somehow unlock historical understanding.

'Mastery' also implies, and seems to result in, a set of pedagogical approaches focused on the transferring of the knowledge to be mastered to pupils. The major issue is that this tramples all over what good history can and should be doing. Again the Schools History Project have long promoted history which encourages pupils to ask questions and develop their own ideas about the past (and the present through the lens of the past). A core aspect of good school history is developing curiosity and an engagement with a genuine historical puzzle. By contrast, 'mastery’ approaches are too often turning history lessons into a series of propositions for pupils to learn and repeat back in various forms. In this mode, pupil engagement in history means reaching the same conclusions their teachers, or their academy trust leads, have decided upon in advance. There is no real engagement with historical thinking. Fundamentally there is no puzzle to develop pupils' thinking and historical literacy and, as Chris Culpin one observed, “no puzzle, no history.” 

Issues with ‘knowledge-rich’
‘Knowledge-rich’ and its strong associations with 'cultural capital' (Hirsch et al., 1988) and ‘powerful knowledge' (Young & Muller, 2010; Young & Lambert, 2014) also raises concerns as an unexamined concept in the curriculum and assessment review. At its core, the idea of a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum has always been an act of virtue signalling from the Gibb-Gove arm of educational reform. Who indeed would suggest the opposite would be desirable? The real questions which do need to be asked, and indeed are being asked in the wider discourse, are about whose knowledge should form that richness and, crucially, for what purposes? Arthur Chapman’s (2021) recent online open access book: ‘Knowing History in Schools’ has a series of chapters by authors addressing these exact issues and is well worth a read. If the concept of 'knowledge-rich' or 'powerful knowledge' is not grappled with, then it continues to risk being reduced to a call to teach a simplistic national narrative (Ford, 2022).

‘Knowledge rich’ much like its counterpart ‘mastery learning’ also ends up focusing attention far too heavily on selection and sequencing of substantive knowledge. Indeed, one of the primary conversations becomes about how best to sequence knowledge at the expense of considering the purposes of that knowledge outside the internal logics of the curriculum. As a result it also leads departments to emphasise pedagogical strategies focused on the transfer of that knowledge, rather than its meaningful integration with pupils wider experiences and understandings. There is a growing body of evidence that, over the last decade, the knowledge demands of curricula have increased, but without a clarity of focus, pupils are increasingly lost in a sea of knowledge acquisition with no sense of the bigger picture of their learning. As one school tells their pupils: each term you will learn 1000 new facts, but the reasons why this should be the case are lost somewhere along the way. 

Internal inconsistencies 
‘Knowledge rich’ and ‘mastery’ also end up being at odds with other priorities for curriculum reform noted in the report. For example, the report does note a desire for more inclusive curriculum content. This could be linked with the ‘knowledge rich’ curriculum, but anecdotal and research evidence from the last decade has shown that, when coupled with the concept of ‘cultural capital’, it ends up narrowing the curriculum instead (Ford, 2022).

There is also an interesting potential contradiction when the report notes the need to focus on things like financial or careers knowledge. For many 'knowledge-rich' and 'powerful knowledge' have become synonymous. Yet in defining 'powerful knowledge' Young (2014) notes that it should be distinct from everyday knowledge, something separate and negotiated through academic discourse. For Young then, a curriculum which priorities financial literacy would not necessarily class as 'knowledge-rich' .

Equally, there is a large body of research to show that pupils with SEND, and pupils who are disaffected by education benefit from approaches which connect with their existing schemas and understandings of the world, rather than treating them as novices waiting to be filled with knowledge. Maintaining a mastery approach to learning, and ensuring pupils who are currently not fully catered for by-, or alienated from- schools might well be contradictory aims.
 
What next?
What is most notable from the curriculum review is that some of the really fundamental challenges to teaching good history in schools are likely to remain under the current government. School history still has a really important role to play for young people, but it will struggle to fulfil this role if we don’t tackle the problematic nature of some of the concepts which continue to dominate curriculum discourse in England. 'Knowledge-rich' and 'mastery' are two such concepts.
 
How will we meet that challenge? Well, that’s a blog for another day!

As ever, I would love to know your thoughts about the curriculum review and its implications for history in schools.

References

• Bleiman, B., & McCallum, A. (2025). Response to Curriculum and Assessment Review Interim Report. English & Media Centre Blog. https://englishandmedia.co.uk/blog/emc-response-to-curriculum-and-assessment-review-interim-report/
• Chapman, A. (Ed.). (2021). Knowing history in schools powerful knowledge and the powers of knowledge. UCL PRESS. http://public.eblib.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=6449963
• Ford, A. (2022). Why is ‘powerful knowledge’ failing to forge a path to the future of history education? History Education Research Journal, 19(1).
• Hirsch, E. D., Kett, J. F., & Trefil, J. (1988). Cultural literacy: What every American needs to know (1st Vintage Books ed). Vintage Books.
• Lee, P. (2017). History education and historical literacy. In I. Davies (Ed.), Debates in history teaching (Second Edition, pp. 55–65). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
• Seixas, P. (2015). A Model of Historical Thinking. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 0(0), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2015.1101363
• Shemilt, D. (2010, October 22). What Are Second-Order Concepts? And Why Do They Hurt? Developing Historical Understanding, Goethe Institute, Fulbright Centre & CCMC, Ledra Palace Buffer Zone, Nicosia.
• Sylvester, D. (Ed.). (1976). A new look at history. Holmes McDougall.
• Wineburg, S. (2007). Unnatural and essential: The nature of historical thinking. Teaching History, 129, 6–11.
• Young, M. F. D., & Lambert, D. (2014). Knowledge and the future school: Curriculum and social justice. Bloomsbury Academic.
• Young, M., & Muller, J. (2010). Three Educational Scenarios for the Future: Lessons from the sociology of knowledge: European Journal of Education, Part I. European Journal of Education, 45(1), 11–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-3435.2009.01413.x

Ofsted have just published the results of their Big Listen research. The stated aim was to reset the damaged relationship between Ofsted, the education sector, and parents.

I have to say that I was reasonably sceptical about the process, not least because the main survey questions were quite vague. What interested me more however was how Ofsted would deal with the results of the main survey and additional research they conducted. Oftsed under Amanda Spielman engaged in a range of consultation exercised, but these were often inward looking, defensive actions to stave off criticism. So, are Ofsted under Martyn Oliver actually listening?
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I have now spent some time analying the survey data and comparing this to the proposed actions. My first impression is that, yes, in terms of the questions which were asked, Ofsted do seem to be acknowledging the scale of the problem and where their priorities for change lie now. Whether this translates into action is another question, but awkward results do not seem to have been swept under the carpet.
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I won’t go through all the headlines here, but I do want to focus on two responses from the main survey which I think are crucial in guiding what Ofsted do next and are critical in analysing whether the proposed responses are sufficient. I also want to offer some suggestions for further actions Ofsted might want to take to move forwards from this point.

Key Finding 1: Ofsted still have a key role
In terms of schools, the first major finding from the Big Listen is that there is broad agreement that Ofsted do have a key role to play in monitoring the quality of educational provision. However, that is not to say that their current remit is the right one. The greatest support comes in terms of Ofsted:

• Exploring and communicating the pupil experience of education 
• Monitoring pupil safety and wellbeing
• Ensuring educational settings are equitable and inclusive 

There remains support for Ofsted monitoring different aspects of the school experience. Interestingly however, the schools part of the survey has no direct question about whether inspectors should comment on the examination outcomes of pupils. The question of data monitoring and comparison is asked in the EYFS section and receives lukewarm support.
 
Key Finding 2: Ofsted are currently failing in their role
The second significant finding I think is that only 13% of respondents agreed that Ofsted gradings gave a good indication of the quality of the schools system. Indeed singe word judgments also received similar wrath and were opposed by 83% of school respondents. This is a fairly damning indictment, and one which the report does engage with. Similarly low confidence was expressed in EYFS and the ITE sector as well. This is significant as it suggests that, whilst many people recognise the important role Ofsted could and should play, there is very little sense that the sector feels this role is being fulfilled. It is also a finding supported by the fact that only 29% of school respondents said that they trusted Ofsted. This figure was slightly higher in ITE (47%) and EYFS (49%), though still under the critical mass. Equally, only 40% of respondents felt that inspectors had good expertise and knowledge of the sector they were inspecting, with even fewer (36%) believing that knowledge of SEND was adequate. 

What is very clear from the Big Listen is that Ofsted cannot simply carry on by making a few tweaks. Again, Oliver does acknowledge this. This is where the proposals come in: Ofsted's promises for changes which will refocus its work and restore trust. 

Do the proposals make sense?
The Big Listen report outlines a series of proposed changes. I want to consider each one in light of the two core findings from the Big Listen, which I have outlined above.
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Proposal 1: We will reform our inspection framework.
I am actually really pleased to see this as item 1 on the list. It directly addresses the issue that a lack of confidence in the inspection system ultimately has its roots in the inadequacies of the current framework.

The current Ofsted framework did a great deal to shift the focus away from a relentless (and often problematic) pursuit of exam results at the expense of careful and considered curriculum construction. However, the one size for all approach of the current framework, and its problematic connections with a single mode of educational thinking have been significant challenges for the sector as a whole. And this is before we consider the fact that many inspectors have wildly different levels of expertise (and even less training) in the subjects they are charged with inspecting. 

The suggested changes here include having a greater focus on pupil voice (an aspect which seems to have held little sway in recent years), but also the creation of rubrics to make it clear to schools what is expected. I have argued for a long time now that schools should be party to the training Ofsted inspectors receive so that the standards against which they are judged are more transparent. The challenge here is whether these rubrics can be created and also remain sympathetic to having high quality subject input at Secondary and allowing for phase specific expertise in Primary. One risk is a return to GCSE or KS2 outcomes data as a primary measure of curricular impact. I think this would be a risky and retrograde step. Much educational time was wasted in the early 2000s with schools trying to ‘game’ outcomes to secure their Ofsted grade, resulting in significant curricular narrowing.

It is promising to see that the rubrics may well be different depending on the age phase and that context will be considered. The real proof of this pudding however will be in the actual process by which the framework is drafted and approved. Wide consultation is necessary to ensure we don’t reinvent old problems.
 
Proposal 2: We will introduce report cards.
A move to report cards is also something to be welcomed cautiously. The commitment to move away from single word judgments means we might actually get useful descriptions of schools back on Ofsted reports. The last 10 years have seen school (and ITE) reports turned into identikit documents, with comments seemingly pulled from word banks. It would be good to return to a system whereby a more detailed description of a school is provided and where the single word judgments don’t dominate. Having worked in schools in all four categories I know very well the impact these can have. Equally however, care needs to be taken not to focus too much on exam outcomes on these report cards as these in turn can skew curriculum making across the school.

A big challenge here though is time. The inspectorate have struggled to produce even the short report required under the current system. This is partly down to the funding of inspectors, but also the fact that the ITE system became so vast and fragmented and required more inspectors. Once again, the proof will be in how well Ofsted consult on the format for these report cards and the information they need to include.
 
Proposal 3: We will strengthen the regulation and inspection of children’s social care, in partnership with the government and the sector.
This one is absolutely vital. Putting children’s voices at the heart of this process will be tricky but is crucial to ensuring greater equity. This goes beyond my area of expertise however, so I will leave this one here. 
 
Proposal 4: We will foster a culture of integrity in which we always treat people with professionalism, courtesy, empathy and respect
This proposal includes sensitivity and consistency training and a new provider helpline. It remains to be seen what impact this will have. One aspect which I think is missing here is the consideration of Ofsted’s own recruitment and monitoring processes, which have clearly been failing on multiple occasions and have led to a culture in which the organisation often closes ranks or refuses to acknowledge failures. This commitment absolutely has to go well beyond a helpline and a few hours of online training – I would really like to see more formal monitoring of inspections by independent bodies, or a better system of getting feedback from schools on the performance and conduct of inspectors. Having a reporting system is fine, but many will worry about the risks. Given the massive lack of trust, this needs more focus I think.
 
Proposal 5: We will launch the Ofsted Academy.
This proposal hits at the heart of issues around trust in the inspectorate. In years past, schools and ITE providers were routinely inspected by experts in their field. In recent years Ofsted inspections have been conducted by those who were available. This has led to some significant issues as the subject framework demanded more and more subject expertise but this was not matched with subject expert inspectors.

There has been a long standing funding commitment issue at Ofsted with relation to proper training for inspectors. The commitment to having inspector seconded into provider settings sound positive but may indicate a continued reliance on generic expertise, bolstered by short ‘placements’. It will be interesting so see if the Ofsted Academy approach solves these issues or focuses more exclusively on consistent practice. Consistency is important, but consistently poor inspection is just as problematic as wildly erratic inspection.

What is not here is a commitment to having subject expertise or phase expertise in the system. Although there have been issues with the way Ofsted have operated, the role of subject leads exploring the state of play across the nation in relation to a subject has been valuable. In previous iterations of inspection we have seen subject leads play an important role in highlighting areas of success and for improvement in a subject area nationally. This would help significantly in creating dialogue.

I am very interested to know if the course and materials of the Academy will be publicly available. Consultation and oversight will be key.
 
Proposal 6: We have updated our code of conduct.
Not much to say here, other than the fact it was long overdue.
 
Proposal 7: We will track whether perceptions of our culture are improving over time.
This is an important commitment and one I am happy to see. Some useful data has been gleaned during the Big Listen but there are refinements which could be made to the monitoring questions to ensure Ofsted are indeed improving. Having some independent advice on the monitoring questions would be very valuable as would a commitment to a more formal process of external scrutiny – someone to watch the ‘watchmen’.
 
Proposal 8: We will be a learning organisation that operates transparently, listens to challenge and takes action to change.
The commitment is key but the proof will be seen in the next few years.
 
Proposal 9: We will improve how we engage parents, carers and providers through our inspections of education settings, and all year round.
The questions asked in the research did not generate a lot of data around this but the Parent View survey has been a problematic tool for many years now - yielding poor quality data and often drawing on a tiny sample of parent views. It is good to see a commitment to updating means for seeking parent and carer feedback on schools and the experiences of their children. It would be helpful also to ensure the Parent View data was useful to schools as well as to the inspectorate.
 
Proposal 10: We will hear from children about their experiences of education and care.
Again an important commitment to restore trust and validity. I am hoping there is work underway to engage with experts on how to best capture pupils views and to ensure that schools do not ‘hide’ problem students during inspections. This is important but quite delicate work as it is giving a voice to the most vulnerable. I am hoping to see significant transparency about the underlying research and choice of methods.
 
Proposal 11: We will establish 6 national hubs to improve consistency across all our work.
I think this sounds positive in principle.
 
Proposal 12: We are changing how we handle complaints.
These changes are all long overdue and it is good to see that the trial of complaints panels with external representative are here to stay. It will be important for information about how these panels are convened, if not the names of those involved, to be in the public record.
 
Proposal 13: We will become more transparent.
It is really good too see a commitment here to publishing training materials for inspectors via the Academy. There is of course a danger that this then leads to senior leaders spending too much time trying to second guess the inspection process. However if the framework is right then the inspection training should also enable senior leaders to consider core aspects of how their school is run and operated. If this is done carefully it could be powerful.

The sharing of process and evidence which has led to a conclusion is also important here.
 
Proposal 14: We will do more to share our insights and data, and ground our work in evidence.
There has been a huge battle in education for the last 14 years over what constitutes ‘the best available evidence.’ It will be interesting to see whether there will be a return to exploring a broader evidence base in decision making, rather than a more ideological selection of evidence as was seen in some decisions under Spielman. I am awaiting the research outputs with interest.
 
Proposal 15: We are increasing our engagement and consultation with stakeholders.
This is positive but will again need to have openness and transparency about the selection process at the core. We cannot continue with a situation where key people are brought in via nods and nudges. I am interested to see how the recruitment to these groups is done and how the process is shared.
 
Summing up
Right. I think I’ve exhausted myself now. All in all, this looks like a positive change of direction, however there are a number of unresolved questions about the status of subject and phase expertise in schools (and ITE). The real proof however will be in how rapidly and how openly these changes are now brought in. It looks like it will be an interesting year.
 

[NB. this blog was updated with Q6&7 on 25 August]

Ah, who doesn't love that famously dull election slogan from Warren G Harding? Still it won him the Presidency, so it'll do for me,

It has been a long time since I posted a blog here! This is my endeavour to get my brain back into work mode after the summer break. I will hopefully be giving some more updates on the SHP Curriculum PATHS project here soon. More on that here: Curriculum PATHS - Schools History Project

If you have followed my blog in the past you may be aware that I did a similar analysis back when the current GCSEs were first examined back in 2018, and again in 2019. The aim was to look at how the new exams compared to the old ones and the potential impact of any changes. You an find it HERE. We then had a long break due to Covid and the ongoing impacts on the awarding of exams.

Today I want to revisit some of the questions from 2018 and look to explore what this year's GCSE History results might reveal about some of the main history specifications on offer for GCSE in England.

I will be addressing the following questions. Please do scroll down to what interests you. I have included my short takeaway answer as well as a longer analysis.

1. Are there any noticeable trends in entry numbers?
2. How do this year’s results stack up against the pre-Covid years?
3. Which boards got the best results?
4. Which exams were the most and least accessible?
5. Which units were the most and least accessible?
6. Are there any historic trends with accessibility?
7. What made papers harder or easier?

As ever, I am grateful for any comments or questions you might have, and am happy to chat further about any of this. These days you can find me over at Bluesky @apf102.bsky.social on Bluesky.

Full disclosure: as an SHP Fellow, I am of course connected with the OCR History B (SHP) specification. That said, I and the SHP Fellows do not set the papers, this is done by OCR. The aim here (as you will hopefully see) is to offer an honest analysis of the results for HoDs and others interested in exploring the bigger picture of the history exams over the past few years.

Finally, I want to say a huge thank you to AQA who put all their data in XLS format, making this job infinitely easier!!

Read on for more...
​

Q1: Are there any noticeable trends in entry numbers?
A1: There is a general increase in History entries overall. Meanwhile Edexcel continue to dominate History GCSE. Other boards have seen some minor movement, though OCR A looks to be in trouble still.

On the broad scale it looks like raw entry numbers for GCSE History have risen since 2019, with over 30,000 exams sat in 2024 compared to 26,000 in 2019. However it is worth bearing in mind that the number of pupils in each school year is different too. When you factor this in, there has probably been a slight decline in history entries as a percentage of overall GCSE entries this year (37.6%) compared to 2023 (38.5%). However both years are up on 2019 (36.3%) (1).

Overall History seems to be going strong and continues to be the most popular optional subject at GCSE (after English, Maths and Science). This trend has been roughly the same since RE dropped from that spot in 2018 (2).

On a board by board basis, Edexcel continues to be extremely popular (6) and remains the dominant board for market share. AQA (4), OCR A (8) and OCR B (8) saw growth in entries, with OCR B beginning to grow its market share again from its low in 2022. OCR A and AQA saw a small decline in overall market share (4 & 8).

​Q3: Which board got the best results?
A3: This is not really a good question to ask. You can’t really answer it as results have a statistical link to the prior attainment of the exam board's specific cohort.

As interesting as this is, it’s really the wrong question to ask. The distribution  of grades per board is largely determined by the statistical connection to pupils’ prior attainment from KS2. This means that results distributions reflect the prior attainment of the entries more than anything else. How this will work as the Covid SATs years begin to bite is anyone’s guess.
​
So, what we can probably say is that centres doing OCR A tend to have cohorts with higher prior attainment and that therefore a greater proportion of higher grades can be awarded. Overall, Edexcel centres seem to sit most closely on the national average for prior attainment (by inference), with AQA centres sitting slightly above average and OCR B centres slightly below. There’s not a vast amount in it though (1-8).

This is where things get quite interesting. Although it is impossible to say which boards get the best results, we can make some inferences about which boards have the most and least accessible exams.

To do this we can look at the raw marks required for each grade boundary. Because the grade distribution is a (mostly) statistically tied variable for each board, the marks required give some sense of how easy or hard pupils found the papers. To put it another way: if around 65% of pupils are expected to pass at Grade 4 or higher, then the raw mark boundaries need to be adjusted to ensure this will happen. If pupils find the papers accessible then they are more likely to do well and therefore grade boundaries will need to rise to ensure the correct grade distribution. If pupils find the exams hard / inaccessible, then the grade boundaries will need to come down for the same reason.

Seemingly oddly then, high grade boundaries actually suggest a more accessible exam. Low grade boundaries the opposite.
​
Now working all of this out is actually quite tricky as GCSE History has a phenomenal number of paper combinations and therefore grade boundaries. AQA alone had 156 possible combinations of papers and therefore 156 different sets of grade boundaries. Compare this to most subjects, which have 1 or 2 combinations and you get an idea of the challenge. Boards do not release the numbers of pupils who sat each combination so arriving at an overall grade boundary average is technically impossible. For the purposes of this study I have had to average across all the different options, which is a bit of a fudge, though at least one I had to do for all the boards. It may have been illustrative to look at some of the most popular combinations, but without knowing what these are, I'd rather not speculate.

If you look at the chart you can see that there are some big differences. Using our measure, Edexcel comes out at the most accessible exam across all grade boundaries with pupils at Grade 7 requiring 72.5% of the marks (5) compared to AQA’s 63% (around a 15% difference) (3). At Grade 4 the difference is also pronounced with Edexcel pupils requiring nearly half marks at 48.4% (5), where AQA pupils needed only 34% of the available marks (a 42% difference) (3). If we look right down at Grade 1 we can see that Edexcel pupils were on average picking up 18 marks over their papers (5), whilst pupils in the other boards were scoring as few as 9 marks for the same grade (3, 7). 

We cannot be sure why pupils scored so badly at the lower end, by the fact that marks are so low at Grade 1 boundary (and even Grade 4) suggests that many pupils failed to finish papers, or possibly failed to complete whole papers. For anyone who has worked with pupils who lack confidence, non-finishing and being put off by difficult questions can be a killer in terms of examination success. The difficulties AQA and OCR B pupils faced could be down to any number of things from poorly written papers, poorer preparation, unclear mark schemes, poorer marking teams, or just too much content to cover.

Edexcel are doing well to buck the trend of low grade boundaries, as you can see in the chart comparing 2019 and 2024. Here, the higher the bar at each grade, the more accessible the exam. It is disappointing to see OCR B, who were right at the top in terms of accessibility in 2019, slipping down to third place here.

However, compare all this to 2017, when the percentage of marks required for the old Grade G were upwards 20-23%, and you can see we have a long way to go to make these exams accessible for all (3-8).

Q5: Which units were the most and least accessible?
A5: It’s hard to draw concrete conclusions from this data set, but there are definitely some interesting potential trends across the boards. If you are on the fence about a unit, it might be worth comparing its historic performance too (see Q6 for an example). Give me a shout if you need a hand with this, or chat to your board rep.

This year I have decided to delve a little more into the components of each exam to see if there are any patterns in terms of accessibility. This is monstrously complex to do due to the fact that these grade boundaries are notional, so don't exist in reality, but also because of the sheer number of possible options and combinations, meaning it is not always possible to pick out a single unit performance. Again, AQA made it easiest to see this data. I also do not have good year on year comparisons for all the units.

All of that said, there are a few small patterns which seem to emerge relating to papers and individual units for each board.

I will be using the same metric for assessing accessibility as in my response to Question 4 above i.e. the raw grade boundaries can reveal a little about how accessible pupils found each component (paper). The higher the % of marks needed for a grade, the more accessible we can assume the paper must have been. The color coding represents how far each grade boundary % deviated from the overall average. Green = a higher boundary / more accessible paper; Red = a lower boundary / less accessible paper.
 
AQA Components
There were a few interesting results from the AQA units. It’s worth noting that the actual difference was only a matter of a few marks, so take all these with a pinch of salt (3).

• The most accessible paper overall seems to be Paper 1, with the depth study being the most accessible component of that.
• America 1920-1973 seems to have come out best in terms of accessibility across the board, followed by  the Inter War Years, Conflict and Tension in Asia, and Elizabethan England.
• Pupils clearly struggled a bit more with the thematic units, all of which showed depressed top ends.
• Weaker students seemed to struggle much more with the Conflict in the Gulf unit.
• It looks like nobody really enjoyed the Norman England paper, which saw low boundaries across the board, nor the Restoration England paper, which saw a significant marks collapse above Grade 4, requiring only 65% for a Grade 9 equivalent.

 
Edexcel Components
So this one was really fascinating in terms of how the different papers played out. Again, the difference in grade boundaries was not huge.. just a few marks, so don’t read too much in here (5).

• Both Paper 1 and Paper 3 appear to have been quite accessible to pupils up to Grade 5, but then become less accessible for the top end. Conversely, Paper 2 (with some exceptions) seems to have been more accessible for the top end and much less so for the lower attainers.
• Paper 1 was by far and away the most accessible, with pupils needing up to 17% of marks for just a Grade 1. By contrast that same percentage of marks would have almost secured a pupil a Grade 3 on some of the AQA papers. There were some differences above Grade 5 however, with medicine and migration seemingly being more accessible for higher attainers compared to the crime and warfare papers.
• The American West seems to have been especially well done this year, suggesting the questions were well pitched.
• There were no runaway terrible papers, but the Normans element of Paper 2 seems to have been a common thread for low boundaries at Grade 5 and below, suggesting it was tricky.

 
OCR B Components

Once again, OCR B Component boundaries offer some interesting, but tentative insights. Grade boundaries did vary a little more, sometimes up to 8 marks between units (5). 

• The big takeaway from a paper standpoint here is probably that Paper 2 is the most accessible. Paper 1 is actually fairly well balanced and Paper 3 lags a little behind in accessibility terms, though not by much.
• For those worrying about the History Around Us unit, this seems to have been the most accessible paper of the whole set, with accessibility nearly on par with Edexcel’s average. Clearly this was a paper pupils felt well prepared for, with only the Grade 1 boundary being a little low (though higher than the other papers).
• The Crime and Migrants units both seems to have fared well, whilst the British Depth studies seem to have had similarly positive accessibility across the board.
• Of the Paper 1 units, it was Health and the People which seems to have caused the most difficulty, with lower grade boundaries across the board. The exception to this was Health & Elizabethans, where the latter unit seems to have pulled the boundaries up a little, or the two content areas worked well together.
• Paper 3 seems to have been more mixed with no obvious patterns emerging other than a general difficulty being experiences at Grades 5-7 in most of the paper options. The exception to this was in the Making of America, where grade boundaries suggest pupils found the paper OK and the higher attainers did a little better than the board average. The fly in this ointment is America and Aztecs, though I am not sure how many centres do this specific combination. 

Q6: Are there any historic trends with unit accessibility?
A6: There’s not a lot of data to go on and what there is does require a degree of speculation. Most units seem to have varied in different ways over time, as we might expect. However a few papers do seem to sit either on the more or less accessible side of the spectrum more consistently. It’s worth a deeper exploration of these papers, their questions and other related issues.
 
I don’t have the capacity to examine the historic data for all the units here, but I did want to provide a few examples of how this can be done so HoDs can maybe do the same with their own options. I thought it would be interesting to look at some of the more extreme units to see if they performed differently over time. In each case, I will be comparing the unit grade boundaries to the average grade boundaries for that year. If the grade boundary is above the average, we can assume the paper was more accessible, if it was below, then it was less accessible.
 
As AQA provide all their data in Excel format, I am using their units for this. It saves a LOT of typing! It’s worth noting though that the reporting of grade boundaries at unit level was different prior to 2020 and I have ignored the two main Covid years of 2020 and 2021. I would be interested to know if these observations about accessibility match with people’s experiences of student reporting of perceived difficulty (rather than results which are modified to reflect the difficulty).
 
AQA Restoration England
This was a unit which came out as a real problem in 2024, with all grade boundaries sitting well below the average. This does not seem to have been the case historically. Last year the paper was about in line with average for the board, and in 2022 it was slightly more accessible for students at the lower grade boundaries. It is worth noting 2022 was a reduced exam year however.
 
AQA America 1920-73
This was the unit which appears to have been statistically the most accessible in 2024. Going back we can see that this was has been true, though to slightly different degrees going back to 2021. A notable result is that the grade boundary for a 4 in 2023 was 11 percentage points higher in this unit vs. the average grade boundary (43% vs 33%).

AQA Elizabethan England
This was another unit which seemed to be quite accessible for pupils in 2024. It’s history is much more mixed though. It looks like pupils struggled a bit more with last year’s paper, which saw lower grade boundaries across almost the full grade spectrum. 2021 was more similar to 2024.
 
AQA Norman England, c1066–c1100
I suspect this is quite a popular option but one which was a bit of a struggle for pupils in 2024. Looking back we can see that the 2023 paper also seemed to be a bit more challenging at grades 4 and below, and a little more accessible for those at Grades 7 and above. Meanwhile in 2022 the paper sat more on the average. Maybe no real pattern with this one.
 
America, 1840–1895: Expansion and consolidation
I also wanted to look at the American West unit, given my own interest. This one seems to have the most erratic pattern – which maybe also reflects the feedback I often get. This year the paper was about average for most grades but possibly a little more accessible around the Grade 4-5 mark. In 2023 however, those looking at grades 5+ seemed to struggle more. In 2021 it was the lower grades which proved more accessible, with the top being around average.
 
AQA Inter-War Years 1918-39
Another one I suspect is a popular option for people. I was mainly interested here to see how it has fared over time. Not lots to say here really. Maybe a slightly more accessible Grade 4-5 I 2024 but the other years are not far from average.
 
AQA Medicine
The thematic studies seem to have fared least well in terms of accessibility in 2024 so I was interested to see if these have been different over time too. The 2024 paper seems to have been trickier for those looking for Grades 7 & 8 especially. However the 2023 paper shows a more accessible paper, especially for those at Grades 3-5. Meanwhile the 2022 version was much less accessible for all grades 4+.

Q7: What made papers harder or easier?
A7: I’m afraid this is a bit of a trick question. I would be really interested to do some analysis of the different papers in light of the statistics we have on their grade boundaries. The differences might be down to question wording, content choices, available scope for answering, or a range of other things. If anyone is interested in looking at some historic papers for a unit together, I would love to hear from you.

Concluding thoughts
Thanks so much for reading this far. I hope this tentative analysis is of some use to people as they start heading back to work and thinking about the GCSE results. As ever, if you have any questions, or just want to chat exams, please drop give me a shout on Bluesky Alex Ford (@apf102.bsky.social) — Bluesky

For more of my blogs on exams why not try:

Dealing with the disease: The urgent need for exam reform (andallthat.co.uk)
Examinations: The Gilded Age (andallthat.co.uk)

References
All accessed on 24-26 August 2024.

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1. JCQ Results Statistics 2024: https://www.jcq.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/GCSE-Full-Course-Results-Summer-2024-1.xlsx
2. JCQ Trends Data 2024: GCSE-Project-and-Entry-Level-Trends-2024.pdf (jcq.org.uk)
3. AQA Grade Boundary Data 2024: AQA | Exams admin | Results days | Grade boundaries
4. AQA Results Statistics 2024: AQA | Exams admin | Results days | Results statistics
5. Pearson Edexcel Grade Boundaries 2024: Grade Boundaries - June 2024 - GCSE (9-1) (pearson.com)
6. Pearson Edexcel Results Statistics 2024: Grade Statistics-June 2024 (Provisional) International GCSE (9-1) Specifications (UK Only) (pearson.com)
7. OCR Grade Boundaries 2024: Grade boundaries (ocr.org.uk)
8. OCR Results Statistics 2024: Results statistics (ocr.org.uk)

As one former Secretary of State for Education quits the cabinet over claims of unethical and immoral behaviour, it seems like a good time to offer up some thoughts to his successor’s, successor’s, successor’s, successor’s, successor…Gillian Keegan (* may not be accurate by the time I post this later in the week) on the direction educational reform may need to go.

Keegan has not done much to outline her position on education reform yet, however she has stated that she intends raise ‘quality’ across the system by focusing the needs of those in comprehensive schools. At the very least, this hints at a social justice agenda involving all schools – a distinctive break from the grammar school focus of many of her predecessors. Indeed, she seems to be taking a similar tack to former (and now current) Schools Minister Nick Gibb, who described comprehensive schools as ‘engines of social mobility’.

But how does Keegan intend to improve school standards to enable this social mobility agenda? The return of Nick Gibb I think gives the strongest indication of Keegan’s likely approach, not least because she described Gibb as having done a ‘brilliant job’ since 2010. If this is true, then it is likely to mean a continuation of centrally imposed, curriculum-focused reforms. In this blog I hope to highlight the limits of continuing in this manner and, with reference to the history curriculum, and using the work of the Schools History Project as an example, suggest some alternative means to enact meaningful change in the education system.

(If you’d like to know more about the work of the Schools History Project, please do sign up here to receive updates on upcoming projects.)

Improving ‘quality’ AND doing justice?

As noted above, reforms brought in under Nick Gibb’s tenure as Schools Minister had a very clear focus on enabling and promoting ‘social mobility’ through comprehensive education. Or to put it another way, providing young people from disadvantaged backgrounds with the means to escape their circumstances. There are of course many good arguments to support this goal in education. Proponents argue that those who are empowered to ‘escape’ their circumstances then have the opportunity to effect change from their new position. What is often less discussed is that it for every person who moves up the ladder of social mobility, another must come down. Even less is said of the very real divides and disconnects which can open up between those who are ‘socially mobile’ and the large proportion who are ‘left behind’.

In their recent chapter in Chapman’s ‘Knowing History in Schools’, Smith and Jackson outline what the ‘social mobility’ approach entails for history education in particular.

For Smith and Jackson, having a focus on ‘social mobility’ rests on the fundamental assumption that current socio-economic structures will remain largely unchanged.  Therefore enabling ‘social mobility’ involves equipping young people with the knowledge and ‘cultural capital’ to compete in continual battle to move upwards, rather than downwards.

In terms of the history curriculum this has been framed as providing young people with a body of powerful knowledge comprised of agreed-upon disciplinary knowledge and a body of substantive historical knowledge (framed by the DfE as ‘cultural capital’). This knowledge in turn is seen as being regulated by the academic discipline of history as the source of ‘authority’. In this conception of justice, it makes sense to deliver that knowledge through centralised systems – doing do maximises the chances that all pupils will get access to that knowledge.

Since 2010, at the same time as allegedly decentralising school control via the Academies programme, there have been a raft of centrally directed measures, most of which have attempted to exert greater control over the history curriculum content taught in schools. These measures have included: the creation of a new ‘Island Story’ National Curriculum; endorsing a new range of ‘knowledge-rich’ textbooks; spending £7.7 million on commissioning ‘knowledge-rich’ schools to create ‘oven ready’ curriculum resources; encouraging the development of a subject-focused Ofsted framework; convening an expert group of historians, consultants, academy chiefs, and the odd teacher to draft a model history curriculum; and an attempt to create a complete set of online curriculum resources via the ex-DfE-funded Oak National Academy.

So, what lessons should the new Secretary of State take from all this? Where have all these centrally directed attempts to transform history teaching left us? The reality is that for too many children, history is still seen as too complex and too irrelevant to study beyond the age of 14. Nearly 40 years after the Rampton Report, children with heritage other than white, English report the curriculum still does little to represent them. Indeed, some have walked out in protest at the history they have been taught. For those who continue with their history education the examinations are so content heavy and dense that a significant number of children barely score a dozen marks over three exam papers after two years of study. Those with SEND seldom continue history beyond the age of 16. The potential for history education to contribute to social justice real, but it is simply not being realised. If the children’s experiences of history in the classroom are improving at all, it is despite—rather than because of—these centrally imposed changes. The real question is why?

Lucy
First, a story. Seven years ago, my wife left her career as a Primary teacher and began training to be a priest in the Church of England. One of her placement churches as a trainee was on an extremely economically deprived estate on the edge of Bradford. She spent four years there with her mentor, Lucy (not her real name).

When we first started attending the church, not long after Lucy’s own arrival, the congregation felt a little lost. They were all part of the local community and wanted their church to grow and thrive, to bring something of worth. But the socio-economic deprivation of the area felt like an insurmountable barrier to access. Naturally they looked to Lucy for leadership.

Last Sunday, three years after we last went to the church, we went back to mark Lucy’s retirement. The change we saw was, if you’ll pardon the phrase, miraculous. We saw a growing congregation. We saw a group of people confident in their faith, and confident to talk about their faith openly with each other, and willing to throw the doors open wide and invite others along too. We saw a group of people tackling the needs of their own community through: a messy church for children; toddler groups; coffee mornings for the lonely and those new to the community; a food bank; a clothing bank; a bedding collection and delivery service; and organising regular meetings with local councillors to give the estate a voice. No-one was kidding themselves that the problems their community faced had gone, but now they felt able to begin to tackle them. More than this, those once quiet congregation members who seven years ago would have sat in their seats, drunk a coffee and gone home, were leading the service, talking about and celebrating their good news, sharing their troubles and their prayers. They had become a confident, outward looking beacon of hope and transformation.

What did Lucy do that enabled the congregation she led to develop the confidence and ability to begin to transform their community? You might think that the answer lies in charismatic leadership, sharing inspirational visions, providing the solutions. But in fact, the opposite is true. Lucy’s success was not in leading the charge, not in directing from the centre, but in ensuring every member of the congregation felt empowered to meet the needs they saw in their own community. It was a form of leadership which began in the community, then guiding and supporting members of that same community to meet those needs, and begin a process of transformation.

Are we doing justice?
As we have seen above, churches, just like schools, can be major drivers of social justice. Yet Lucy’s is a very different vision of social justice than the one which has dominated thinking in education for the past twelve years (and longer). I think there is much to learn from this approach.

Smith and Jackson provide a second outline model for social justice – one whose goal, much like Lucy’s, is not ‘social mobility’ but ‘social change’.

In this model, the ultimate aim of education is not solely in providing young people with the means to escape their circumstances, but to enable them to be part of transforming them, and thereby wider society. Again, this is similar to the way in which Lucy saw her role as enabling her congregation to serve, nurture, and heal their own community. And just like in Lucy’s example, leadership of this kind of change does not and cannot come from the top down. Transformation begins by seeing all communities as having value and recognising that all communities also need to grow and change in different ways. This kind of knowledge is vital because it is impossible to enact meaningful change without knowing a community deeply.

In terms of the history curriculum then, pursuing the goal of ‘social change’ means being aware of the knowledge and experiences brought to the classroom by young people from within their communities. It means acknowledging that what counts as powerful substantive knowledge is only so through negotiation. This fundamentally questions the idea that the discipline of history should act as the sole source of ‘authority’, with teachers acting as a bridge between two worlds. The ‘social change’ model views the discipline of history as just one source of authority, balanced by broader understandings of history and memory, the voices of the community, the voices of pupils, and the educational knowledge of teachers themselves. Here teachers are negotiators between many worlds: experts rather than conduits.

A model for transformational change
So, what would it look like to enact transformational change from a community level in history education? Here I want to talk about how the work of the Schools History Project provides one powerful example of this approach.

Since 1972 the Schools History Project has been encouraging teachers to consider how school history can meet the needs of young people in their own communities. From the outset it was attempting to tackle those feelings of disconnection and dissatisfaction noted earlier in this blog. The Project recognised that children needed to find a connection to history in order for it to have any transformative power at all. The project’s aims were codified in a set of Principles which were agreed upon centrally but broad enough to shape action locally. If Gillian Keegan wants to harness the power of education (and history education in particular) to be an agent for social justice, then I think is it important to understand how these principles have acted as a means of professional empowerment and community transformation.

SHP Principles have been a spark to action for thousands of history teachers. They have encouraged history teachers to focus on the local historical environment, to connect history to the lives and experiences of young people, to develop children's love of history, and to empower young people to know their world from the intensely local, to the national and international. The Principles have shaped GCSE examinations, teacher education courses (both nationally and internationally), and have underpinned textbooks and resources which have had enormous reach. The Principles have been an inspiration for teaching conferences, bringing people together from vastly different school communities to discuss what tranformative history teaching could look like in their contexts. They have empowered history teachers become authorities on the teaching of their subject, broading and deepening their impact on social change.

(I really wanted to write about all the examples I have come across of the imapct of SHP thinking on pupils and commnities, but space just won't allow. Please do look at some of the amazing workshops linked above if you have time for a flavour, and I sincerely hope SHP colleagues will share their own examples too.)

Fifty years on, the Schools History Project (SHP) is still guided by a set of Principles which seek to advance the cause of social justice by empowering teachers to meet the needs of the young people in the communities they serve.

School history should be meaningful to young people and help them understand the world they live in

• SHP has always sought to promote history which seeks to explain the forces which shape the present day and the unique circumstances of specific communities. It recognises that what counts as history starts at home as much as in the halls of academia.

School history should include ‘history around us’

• For many children a fascination with history begins when they first appreciate the historical nature of the environment around them. This Principle celebrates what is local but also helps young people recognise that history is all around them wherever they go and wherever they have come from – it is part of the fabric of our identity as well as our heritage.

School history should involve enquiry

• SHP has always maintained that young people should not just know about history but also know how historical claims are made. More than this however, SHP teachers have sought to help young people develop their own views and ideas about historical issues and even to engage critically with what “doing history” actually means. In recent years especially this has meant challenging notions of who counts as an historian – opening up worlds of oral history, community history and Indigenous ways of knowing.

School history should reflect the diversity of modern Britain

• In the last ten years there has been a noticeable narrowing of the history curriculum. SHP recognises that meeting community needs means reflecting the true breadth of the histories which make up modern Britain. It also challenges teachers to engage with the decolonisation of the curriculum to remove damaging framings which have harmed communities and wider society for far too long.

School history should build knowledge over different time periods

• Understanding our world means being able to navigate the broad-brush strokes of a thousand-year story of migration, and also being able to engage in the messy detail of the historical records surrounding the Bristol Bus Boycott, or any number of other events with meaning to a specific community.

School history should be enjoyable, accessible and life enhancing for all

• This Principle encourages teachers to see enjoyment of history as a worthwhile end in its own right. It asks teachers to consider how challenge can be kept high whilst enabling every child to take part – a challenge which demands a focus on pedagogies as well as content. This Principle says that it is not acceptable to create history which is only for the higher attainers, or those without additioanl needs, or those who happen to be interested in the kinds of history which are classed as 'cultural capital'. It asks every teacher to consider what is life enhancing for pupils in their own context and how this might lead to greater justice for all. It is only by making this an explicit aim that we increase the likelihood that young people value the subject and benefit from is transformational potential.
  

A new challenge
The role of a Secretary of State for Education is a complex one. There are many elements to promoting social justice. History education is just one part of the picture. However, each and every school subject plays a role. Our history curricula can either help us move towards justice for our communities, or they can stand in the way.

The Schools History Project approach and its Principles do not provide easy answers or simple solutions. In fact, SHP Principles pose a series of challenges for teachers in relation to the needs of the young people in the communities they serve. But what is wonderful about them is that they are both a challenge and an invitation. Anyone can become part of the School History Project family, just by committing to put the Principles into action. Those who do will find themselves part of a movement which is committed to empowering history teachers to enact real social transformation through their work. The DfE can continue to try to ignore or side-line such approaches by continually imposing new top-down measures, or it can choose to engage with the mission of ‘social change’ and allow movements like SHP (and many others) to thrive. Either way SHP will continue to welcome and support all teachers who want to continue that transformative work. Together #WeAreSHP.



 
Note
The Schools History Project is currently working on a project to enable schools to share their own principled curriculum models as an alternative to the Model History Curriculum. There are also a range of exciting projects on the horizon, as well as a range of other work listed below.

If you’d like to know more about the work of the Schools History Project, please do sign up here to receive updates on upcoming projects.
 
Current work & projects:

• Annual history teaching summer conference at Leeds Trinity University
• Annual early career history teaching online conference
• OCR History B GCSE Specification
• Key Stage 3 textbooks based on SHP Principles
• GCSE textbooks based on SHP Principles
• A Level textbooks based on SHP Principles

A new year means hundreds of PGCE history trainees and history Early Career Teachers setting out on professional learning journeys. It is always an exciting time.

However, our current (& future) ITE system, rooted in the ECF and CCF means many get very limited subject specific input. See my thoughts on this issue HERE.

This year I’m using a Schools History Project (SHP) lens to explore the core things I wish every new history teacher knew at the beginning of their teaching career to enable them to thrive in the long term. In my view there has never been a more important time to keep principles at the heart of history teaching. You can find out more about the SHP Principles HERE or see the summary below. 

This has primarily been written from my experiences as a secondary teacher and teacher trainer, however much will also apply in primary too. Indeed, the new National Curriculum puts many of the same demands on teachers of history from Key Stages 1 to 5.

I will be adding new blogs each week initially. This page will be a landing page to see all of them in one place. I hope they are useful to anyone setting out on this journey, or indeed anyone responsible for training or mentoring a new history teacher. 

As ever please do leave comments or questions below, or get in touch with me on Twitter @apf102.

Things I wish every history teacher knew...

• 12 September: Why do we need to think about how we learn as teaching professionals?
• 19 September:  Why do we teach history at all?
• 26 September: How do we help young people understand how history works?
• 3 October: What does 'developing knowledge' look like in history?

Recognizing Indigenous Presence in GCSE American West courses
Thread by @apf102 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

Why diversifying and decolonizing history is so important
​Thread by @apf102 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

Why the heritage industry needs to face the challenge to decolonize
Thread by @apf102 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

Why we can't rely on the historical method for self correction
Thread by @apf102 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

Challenges to Powerful Knowledge
​Thread by @apf102 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App


Pedagogy and Learning

Tensions and contradictions in Cognitive Load Theory
Thread by @apf102: "Several interesting tensions between Sweller et al. (2006 -Left) and Sweller et al. (2019 -Rigth) in relation to Cognitive Load Theory. 1) T […]" (threadreaderapp.com)

Empathy in history lessons
https://twitter.com/apf102/status/1447490106877677570


GCSE and A Level

Fitting a GCSE into two years
Thread by @apf102: "Timing and 2 year GCSE is def a challenge. If you are struggling in history it may be: an issue of clear spec writing; knowing when to be mo […]" #historyteacher (threadreaderapp.com)

The Exam grading disaster of 2020
twitter.com/apf102/status/1247089907694174209
​

Teacher Training 
Why we need to listen to voices in ITE about ITE reform
​Thread by @apf102 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

The limitations of the ECF and CCF
Thread by @apf102 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

ITE Market Review Critique Part 1
Thread by @apf102 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

ITE Market Review Critique Part 2
​Thread by @apf102 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

People's experiences of ITE
twitter.com/apf102/status/1413438137230143488​


General

Managing a school trip disaster
Thread by @apf102 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

On the 1776 Report
https://twitter.com/apf102/status/1351669689496334338

Context
March 2022 saw the publication of the government’s “Inclusive Britain Strategy”. This was a response to the controversial Sewell Report of March 2021. The report’s denial of systemic racism garnered most headlines, but it also contained 24 recommendations to solve problems the report seems to claim do not exist.
 
One of the recommendations in the Sewell Report was to improve the curriculum taught in schools, drawing primarily on work by the US scholar, E.D. Hirsch and the British sociologist, Michael Young. Interestingly, the Sewell Report suggests that the purpose of the curriculum should be to create a “sense of belonging” by showing the contributions of the “forefathers and mothers” of pupils of different ethic background to “this country”. As the report notes, “This is not about teaching the personal history of each individual but rather linking the story of different ethnic groups to a unifying sense of Britishness.” The report goes on to conclude that a “well sequenced, knowledge-rich curriculum” is the answer to a more inclusive Britain, and invites the government to advise schools on how to plan a “politically neutral” curriculum.
 
The recommendation on curriculum was picked up in the 2022, Inclusive Britain Strategy.  Action 57 states that: “To help pupils understand the intertwined nature of British and global history, and their
own place within it, the DfE will work with history curriculum experts, historians and school leaders to develop a Model History curriculum by 2024 that will stand as an exemplar for a knowledge-rich, coherent approach to the teaching of history.”
 
Suggesting the need to make curriculum more diverse and inclusive is not new. Similar (and better grounded) recommendations can be found in the Rampton (1981) and Swann (1985) Reports, as well as suggestions for changes to the National Curriculum framework in the MacPherson Report (1999), for instance.  What is new here however is the suggestion of creating a model curriculum to show how schools might create more inclusive history in their classrooms.
 
The DfE have been trailing the idea of a model curriculum for history for a while now. March 2021 saw the publication of a controversial “model curriculum” for Music. Similarly, Nick Gibb was suggesting the need for a model history curriculum to address issues of diversity and inclusion in October 2021. It is interesting that Gibb and Sewell both seem to suggest that the reason schools are not teaching more diverse and inclusive histories is due to the failure of teachers to plan ambitious curricula. Neither seem to acknowledge the role played by Michael Gove’s curriculum reforms of 2013-4 which actively shifted the National Curriculum to be a much narrower, traditional, nationalistic narrative, framed as cultural capital (or more erroneously, powerful knowledge). It is notable that, over the last few years, many schools have shifted to try to teach this perceived historical canon, something I have written about previously. I don’t really blame schools for this, the whole narrative from government and Ofsted has been about the provision of cultural capital. And the DfE themselves have actively promoted textbooks which promote a similarly narrow curriculum view.
 
What is the model curriculum?
Whatever the context we are now in a position where we know the DfE are officially beginning work on a model curriculum for history. Few details have been released so far on what this will involve, or indeed who will be involved. Below is a summary of what we know so far.

• The model curriculum will be created for all but will not be mandatory in schools.
• The curriculum will aim to create a sense of belonging for pupils of different ethnic backgrounds as part of the UK.
• The model curriculum will take a knowledge-rich approach to enable “better curriculum design and sequencing”
• There will be a focus on Britain’s place in the world and on the national stories of the four nations of the UK.
• The DfE will consult “curriculum experts, historians and school leaders” to produce the curriculum for 2024. The process by which this group was/is being selected is not made clear.
• It appears this group is already being consulted and one of those confirmed in the group is Christine Counsell
• The DfE will signpost relevant resources to support the delivery of the model curriculum.

Surveys
On the back of the announcement and given the lack of consultation the DfE seem to have done with history teachers, I thought I would do my own exploration of teachers’ responses to the proposals outlined above. The remainder of this blog is an analysis of the results gleaned from the 261 anonymous responses I received from educators connected to history across the Primary, Secondary and Tertiary sectors. I am absolutely not claiming these results to be statistically representative, however I think they provide a good litmus on general opinion from a wide range of schools. The responses were sought via Twitter and on GCSE History exam board groups.

Risks and Benefits
The first area I wanted to explore was in terms of risks and benefits. I presented a list of potential benefits of having ONE model curriculum for history and asked respondents to say whether they felt the benefits described outweighed the potential risks respondents perceived. The results were interesting, with Primary (n.14) teachers seeing significantly more potential benefits than their Secondary (n.218) counterparts. For Secondary teachers the benefits are seen as less significant than the risks in all but one area (CPD). Primary teachers were more positvie about potential benefits, though still had concerns about the DfE's involvement with the creation of the curriculum. This is certainly worth bearing in mind. My wife was a Primary teacher for 12 years and the challenge of managing and resourcing multiple subjects was huge. I can therefore see why a model curriculum might be appealing here. When asked to comment on any other benefits, most people commented on concerns instead. Full results are given below:

Concerns
In the second set of questions, I presented a number of statements in relation to the proposed model curriculum and asked respondents to comment on how concerned they were about these things. What is notable is that levels of concern across almost all areas were much higher than the perceived drawbacks from the last set of questions. There were no questions where the majority of respondents did not have concerns. In most instances, well over 75% of respondents expressed concern and over 50% expressed significant concerns. Again, Secondary colleagues were more likely to express concerns than Primary colleagues, but the picture is still quite striking.

In the second part of the section, I asked people to comment in more detail on their concerns. I then spent some time coding each of these responses. I have included a word cloud below to show the summary.

There are clearly a lot of concerns being raised here by teachers on the ground, especially in relation to the potential restrictiveness of having a single model curriculum. There are also deep concerns about deprofessionalisation. These concerns are not unfounded. There has been a big focus in recent years on teachers delivering content which has been planned and sequnced by others.

Another set of concerns revolves around the local contexts of schools and the need for curriculum to be flexible and adaptive to local needs. The proposal is for a voluntary curriculum model, but there were many expressions that this might not remain the case, or central pressures would mean the curriculum became expected. Many teachers expressed the concern that the content would be too rigid and prevent deviation. Meanwhile the complextiy, amount and pitch of the content was a signifciant worry among Primary teachers. 

There was significant unease (on both sides of the political spectrum) about the model curriculum being  politically motivated and therefore one which would constantly change with each successive government. There were lots of uses of the term indoctrination, with some citing "woke" academics as the issue and others "nationalists".

Finally, the comments reveal some themes about levels of trust and transparency which I think the DfE (and Ofsted) need to acknowledge and address urgently. Many people expressed concerns over who would be consulted on the model curriculum, whilst others were thought the model might become mandated either via the DfE or through Ofsted expectations.

All of these concerns are significant. They demonstrate, I think, that teachers are not opposed in principle to curriculum models being shared, but they are extremely worried about the way in which this may be enacted, and for a range of very valid reasons.

 Yesterday we said our final goodbyes to Fred. His death was not unexpected. He was well into his eighties and had been in ill health for some time. Yet despite this, it was still a shock. He always had a wonderful spark about him and was so full of life. He thrived in company and had a wonderfully mischievous twinkle in his eye right to the end. When she was able to visit (before covid) my daughter loved to explore the garden with him, or play with his foot massager, or travel up and down the narrow staircase on his recently installed Stannah. Fred loved her company in turn. He would take her to pick ripe tomatoes or find secret passages between the rows of sweetcorn. When he was less mobile, he would stand at the foot of the stairs with the stair lift controls and my daughter would giggle and laugh as he made the lift take her slowly but surely to the top. He was like another granddad. Yesterday my daughter sent him a final video message and I couldn’t help but feel the loss.

I have written about Fred previously, but in this blog I wanted to revisit the story of our first meeting and a conversation we ended up having about teachers and teaching. I want and tell it again now in light of the man, and the teacher, I came to know. I suppose it’s my way of saying goodbye, but also, I hope a way to share the wisdom of someone who I wish everybody could have met.
 
Lunch with Fred
 
I first met Fred in the summer of 2016. My wife has been visiting him for some time as he was a member of the local church and had recently lost his own wife, Sue. Just like Fred, Sue had been a teacher. She had worked with women in immigrant families in Bradford to help them learn English. Some of these women still came to visit Fred right until the end. In the summer Fred was often to be found sat on a lawn with a cup of tea and company whilst small children ducked in and out of runner beans or picked apples or pears in the garden.
 
One Sunday, Fred invited my wife and I along to lunch at a local pub. Before she became a vicar, my wife had been a primary school teacher, and I was in my first year of running a PGCE course. It was almost inevitable that the conversation would turn eventually to teaching.
 
You may not believe this, but I am actually not a huge fan of discussing education outside of my professional life. All too often I find myself in conversations with people who either think the youth of today are going to Hell in a handcart, or that teachers are too soft. Or conversely, I end up listening to people telling me that knowledge doesn’t matter and that we just need to teach children to be creative. Either way I am very bad at the polite but firm disagreement which these encounters require.
 
Fred had been a teacher in the 1960s and 1970s. I reasoned he had almost certainly been trained in the progressive pedagogies of this period (he once met Piaget it transpired) and was already anticipating where the conversation might go. Meanwhile in 2016, I was drunk on Michael Young, ‘powerful knowledge’; the liberations of ‘rigour’; and busy decrying the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ found in many schools obsessed with GCSE grades or ‘21st century skills’. I suspected that our dinner conversation would be one to endure rather than enjoy. As with so many other times in my life when I have been certain of my own rectitude, I was wrong.
 
Reading none of the books

What makes a great teacher?
 
I often think about that story when I am working with new teachers. I come back to it because our educational landscape is often painted in black and white. Do this. Don’t do that. The truth is that education is never black and white, and the power of great teaching lives mainly in the messy middle ground.

Early in the PGCE year I do an exercise with trainees where we consider what makes a great teacher. We revisit these ideas throughout the year and amend and trainees change them as they learn and practise their own teaching in the classroom. There are no hard rules for what makes for transformative teaching but whenever I think of a great teacher, I am often thinking of Fred.
 
Frist, great teachers are curious. If you had been to Fred’s house, nestled away in a quiet cul-de-sac in Idle, just off the Leeds Road, you would have found a life of curiosity. His hallway overflowed with fishing paraphernalia. His living room was filled with homemade toys, which my daughter used to delight in playing with. Next to his chair you would have found shelves of books and homemade contraptions to do this and that. If you had been lucky enough to be invited up the rickety ladder into his attic, you would have found a fully functioning dark room: bottles, trays and developing tanks all still meticulously organised into a careful workflow. When searching for some food recently, one of his children found a packet of old cinefilm in the bottom of the freezer, just awaiting its opportunity to be loaded up and used. Fred could talk on almost any subject. In his time, he worked as a craftsman, joiner, coffin maker, press photographer, middle school teacher, and probably much more. Being curious is not something we often talk about in relation to teacher training but the best teachers I know show this same curiosity in all the work they do. They are curious about their pupils’ experiences. They are curious about what works. They are curious about why some students struggle with this aspect or that. They want to know what is happening and how they can help. And they want to help young people be curious too. Curious about learning. Curious about the world around them. Curiosity is the first step to transformation.
 
Second, great teachers are methodical; they put in the hard yards and build knowledge and understanding patiently over time. The real joy of Fred’s home was his garden. He told us once that his mother helped him fall in love with gardening at the age of five and this love was nurtured and grew throughout his life.  Fred’s modest house was a gateway to the most extraordinary garden. Over the years he purchased little parcels of land from neighbours so that his originally humble back yard eventually stretched in a long, snaking line right across the backs of all the houses on Leeds Road. Patiently, and over many years, he built greenhouses and sheds, weeded and hoed, planted and tended his crops. His garden was a testament to eighty years of gardening knowledge and understanding: a labyrinthine maze of potatoes and carrots, towering sweetcorn, gnarled apple and pear trees, raspberry canes, ripe tomatoes, and juicy strawberries. A garden like this, much like an education, is the work of a lifetime. Whenever I have visited him, he has always encouraged me not to give up on my own fumbling attempts at horticulture. He has never accepted my excuse that I have “black thumbs” and I always received some new advice on when to plant my potatoes, or how to stop my carrots from being stunted.

Just like gardening, so much in teaching is not about the flashy breakthrough but about the patient work we do everyday. Day in day out, great teachers, just like Fred, keep building paths for young people towards meaningful and life enhancing ends. It would have been all too easy for Fred to just take the books away from these boys and never bring them back, but his commitment to the joys and power of reading meant that he kept nudging them towards that goal throughout the year. Great teachers never give up.
 
Finally, the best teachers, just like Fred, understand that all teaching is, at its heart, relational. Unlike many of us who become more irascible and misanthropic the older we get, Fred approached life with a great openness. He loved talking to people. He loved working with children. He was interested in everyone and everything and this meant that, even in his twilight years, he was still meeting new people and forging new friendships. Everything we do as teachers rests on how we form trusting relationships in our classes; how we show patience and understanding; how we help young people to feel successful and like they belong. Fred has this quality in spades. If we hold relationships as foundational to children learning then we will truly have a chance to transform the lives of young people; to open new doors for them in their lives; to help them feel heard and valued. We may never see the results of this work, but it will happen all the same.
 
But more than all of this, if we hold the three principles above as important in our professional lives, we also become open to shaping and enhancing our wider lives in the process. Fred lived a life which constantly brought him joy through curiosity, which gave him satisfaction through determination, and built relationships which meant that in his final hours he was not alone, but surrounded by the love of his family and many friends.

Despite the obvious issues, processes were put in place to provide students with grades. Centres were asked to undertake a process of providing a likely grade for each of their students in each subject had they sat the exams (a centre assessed grade or CAG). They were also asked to rank their students against each other in each subject area.

Once grades were submitted, Ofqual, in line with the DfE’s request, set about standardising the imagined examinations. A controversial algorithm was developed which redistributed the CAGs received by students according to the historic performance profile of the school. You can read much more on this process in the blog by FFT Education DataLab.
​
The result of all this was that when students received their grades on 13th August, many were shocked by what they found. Despite the many reassurances of fairness from the DfE and Ofqual, only 58.7% of centre assessed grades were retained. A tiny handful of grades (2.2%) were upgraded by one, but over 35% of grades were reduced by one and a further 3.5% by two or more. Naturally, this caused outrage.

Given Ofqual’s remit to maintain grade distributions and prevent inflation, it was inevitable that fairness would have to go out of the window. When teachers provided centre assessed grades, they were asked to submit grades which “reflect a fair, reasonable and carefully considered judgement of the most likely grade a student would have achieved if they had sat their exams this summer and completed any non-exam assessment.” Given this remit, many teachers explored evidence and agonised over the most appropriate grades to provide. Of course, in a real exam situation, some students do not perform to their “ability” for a whole range of reasons. But, no teacher in their right mind would have wanted to predict which of their B grade students might have choked in the exam, or chosen the wrong question, not slept the night before, or run out of time. That would have been unfair and unprofessional (despite claims by Ofqual, the DfE and the Telegraph that teachers were to blame for the whole fiasco).

The result of teachers’ deliberations over grading was that Ofqual were provided with exactly what the regulator asked for: a fair assessment of the abilities of students based on teacher evidence and judgement. Of course, the grade distribution was much more positive that the distribution would have been had exams been sat. This is because during a normal exam season the grade boundaries are set to maintain distributions in line with previous years. In other words, an A Grade does not exist until all the exams have been marked. By inverting that process Ofqual created a huge issue. Given their instruction from the DfE was to keep the grading as close as possible to previous years to prevent grade inflation, major changes to CAGs were required. Arguably it might have been more transparent if Ofqual had provided schools with their allocated grades beforehand i.e. “based on historic data you can award 6 A grades; 26 B grades” etc.
​
The issue of being fair to students and keeping grade inflation in line with historic figures was always going to cause problems. It is of course perfectly true that the same proportions of grades were given out as in previous years (indeed there was a small increase in awards at the top end). In a normal year however, the differentiation between students getting an A or a B grade in a subject would have been determined by the actual performance of that student in their exams, not by a system of statistical manipulation based on a school’s historic performance. As one commentator put it, students were judged by the ghosts of students past. The process in effect became a lottery based on historic data and teacher ranking (itself a problematic process, especially when teachers had ranked with little knowledge of how exactly this was to be used).

Recognising the disease
The outrage over results this year is perfectly understandable. However, many commentators are prone to assume that it is somehow unique. But the crisis did not appear from the ether in March 2020, rather it was a symptomatic outpouring of a much more pernicious disease. The reality is that our exams system has been eating itself away with its own contradictions and injustices while Ofqual, the DfE, and many others carry on as if nothing is wrong. We cannot ignore it any longer. Unless we admit there is a problem there will be no cure.  

This year’s results have grabbed the headlines because students were affected across the board and through no evident fault of their own. Yet equally outrageous miscarriages of fairness have been occurring in many subjects at GCSE and A-Level for years.

I could list many example here of the ways in which specifications are poorly set and defined; how teaching time limits are poorly monitored at GCSE; how exams have driven content in some schools for far too long; how the norm referencing approach ignores what students can do in favour of how they rank against others in their national cohort; or how the exam support system has encouraged teachers to game results and push their pupils up in those rankings. In this blog though I want to focus on the sickness at the heart of the marking and grading of exams.
​
In 2018 Ofqual published research exploring the reliability of marking in reformed GCSE and A-Level examinations. They explored how far markers were in line with the “definitive marks” awarded by the principal examiner, as well as how far markers were in line with the “definitive grade” awarded by the principal. What they found in some subjects was just as shocking as the awarding crisis we have just experienced. 

​Whilst subjects like maths were found to have a 94% rate of agreement between markers and principles on the final grade, in many subjects the rate of agreement was below 70%. In History, the probability of a marker giving the same grade as the principal examiner across GCSE and A-Level exams was just 55%. Or in other words, there was a 45% chance that a student would receive an incorrect A-Level grade. This is actually worse than the 42% of pupils who received grades other than their CAGs during the recent summer series. The lottery we have seen in 2020 has been happening to students in History, English, Sociology, Geography, and RE (and to a lesser, though still worrying extent with Psychology and Biology) every single year for many, many years. Whole generations of students have sat papers in History and English with only just over a 50% chance that their grades will reflect their actual performance (and this is before we consider the impact of norm referencing which can move grade boundaries to ridiculous levels). Yet at the same time the commentary on exams each year has obsessed over grade inflation: an issue which is of course very easy to control and manipulate in a norm referenced system (something I wrote about back in 2012). Meanwhile Ofsted and the DfE have repeatedly dismissed worries about grading of exams and accused schools of trying to game grades through speculative re-marking of scripts. 

So, what does all this tell us? Well it probably tells us that the line which gets spouted about the “inflated” grades this year damaging confidence only means anything if you also believe that historic exams are accurate reflections of students’ attainment. For over 45% of students in some subjects, we know that is unlikely to be the case. It also tells us that we need a meaningful review of our approach to examination in this country. As I have written in the past, we need to consider carefully what the purposes of examination are and consider the best systems to meet this need.

The crisis of 2020 may well be a blessing in disguise. We can no longer pretend that the exams system in the UK is fit and healthy. But we must ensure that treatment comes soon. We cannot continue to drag the sick-man on still further. To do so would be to fail yet another generation of young people.

​


Follow-up reading

For more on the marking issues noted in this blog please read my previous blog, “The Gilded Age”.

For some thoughts on the purposes of examinations and the issues of norm referencing see: “Searching for Gold”.

And for some musings on where we might go next see: “After the Gold Rush”.

Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of community in teaching. Indeed, I have written in the past about the power of professional learning communities. In many ways we are right to be proud, as UK history teachers, of the ways in which we have engaged with the teaching of our subject. We have multiple, thriving conferences, a teacher-led journal, a vibrant community on Twitter, many active Facebook groups, not to mention key links with educational academia. But whatever the unifying power of community, something doesn't quite sit right.

Self-narratives
I have grown increasingly uneasy about this narrative I tell myself about "the history teaching community". This unease is exacerbated when our profession is challenged, when “the community” is asked to account for its actions or lack thereof. Too often I have found myself reacting to challenges by responding “oh, the community have already been thinking about that.” When there was debate about the revised curriculum in 2013 and its excessively British focus, I could look at my SHP inspired curriculum and be happy it wasn't all stale, male and pale; and could say “Don’t worry! SHP has been thinking about this for ages and promotes curriculum diversity.” When the “knowledge-rich” movement began to gain traction, I was able to point to many examples in Teaching History of history teachers bringing together both knowledge and second-order conceptual understanding in their work. And when Ofsted was arguing for the importance of focusing on the “curricular what” and not the “pedagogical how”, I was equally able to suggest that this had been a core theme in the “history community” over time. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if I have been too quick to seek examples of what “the community” already does, and too slow to examine the reality. And this worry has become even more pronounced in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has asked groups right across our society to reassess the ways in which they conceptualise, reinforce, or challenge racism.

I am of course nowhere near the first person to have these worries. There are many examples of history teachers questioning stances in “the community” on social media, at conferences, and of course in Teaching History. In recent times, Mohamud & Whitburn (2014, 2016, 2019), Dennis (2016), Nascimento (2018) and others have challenged “the community” on whether it is doing enough in terms of tackling the concept of race in history head on. Similarly, Lockyer & Tazzymant (2017) and Boyd (2019) have asked us to rethink how we engage with sex and gender in our teaching.

Jason Todd wrote a fantastic editorial piece in Teaching History 176 in which he explores some of the ways in which “the community” have been wrestling with many of these issues over time. However, he goes on to show that the picture is far from universal. He notes how the advent of the “knowledge-rich” movement has downplayed student needs, and that doing justice to history is more than just making our curriculum diverse (Todd, 2019). As Mohamud and Whitburn argue, the challenge is also to directly address problematic concepts such as race as historical phenomena in their own right (Mohamud and Whitburn, 2016). Todd goes on to highlight that there is still much to do to re-imagine the place of history and question the importance of “nation” as the central concept in history teaching. Indeed, the Runnymede Trust and RHS have noted a whole range of ways in which history teaching could and must improve (Atkinson et al., 2018; McIntosh, Todd and Das, 2019). This directly challenges that cosy vision I had of a “community” who had these issues well in hand.

In many ways then, these blogs are seeking to answer Todd’s call that we “examine the given nature of things…[and recognise that] we ourselves are products of both history and the associated operations of power” (Todd, 2019, p. 7). Rather than focusing on issues of taught curriculum however, I want to turn this examination onto the discourse of “the community”.

The need for honesty
Korthagen et al. note that one of the main factors in enacting change in teacher action is for teachers to be aware of the need for change internally. When we fail to see a need for change internally, we seldom change what we do externally (Korthagen, Kessels, et al., 1999). This was certainly true of my own approach to history teaching.

In some ways, having a small body of work which has engaged with the challenges presented by Black Lives Matters made it easier for me to ignore the problem It allowed me to reach the mistaken conclusion that we are addressing these concerns well, when in fact, despite amazing work being done, we were still a long way from addressing those same concerns. The comforting knowledge that some people in “the community” are working for change reinforces that internal voice that says no personal change is needed. We have seen this exact problem in politics in recent times, with the Remain campaign and the Corbynite project both failing to critically examine themselves. We already know how that ended. By telling ourselves that “the community” has “always been doing that”, we fundamentally fail to question whether what we have been doing actually matches the current challenge as outlined by Todd, or in the worst cases, ignores the fact that we, as individuals or groups, might not have been doing anything at all.

If our response to challenges is to try to absorb threats into a self-confirming narrative, then we are missing a major opportunity for intellectual and professional honesty. Without this we cannot move forwards but risk becoming trapped in a self-referential bubble. Two things really brought this home to me recently.

First, I have spent a good deal of the last eighteen months wrestling with criticisms of textbook projects I have been part of. I was mortified when a girl contacted me in 2018 to express her disappointment of my portrayal of Mormons in my “Making of America” textbook. My first reaction was to be intellectually wounded. Our human instinct is to believe we have done our best and that we should move on. My self-narrative as an author was of someone who cared about representation, about research, about accuracy, about respecting the people of the past. I looked into her critique, but my aim was ultimately to confirm this self-narrative. I checked my sources and stood by my decision. I sent her school a letter explaining my research and my choices of language. But the there was a nagging feeling which would not go away. I let it sit a week. It still wouldn’t rest. Over the next month or so, in my spare time, I began to read around the issue. I sought out new interpretations. I reassessed my frames of reference. She was right – I had been lazy in my narrative. What I had engaged in was an act of self-preservation and self-justification, rather than an act of honestly. The reality of this action was that my work had directly caused that child to feel uncomfortable and angry enough to write to me as an author. Without an honest assessment of our self-narratives, this is always the risk. 

This first experience with a person being (rightly) critical of my portrayal of history in a public work was not the last. This in turn caused me to rethink the comforting narrative I had begun to tell myself about “the community”. Not long after, the RHS Race Report confirmed that this doubt was well founded. The harsh light of research made starkly evident that BME pupils are less likely to choose history; that only 11% of history students at university come from BME backgrounds; that school history curriculums continue to be narrow and to alienate BME pupils; that 96.1% of university historians are White, and so on (Atkinson et al., 2018). Whatever the achievements of “the community”, and as Todd would note in his 2019 editorial, there was much further to go.

Critical engagement not self-flagellation
Now if all of this sounds like so much chest beating and self-flagellation, I apologise because that is not the point of this blog series. I am well aware that many attempts at honest self-reflection these days are dismissed as so much value signalling. I recognise of course that this is a risk, even if it is not my intention.

What I want to do therefore keep the challenge of being honest about realities of history teaching and “the history teaching community” central so that we can see where the problems lie and not be complacent. Crucially I want to engage with the legitimate challenges raised by Black Lives Matters in relation to history teaching; to be honest about the realities; and to suggest some practical ways we could move ourselves on.

Blog series:

1. Being proud of our history? 
2. Are we being honest about curriculum?
3. Are we being honest about our discourse?
4. ​...
   

References

• Atkinson, H. et al. (2018) Race, Ethnicity & Equality in UK History: A Report and Resource for Change. Royal Historical Society, p. 122.
• Boyd, S. (2019) ‘From “Great Women” to an inclusive curriculum: how should women’s history be included at Key Stage 3?’, Teaching History, (175), pp. 16–23.
• Dennis, N. (2016) ‘Beyond tokenism: teaching a diverse history in the post-14 curriculum’, Teaching History, (165), pp. 37–41.
• Korthagen, F. A. J., Kessels, J. P. A. M., et al. (1999) ‘Linking Theory and Practice: Changing the Pedagogy of Teacher Education’, Educational Researcher, 28(4), pp. 4–17. doi: 10.3102/0013189X028004004.
• Lockyer, B. and Tazzymant, A. (2017) ‘“Victims of History”: challenging students’ perceptions of women in history’, Teaching History, (165), pp. 8–15.
• McIntosh, K., Todd, J. and Das, N. (2019) ‘Teaching Migration, Belonging, and Empire in Secondary Schools’, p. 20.
• Mohamud, A. and Whitburn, R. (2014) ‘Unpacking the Suitcase and Finding History: Doing Justice to the Teaching of Diverse Histories in the Classroom’, Teaching History, (154), pp. 40–46.
• Mohamud, A. and Whitburn, R. (2016) Doing justice to history: transforming black history in secondary schools.
• Mohamud, A. and Whitburn, R. (2019) ‘Anatomy of enquiry: deconstructing an approach to history curriculum planning’, Teaching History, (177), pp. 28–41.
• Nascimento, S. N. (2018) ‘Identity in History: Why It Matters and Must Be Addressed!’, Teaching History, (173), pp. 8–19.
• Todd, J. (2019) ‘HA Update: Thinking beyond boundaries’, Teaching History, (176), pp. 4–7.

I was hopeful that:

• i) The quality of the schools’ curricular provision would be more central to the overall judgement
• ii) There would be a greater focus on curricular breadth in upper primary and secondary, and that two-year Key Stage 3 would be challenged
• iii) Ofsted would rely less on on school data and consider the ways in which assessment is used by teachers on the ground
• iv) Ofsted would shift their focus onto the learning of students rather than the performances of teachers
• v) The new framework would shift the focus onto subject specific training for teachers
• vi) Ofsted would begin to challenge schools who focused on exam technique over actual subject content
• vii) The new inspection system would lead to meaningful discussions around subject specific issues in schools and help inform school-level, and indeed system-wide, improvements in curricular provision.

I was worried that:

• a) The language of memory, sequencing and knowledge checking would become a smoke screen for schools to cover up bad practice with non-specialist inspectors
• b) Inspectors would throw out the baby with the bath water and see anything framed in terms of pupil motivation as a negative

 
In many ways I am pleased to say that many of my hopes in relation to the assessment of school curriculum have come to pass. I will explore this in more detail in a moment, but there is good evidence that items i-v (above) are prominent in the new reports. There is also some evidence that student motivation is not being ignored in favour of input-recall paradigms (item b in my worries). However, there is much less evidence relating to items vi and vii above, as well as item a. I will deal with these in a separate blog.

On a broader note, I also think Ofsted have done a fairly good job of keeping closely to their stated aims in the new assessment regime. There are of course other issues, but I plan to deal with those in a separate blog.
 
What did we find out?
So, with a guardedly positive review so far, what else can we glean from the new Ofsted reports?

• 1) The new reports are much shorter than the old ones. The summary of the school is fairly high level, but does focus on the “atmosphere” of the school as well as the curricular provision. As such they offer a broad picture of the schools as a place, but don’t offer much beyond this. The example below gives a good sense of this. 

• 7) Although this cannot be seen in the reports, there is a range of interesting questions being asked by inspectors during their Deep Dives. I think it is worth flagging these as I think that these questions are quite helpful as a means for subject leads to consider their own preparedness for inspection. None of these questions are inherently unfair but they do require a good knowledge of the curriculum to be taught and place a real emphasis on leadership teams to train their subject leads in subject specific ways. Examples include people being asked how curriculum is sequenced and what progression looks like. Other prompts have included: How do you ensure a pupil in Year x is ready for the next stage of learning?; Tell me about an assessment in your subject: when is it? How is it marked? What is its purpose?; What support/training have you received to help with your curriculum planning?; Comment on curriculum time allocation; and: How do you support your team to deliver the curriculum effectively?

So all in all there is a lot to like about the new Ofsted reports. What is particularly notable is that I think it would be hard for schools to infer too many odd things about "what Ofsted want" from these. Anything which is in the reports is, by and large, already in the inspection framework and has been made very clear. However, the focus on making the reports clear has come at the expense of detail. In my next blog I will be exploring some of the worries I still have about the new EIF. 

​As ever I hope this is useful and would be very interested in comments and feedback.

There were some minor differences, but at a school cohort level of say 100 pupils, the difference would have been less than a single pupil missing out on a grade C/4.
Of course, this does not mean everyone’s results will have been stable. It is common with new specifications for some schools to do much better than normal and some to do much worse. This is usually because some schools manage to match what examiners were looking for more closely. It is almost impossible to second guess this precisely in the first year of a specification as examiners refine their expectations during first marking and grading discussions.

Takeaway lesson:
​NO CHANGES HERE
Read the examiners’ reports closely and get some papers back if you were not happy with your overall results.

2) Your choice of board made almost no difference to overall grades (on average)
There is very little change here this year. The distribution of awards per board seem to be fairly static and this reflects the fact that awards are still tied to pupil prior attainment. From this we can therefore infer that centres doing OCR A tend to have cohorts with higher prior attainment and that therefore a greater proportion of higher grades can be awarded.

Discounting the statement at the end of the last point: because the boards all had to adhere to this basic rule when awarding grades, the differences between boards are also non-existent. If you look at the detail you will see that some boards did deviate from the 2017 figures, however this is because they have to take prior attainment into account. So, the reason that OCR A seem to have awarded more 4+ and 7+ grades would suggest that more high attaining pupils took these exams. By contrast OCR B probably awarded slightly fewer 4+ and 7+ grades due to a weaker cohort. This might imply that OCR centres chose their specification based on the ability range of their pupils (though this is pure speculation). AQA and Edexcel pretty much fit the Ofqual model, suggesting they had a broadly representative sample of pupils.

Takeaway lesson:

​None really!

3) The papers this year continue to be harder than pre 2018 [updated statement]
In comparing raw marks required for different grades, there continues to be a big difference between pre 2018 exams and the current crop. Differences between 2018 and 2019 grade boundaries however were fairly minimal. That said, there were some interesting differences which I have outlined in the charts below.

Given that the proportion of students getting grade 1+, 4+ and 7+ were fixed, the moving grade boundaries tell us a little about how difficult/accessible the papers were:

• If the grade boundaries go up it suggests pupils found the paper easier
• If they go down, it suggests the pupils found the paper harder

In the chart below, you can see that in 2017 pupils in history generally needed to get 74% to be awarded a grade A, however in 2018, they needed only 60% of the marks. In 2019 this increased a fraction to 61%. As a rough measure, this suggests the A grade in history was 19% harder/less accessible for pupils in 2018 vs 2017, but "only" 18% harder (!!) in 2019. The big issues are much more evident at Grade C/4 and G/1 where pupils needed just 37% and 6% of the marks on average in 2018 vs. 55% and 18% in 2017. In 2019, the Grade 4 fiure sat at 39% of marks and the Grade 1 at 7% of marks. In essence this makes the 2019 exams 30% harder for pupils to get a Grade 4 than in 2017 (vs 34% harder in 2018) and 60% harder to get a Grade 1 (vs 69% in 2018).

Now we could argue that this does not matter as the same proportion of students still got the various key grades, as explained above. However, there are some fundamental issues here.

1. These were meant to be strengthened GCSEs to raise standards. There were around 18 questions between 2 or 3 papers for most of the GCSE specification. On average, each of these questions was worth around 9 marks. A pupil who gained a G grade probably only got around 10 marks in total over these papers. Or in other words, they answered only 1 complete question correctly in 3 papers and over 4 hours of exams. By contrast a pupil in 2017 was getting around 36 marks across their papers, and therefore answering at least 3 whole questions correctly. This does not change substantially in 2019.
2. We cannot be sure why pupils scored so badly at the lower end, by the fact that marks are so low at Grade 1 boundary (and even Grade 4) suggests that many pupils failed to finish papers, or possibly failed to complete whole papers. For anyone who has worked with pupils who lack confidence, non-finishing and being put off by difficult questions can be a killer in terms of examination success. At the very least, pupils in 2017 were given a chance to demonstrate their knowledge more completely than in 2018. The very low marks at the bottom end also make the issue of fair grading a bit of a crap shoot. It would have been possible for a child to get lucky on a single question (something they had just looked at) and secure a grade 1 without answering a single other question on the paper. Meanwhile a child with weak knowledge and limited confidence might have attempted 3 or 4 questions with a little success and then given up and received the same grade. Again, no real change here, except at board level.

Takeaway lesson:
​NO CHANGES
Your top end pupils are probably fine with all the changes, but your weaker students are going to struggle. Strategies to finish papers, or answer more questions will be key, alongside boosting core knowledge and building confidence in the face of hard questions.
 
4) Some boards were harder/less accessible than others
I have added some further 2019 analysis to this section

Following on from the above, a closer analysis of the grade boundaries reveals some interesting things. Again, we take the premise that the grades were fixed and therefore lower grade boundaries essentially mean a harder set of papers.

If we look at the charts below we can see that the percentage of marks required for a Grade 7+, 4+ and 1+ were broadly similar across Edexcel and OCR. However, the AQA grade boundaries for both grades 4+ and 7+ are significantly lower in both 2018 and 2019. At grade 7 the difference is 15% and at grade 4 it is around 10%. This would suggest that pupils found the AQA papers noticeably harder/less accessible than pupils taking the other boards despite the additional time offered by AQA in an exam revision for the 2019 series.

 Again, this does not affect final grades, but levels of confidence and accessibility are key when working with pupils. The difficulties AQA pupils faced could be down to any number of things from poorly written papers, poorer preparation, unclear mark schemes, poorer marking teams, or just too much content to cover. There is no easy way to know the answer, but the similarities between the other boards paint and stark picture here.

The year on year changes are also quite interesting. Looking at the percentage of marks required for different grades and comparing these, it is possible to look at whether papers have become harder or easier year on year. The picture here suggests little change at Grade 7+. However, at Grade 4+ analysis suggests that pupils studying AQA in 2019 found the papers slight more accessible at Grade 7+ (2% change), and Grade 4+ (9% change). OCR B saw a larger shift at Grade 7+ (3% more accessible) and Grade 4+ (13% more accessible). Edexcel meanwhile saw very little change at Grades 4+ and 7+ in terms of accessibility, while OCR A papers actually became slightly harder to access for pupils. All boards, apart from OCR A were apparently more accessible for the weakest, with shifts from 20% (AQA) to 33% (OCR B) in the positive direction. This means that pupils gaining a Grade 1 in 2019 required 5% of the marks for AQA and 9% of the marks for OCR B. This compares to an average of 18-19% in 2017, so accessiblity is still a major issue for the weakest students!

Takeaway lesson:

If you are doing AQA and you have a very mixed cohort, or a large number of 3-4 borderline students, this may well not be the right specification for you. Have a think about some of the key points on spec switching. That said, AQA have done a little to address the issues, but not enough to close the gap in 2019. OCR B seem to be offering the most accessible papers in terms of pupils being able to answer the questions set, though this may vary between options and all papers are nowhere near as accessible as in 2017.
 
5) Should I change exam boards?
No major changes here, but I have included a comparison of board sign up below. It would seem very few people changed in the 2018-19 year, though this was to be expected given that the first set of reuslts had not been published when the current cohort began their studies. It also means that OCR's decline in terms of market share remains pronounced.

OK, so this is more of a question than something we have found out, however it is one a lot of people are asking. It isn’t possible to provide a definitive answer to this, however I hope some of the explanations above help you contextualise your results a bit. If you are still unsure what to do, consider the advice below.
​
Below is a list of possible reasons for your exam results being poorer than in previous years. 

• Your students might not have approached the exam in the way the examiners intended for any number of reasons.
• Read the examiner reports closely and request a range of papers. If you can’t afford your own papers, ask the board to send you some scripts from across the range. Keep asking the boards for advice. It never hurts to have at least one department member marking either!

 

• Your students might not have answered enough questions, or failed to finish papers, as seems to have been common this year.
• Work on timing and confidence building. Some more realistic grade boundaries will probably help here, but bear in mind these will probably go up next year as people get used to the exam.

 

• You did not cover the course completely.
• Rethink your planning in light of the depth of understanding required by the exam. One big issue I have seen a lot is departments taking legacy units and spending too long on things which are now less important in the new specs e.g. ancient medicine. You might also like to consider how conceptual understanding might be supported by a re-worked Key Stage 3, both in terms of knowledge and second order concepts. Hodder are about to publish a new KS3 book to this end. You might also like to read Rich Kennett and my recent article in Teaching History 171 via https://www.history.org.uk/publications/categories/300/resource/9398/teaching-history-171-knowledge 

• Any number of departmental, school, other issues
• This happens all the time. If you have been in turmoil, a change of exam board is not always wise. A bit of stability often goes a long, long way in a troubled department or school! Seek out help from schools doing the same spec nearby. Get on any exam board, or other training ASAP. If you are OCR B, don’t forget regional advisors.

If you are still considering changing boards, bear the following points in mind:

In essence the argument is that children need knowledge (not skill-based curricula) for social justice (I agree), and that the most ‘powerful’ knowledge can be identified by using the existing disciplines. This, Young argues makes the knowledge different from simply “cultural capital” or the ‘knowledge of the powerful’ in an E.D. Hirsch sense, because it is always provisional and rooted in real processes for creating truth.

The problem is, the more I see people discussing ‘powerful knowledge’ in the curriculum, the more I tend to see discussions of the ‘knowledge of the powerful’. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen very traditional, Anglo-centric, politically focused history curricula put forward as ‘empowering’ or living out the principles of ‘powerful knowledge’. This to me is a huge problem because it lends an unwarranted, and seemingly politically-neutral justification to an approach to curriculum which is actually heavily ideological. Yet the concept of ‘powerful knowledge is so ill defined in history, that it allows this kind of abuse. Indeed, I would go further and say that the term itself gets in the way of more important aspects of curriculum construction like being open about our ideologies, principles and aims in our content selection.

Defining ‘powerful knowledge’
Young’s concept and his message are certainly compelling. ‘powerful knowledge’ seems to offer a means to design a curriculum without the messiness of considering our own philosophies and motivations. The fact that certain knowledge is agreed upon by a broadly cohesive and stable grouping appears to be a good way to transcend the difficulties of whether to teach Henry V’s victory at Agincourt or a social history of the teaspoon. The example below, taken from science (ASE), does a good job of illustrating how this might work in practice. Here a set of ‘agreed-upon’ statements are presented as the founding ideas and processes of science. So the question is, could we produce something similar for history?

Ideas of history: ‘powerful’ substantive knowledge?
In the science example above, the ten “ideas of science” are all substantive. If we take the same approach with history, then we are forced to ask: what is uniquely powerful in the vast swathe of content and ideas which one could teach in human history? One would also be forced to ask: should that ‘powerful knowledge’ be outlined as powerful events, powerful substantive concepts, or broader, powerful historical statements?

Events: Even a simple set of tests reveals the weakness of trying to define ‘powerful’ historical knowledge in terms of events. Is the Peasants’ Revolt ‘powerful knowledge’ or the events of the English Reformation a better example of ‘powerful knowledge’?  It is certainly difficult to understand the British Civil Wars, or the Enlightenment, or any number of other things without first covering the developments which took place in the English Reformation. However, this supposes that the curriculum should also contain the latter two items. A history teacher in in Beijing, or Stockholm, or Tirana seems far less likely to be teaching about the British Civil Wars and therefore the explanatory power of the studying the English Reformation is instantly diminished. This seems so obvious as to be moot, but it is vital because one of the other core tenets of ‘powerful knowledge’ is that it needs to have broad explanatory properties for the discipline as a whole. Choosing any given set of events only reveals a power relative to other content being taught. Teaching the English Reformation is powerful in terms of understanding huge amounts of English, and wider British history, politics, economics, what it means to be British, and so on, but it is not universally accepted as ‘powerful’.

Substantive Concepts: Another approach might be to move away from a focus on events and to define particular substantive concepts to be learnt e.g. ‘democracy’, ‘empire’, or even ‘peasant’.  Yet such concepts are not rooted firmly in the discipline of history, and therefore fail the ‘powerful knowledge’ test that truth should be established through the community of enquiry. ‘Democracy’ and ‘empire’ for example might be claimed by political sciences, or philosophy. Beyond this, history borrows substantive concepts from so many fields that to even begin to define the necessary ones would be half a lifetime’s work. Therefore, the core problem becomes one of selection. The choice of substantive concepts for study would necessarily depend on the overall shape of the curriculum, but could not determine the shape of the curriculum as Young and Lambert (2014) have suggested ‘powerful knowledge’ might.

Historical Statements: A more novel way of thinking about ‘powerful knowledge’ in history might be to attempt to generate ideas and concepts which transcend particular time periods or events e.g. “people are prone to challenge authority”, or “revolutions lead to change”. However, this throws up new problems. The first is already obvious: neither of these ideas is universal as neither applies in all cases in history. Second, it seems doubtful that even a handful of historians would be able to create an agreed upon list of universal concepts, let alone the discipline of history as a whole. Even if such a process were able to identify a selection of ‘powerful’ ideas to agree upon, there would still be no consensus on which events in history might best convey or exemplify them, so the problem of content selection resurfaces.

Can historical knowledge not have power?
Does this mean that particular substantive knowledge has now power? No, I just don’t see how any substantive knowledge in history can be ‘powerful knowledge’ in the way Young has defined. Much sensible discussion about knowledge in the curriculum has revolved around the notion that knowledge can have generative power (Counsell, 2017, 2016; Hammond, 2014). This I think is an important idea, but it distracts us from the core issue of what should be included in the curriculum in the first place. Any justifications of knowledge to include in a history curriculum because of its generative power end up being self-referential. Some knowledge definitely has more generative power than other knowledge within particular curricular constructions. If I am teaching students about the first three Crusades (or Frankish Invasions), then it is definitely more powerful for them to have grasped the concept of religious belief in the C11th beforehand, and to see how this developed the idea of “Just War”, than it is for them to have explored the death rites of the Inca. This idea of knowledge which helps underpin future knowledge is a central and important part of curriculum design, and is something Rich Kennett and I wrote about recently (Ford and Kennett, 2018). However, this is knowledge which has ‘curricular power’ rather than ‘powerful knowledge’. The power is relative to the curriculum which has been designed; it does not have the universality of the concept of say “all material in the universe is made of small particles” in science. Change the curriculum and the internally powerful curricular knowledge would change too. The only possible solution to this might be to create a list of all the possible events and ideas which have generative power in the whole of human history, and then see if the entire discipline could agree upon them, but I hope the futility of such an endeavour is obvious without further explanation.
 
Ideas about history: ‘powerful’ disciplinary knowledge?
Where I do think we might make more of a case for ‘powerful knowledge’ in history is in terms of the disciplinary aspects of the subject. Notably, in Young’s terms, it is powerful to know how a discipline seeks ‘truth’, and important to know the processes by which such is ‘truth’ is created (Young and Lambert, 2014). I think it would be fairly safe to say that most historians would agree that historical enquiry is the process by which historical claims are generated and challenged. I am still indebted to the wonderful work done by Ian Dawson to this end (Dawson, 2018, 2015). To take this further, it might be considered ‘powerful knowledge’ for students to know that historians are always on a trajectory from knowing little, with an aim to know more; that they engage with evidence, ask questions, develop and refine hypotheses, and continue in this vein until they are satisfied that the shape of some tentative historical truth has begun to emerge. This process is nearly outlined also by Chris Husbands in his now classic “What is History Teaching” (Husbands, 1996). 

It might also be possible to make the case that it is ‘powerful’ to appreciate that historians ask distinctive types of question about the past; that asking and answering such questions entails a set of approaches which are broadly similar; and that therefore the processes involved in asking and answering second-order, or disciplinary, questions have the potential to be generalizable. Below are example of the kinds of questions which historians ask and answer, and on which there might be some hope of finding a ‘powerful’ consensus:

• Questions around why things happened
• Questions around how things changed or stayed the same
• Questions around the impact of events
• Questions around the similarities or differences between people’s experiences
• Questions around appropriate generalisations
• Questions around the nature of historical evidence
• Questions around the ways in which the past has been interpreted or represented
• Questions around historical significance

All of these types of question have rich traditions within historical study, but also in the study of school history. We might therefore offer a tentative definition of ‘powerful knowledge’ in history as: ‘powerful processes’, ‘powerful questions’, and ‘powerful debates’

However, even with this more promising lead, defining ‘powerful knowledge’ as disciplinary knowledge still raises problems for curriculum construction. In fact, defining ‘powerful knowledge in this way moves us back to a scenario where substantive knowledge might be downplayed in favour of disciplinary. It might be possible to make a case to base the entirety of a Key Stage 3 history on topics connected to the growth, development, and crises of the kingdom of Benin for example. The only thing which would prevent teachers doing this would be a moral judgment about the extent to which students should know the history of the nation in which they are currently residing. Such a justification might be perfectly acceptable, but it would not be supported via the lens of ‘powerful knowledge’. To put it another way, there is seemingly no conception of ‘powerful knowledge’ in history in which substantive content selections do not have to be justified in relation to other educational principles and aims.
 
Knowledge, power and principles
The point of writing this piece was to try to put into words some of the things I have been wrestling with for the last few years of my history teaching—, and PGCE— , career. I do accept that Young has provided a useful toolset to consider what we teach within a curricular construction. For instance, once we have selected our topic areas, we can gain a huge amount by looking at the ‘powerful questions’ historians are asking, and the ‘powerful debates’ they are engaging in to determine our focuses and choice of content. No study of the First World War should be happening in schools today in my view unless it is engaging with current questions over the diversity of the soldiers who fought. Equally, no self-respecting study of the American West should be taught through Turner’s Frontier Thesis, or Brown’s “Bury My Heart and Wounded Knee”, thereby ignoring debates about the West as a place, and the agency of Indians in the story of America.

However, I am ultimately concluding is that in most cases, there is no easy or objective way to select the content we include in history at the macro (curricular) scale; everything comes back to our philosophical justifications. Whether we like it or not, our educational aims and philosophies remain the bedrock of content decisions in history. We need to accept that we cannot outsource the task of choosing the outline content of our curriculum to ‘the Discipline’. Knowledge can only have generative power in a curriculum once its shape is already known. There is no universally powerful set of knowledge for students to understand via history. Therefore, we must ensure that whatever decisions we make are deeply rooted in the moral and ethical values which we hold to be central to education and to history education in particular. These hopefully come from engagement with a wider group of historians and history teachers, but we need to recognise them and be open about them. Marc Bloch once said that he “should like professional historians, above all, the younger ones to reflect upon [the] hesitancies…[and] incessant soul searchings of our craft. It will be the surest way they can prepare themselves…to direct their efforts reasonably” (1992, p.15). To add history teachers to this group would be a small leap. If history educators do not constantly ask questions about the nature of their subject and its principles, then the subject is nothing. Only through this process can we open history up to scrutiny and therefore justification.


References 
Counsell, C., 2017. The fertility of substantive knowledge: in search of its hidden generative power, in: Davies, I. (Ed.), Debates in History Teaching. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London ; New York, pp. 80–99.
Counsell, C., 2016. History teachers’ publication and the curricular ‘what?’: mobilising subject-specific professional knowledge in a culture of genericism, in: Burn, K., Chapman, A., Counsell, C. (Eds.), MasterClass in History Education: Transforming Teaching and Learning. Bloomsbury, London, pp. 350–359.
Dawson, I., 2018. What do we want students to understand about the process of ‘doing history’? Exploring and Teaching Medieval History 109–112.
Dawson, I., 2015. Enquiry: developing puzzling, enjoyable, effective historical investigations. Primary History 8–14.
Ford, A., Kennett, R., 2018. Conducting the orchestra to allow our students to hear the symphony: getting richness of knowledge without resorting to fact overload. Teaching History 8–16.
Hammond, K., 2014. The knowledge that “flavours” a claim: towards building and assessing historical knolwedge on three scales. Teaching History 18–24.
Husbands, C., 1996. What is history teaching?: language, ideas, and meaning in learning about the past. Open University Press, Buckingham ; Philadelphia.
Young, M.F.D., Lambert, D., 2014. Knowledge and the future school: curriculum and social justice. Bloomsbury Academic, New York.

Curricular empowerment
If schools worked together to build and design their own specifications and assessments (graded or matriculation style), I believe it would overcome many of the issues outlined above and pave the way for teachers to be better engaged in professionally enriching work at Key Stage 4 and 5.

1. Without the focus on vague specifications, teachers would be free to build meaningful courses based in shared knowledge. This would be incredibly enriching and allow some of the most exciting work at Key Stage 3 to be replicated post-14. I suspect this would also do wonders for recruitment and retention of teachers as I am not sure who really finds joy in delivering pre-set content to a frankly baffling array of pre-determined assessment objectives. As one of my excellent colleagues, commented: “teachers need to keep sight of why they became teachers in the first place – it wasn’t to meet performance management targets over GCSE grades or become desperately familiar with a set of assessment objectives.”
2. Teachers would be able to set assessments which sampled appropriately from the domain they had taught. They would also recognise the need to not reduce their teaching to just the sample because they would have been involved in choosing the appropriate hinterland for their course, and therefore presumably see its value. They would also be able to set more rigorous, interesting and potentially more valid assessments as they would serve a specific purpose in an agreed curriculum, rather than a broad purpose in a genericised national curriculum.
3. Teachers would have the freedom to update and review their curricula in light of new and recent research. This would open the door to professional development work, especially if specification renewal was made part and parcel of such a system. Again, I am sure this would do wonders for teacher retention and could tap into brilliant projects such as the HA’s Teacher Fellowship Programme.
4. Teachers would be able to examine their students more accurately due to their increased knowledge of what exactly had been taught. It would still be possible for schools to make claims about the abilities of their students and therefore to provide some information about the outcomes and potential of such students.

Monitoring
Of course, this is not an exhaustive plan and I am sure there are many gaps which still need addressing. One major area for thought is the oversight of such a system. Again, this feels like less of a big leap now than it might have been before the breaking up of the LEAs and the creation of MATs.

1. Ofqual could set broad subject parameters which local exam groups had to consider when designing their specifications. A good example of this can be seen in the Queensland System, where 75% of all examination is set at a local group level (QSA, 2010).
2. Carefully designed, but very broad, exam specifications could be set out in a similar manner to some parts those offered by OCR B for history. For example, one bullet point of the America specification says “How and why the USA expanded, from 1789 to 1838.” Because no specific causes are listed, none can become a “trip up” question e.g. “Explain how the Northwest Ordnance contributed to American expansion” could not be asked, but “Why did America grow 1789-1838?” could. This means schools are actually free to teach the nature and causes of expansion as they see fit. Similarly, the “History Around Us” unit which sets 14 broad criteria around which schools have to design an appropriate course. Although there are still many issues with the way this specification is assessed, parts of the specification do offer a very good model.
3. Ofsted are already moving towards judging the quality of curricular provision rather than solely examination results. It would be a small step to expand this to look at curricular design in Key Stage 4. The shift away from high stakes grades in a matriculation system might also lessen the pressure on schools to “cheat” and boost grades.
4. The money saved from national exam entry costs could be spent on appropriate verification and moderation. This might operate in a similar way to universities, where other institutions or groups give oversight of assessments and course design. Equally, Ofqual might appoint key persons to such a role. It seems easier for one person to get acquainted with he approaches and assessments of a few dozen schools than to try and get consistent understanding amongst thousands of teachers of a single specification.
5. There is no reason that formal examinations could not be used, and external invigilators appointed for oversight. In terms of marking, this could be shared between subject teachers in a local examination group and checked for rank ordering at a face to face meeting, or marked using CJ. When we used to mark coursework, the key measure at the end was to ensure the rank ordering was correct. This was seldom a major problem and was often a good way to understand how to improve teaching for the following year. This would be good professional learning.
6. There might be some argument that certain subjects, or component parts of subjects, could continue to be assessed nationally where there was enough agreement on content. For example, Maths might continue to work as a national examination, as might some elements of the science curriculum. We might also introduce a national spelling and grammar test for 16 year olds. This is similar to the approach taken in Sweden.
7. Businesses and universities seeking to have more detail on their applicants could set their own entry tests/interviews based on the qualities they were looking for. References are already in place for UCAS, so more use could also be made of these.

​

There are in fact already large-scale instances of similar systems in operation. For example, the Swedish system places grading in the hands of teachers at a school level and national exams, though on offer in Swedish, Maths, and English, are generally seen as unnecessary (Wikström, 2006). It is fair to say however that this system is also based on a more generic competencies view of curriculum and would therefore need adapting to live up to the suggestions outlined above. A good UK example was the OCR GCSE History Pilot which saw schools setting their own topic areas for assessment through internally set exams. These were still beholden to broad mark schemes (which could be refined) and therefore the grading was still done nationally. Having taught this specification in the past I can certainly say that I found it incredibly professionally enriching. Indeed, the only unit where there were ever problems was the nationally examined one on the power of kings. This model could be certainly be refined and adapted with the right will and appropriate support. 

After the gold rush
Over the course of these three blogs, I hope I have managed to outline why I think we need to move beyond the notion that national examinations are somehow a universal “gold standard” of assessment. In my view, fundamental rethinking needs to happen about the system of examination. This might allow it to improve educational outcomes for children in a deep curricular way, rather than superficially through a drive for elusive “gold standard” examination grades. I believe that moving away from national examination may hold benefits not only for students, but also by empowering the teaching profession more broadly. I am not sure if this blog has done much to get towards solutions, but I do hope it opens up some interesting discussions for what life might look like after the gold rush.
 

References
 
Queensland Studies Authority (2010) School-Based Assessment: The Queensland System [online] Queensland Studies Authority. available from <https://www.qcaa.qld.edu.au/downloads/approach2/school-based_assess_qld_sys.pdf>
Wikström, C. (2006) ‘Education and Assessment in Sweden’. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice 13 (1), 113–128
 

• GCSE grades might tell us how well a student has done in a subject compared to others who studied the same subject
• Ofsted have used GCSE grades to determine school impact and educational quality
• Employers have sought to use GCSE grades as a broad indicator of a student’s ability to communicate effectively, or perform core tasks. Children are often told directly that good GCSE grades tell potential employers that they are good candidates too.
• School leaders have used GCSE results to draw inferences about the effectiveness of their departments and teachers.
• FE and Sixth Form Colleges seek to use GCSE grades as a measure of potential for a student to engage in further study
• The DfE use GCSE English and Maths grades (C+) as a partial determiner of a candidate’s suitability to become a teacher.
• Some universities (notably Durham) have even used GCSE grades as a means of distinguishing between groups of students who all have a clean sweep of “A” grades at A-Level. 

I could go on, but you get the picture I think. The real question is whether the current system of GCSE examination can meet these purposes. I don’t have the space for a long analysis here, but it is fair to say that Ofsted have already begun to recognise the limits of GCSE grades as the sole measure of educational quality. Equally, any school leader worth their salt knows that GCSE results are only ever a partial picture of a teacher’s effectiveness. Employers frequently complain that GCSE grades don’t give them any useful information about a young employee’s ability to communicate correctly in a letter or email, or to complete financial calculations. Universities make similar complaints at A-Level. Similarly, the DfE themselves require trainee teachers to take additional maths and literacy tests to confirm their abilities – the GCSE is not trusted alone. Pupils also quickly find that their GCSE grades might get them a foot in the door, but they are far from the ticket to wealth and happiness they were promised.
 
If we were to look at the function GCSE examinations really perform it is this: They show were a student sits in a rank order with their peers in a particular exam board’s interpretation of a subject. A pupil who gets a grade 7 in history therefore can say that they are in the top 25% of students who sat the OCR History B paper in 2018 (or at best the top 25% of students who sat a history paper in 2018). Can we draw some useful inferences from this? Maybe, but they will not extend well to the multitude of purposes outlined above, and this is all thrown in the air anyway when we consider that there is a 4% chance this grade is too generous or lenient by two grades and a 45% chance that it is a single grade out (i.e they might be in the top 10% , or just the top 40%) (Ofqual, 2018).

If we really want to think about a gold standard for examination, we may need to be more realistic about the inferences we can draw. To my mind there are two main inferences we might be able to draw from examinations at age 16 with some modifications to the existing system:

1. We could suggest whether students had met a set of agreed upon baseline standards in various subjects, and therefore draw inferences about their readiness for the next stage of their education and training
2. We could use examinations as a broad measure of how well the curriculum had been delivered in a school.

The suggestions I am offering here are of course little more than musings, but I have tried to find examples of where these things occur elsewhere too. 

Comparative judgement
I am not going to explore CJ in great depth here as I know much has already been written on the subject. However, the effective idea is that, rather than trying to fit essays into a mark scheme, we instead place them into a rank order. The big difference with CJ however is that no mark is ever entered, we simply decide the order by comparing two essays – a big data system then creates the rank order by using other markers’ interpretations.
 
CJ has many potential benefits if our end goal is to create a ranked order of candidates (as GCSE and A Level currently do). However, there are issues if this is not our goal. I also have some worries that without the requisite number of specialist markers, each with a good knowledge of the topic being assessed and a good understanding of how it was taught, then a system like CJ will end up prioritising generic features such as structure, or the inclusion of a conclusion. That is to say: if I had 4 markers (two specialists and two non specialists), the specialists might look for niche features such as the nature of the causal explanation and the particular language of cause deployed, as well as generic features; the other two might only look for the generic features. This would then weight the generic features more in the ranking. This is not insurmountable, but it is an issue! As an example of this, I wonder which KS3 essay (below) you think is better. I would argue that non-specialists would choose one and Norman history specialists the other. 

A move to matriculation
We might also deal with grading issues by doing away with them altogether. In many countries (including large parts of the US and Canada), students do not finish secondary school with a set of grades, but with a certificate of matriculation to confirm they completed their courses successfully. This removes the pressure of examination outcomes and means schools focus more on ensuring the matriculation standard (as defined nationally or indeed locally) is met, rather than on trying to jump hoops to reach particular grades. There might even be a case to say that students could be offered an opportunity to take extra-credit assessments to pass at a meritorious, rather than a standard level. Having only three possible outcomes would significantly reduce the possibilities for error.

Ten years ago, this idea might have seemed farfetched, but the Primary assessment system has already moved in this direction by having a standard for the end of Year 6 which pupils can either be meeting, above, or below. Given that pupils now must stay on in education or training beyond 16, this kind of system might be a much better bet. This might be further strengthened if a focus on grammar was also brought into secondary schools, relieving the internal tensions in English where focus is split between creative types of writing, literary appreciation, rhetoric, and other core areas. Having said that, the ever-wise Sally Thorne has informed me that she had listened to someone talk about the “tyranny of matriculation” in the 1920s and 1930s this week, so maybe this is not quite as golden as I would like to believe.

Improving specifications in problem subjects
One thing which came out of the Ofqual report very clearly was that issues of examination were much more pronounced in some subjects than others. Where questions had definitive answers and where questions were shorter, as in Maths, the rates of agreement were extremely high. In fact, reliability remained quite high even with longer questions. This, I would hold, is because the content being tested is largely fixed and agreed upon. We could argue then that a system of national examination for Maths, and other subjects where there is broad agreement on desirable core knowledge is acceptable.

As a real-world example consider the driving test. This has both an examined and a practical element, but there is good agreement on what new drivers should do to be safe drivers in the longer run so the test broadly works (I appreciate there are shortcomings too). Now let’s imagine a different case. What if we wanted to determine whether someone was a good artist? This would be nigh on impossible as so many other factors would come into play – the range of knowledge which could potentially be required would be almost limitless. We could of course reduce the variability and say that a good artist could be determined as those who can accurately reproduce a copy of da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”, but this would, I imagine, cease to be art. (I should briefly note that of course in subjects like art, the need for a very different form of assessment is already recognised and in place)

To come back to school subjects then, the only way to ensure that English Literature, or History could be marked as accurately as Maths at a national level would be to reduce the instances of open response questions and set out a more definitive curriculum. This approach is loaded with problems and is certainly not one which Ofqual seems to favour. How does one even define what it is desirable to know in History for example? And would it be possible to boil this down to a list of testable facts? This has certainly been tried in many US states. Indeed in Florida there was an attempt to define history as “factual, not constructed”. History, the legislature argued should be “viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” Of course all of this is somewhat ahistorical as illustrated in this fascinating report by the Fordham Institute (Stern & Stern, 2011).

Improving examinations in problem subjects
Without a list of definitive knowledge, exam boards are forced to create generic statements in their mark schemes. In some ways these give broad guidance: “some analysis” versus “consistently analytical” or “a sophisticated understanding” vs “sustained and convincing” for example. However, these terms always need redefining in relation to specific questions post-exam. In the worst scenarios, boards resort to performative shortcuts such as “the student identifies two reasons” or “the student explains three reasons”. This in turn leads to the kind of generic hoop jumping which skews the teaching of a subject.

A shift to a system of matriculation might reduce some of these problems, but would not remove them. Instead, exam boards might take the plunge and start trialling assessments on students before the final exams. This does carry risks, but means that at least live testing would have happened on such high stakes papers beforehand. Many other countries do this. Not doing so feels like testing out a new plane with a full compliment of passengers, rather than in a dummy flight with no-one on board! Another option would be for exam boards to return to a system whereby more of a subject is assessed by teachers in school (as in art) and moderated by the board. This could include teachers setting their own questions within board parameters and with verification; or might involve teachers being given set questions at the beginning of the course, some of which might be sampled on this final exam (this is similar to the way in which coursework operated). Teachers would also then be tasked with creating specific question mark schemes connecting the broad bands and the specific knowledge delivered in the course. This would mean that teachers would have a better grasp of the specific knowledge they needed to teach and would also be able to reward their students for applying this appropriately in relation to questions. Of course, this in turn comes with a whole new raft of issues if we want to maintain the accuracy and reliability of those judgements of student and school performance.

Finding gold?
The search for a new gold standard of examination does not seem to be a case of simple modification. Instead the case might be made that subjects where there is little agreement on content need a more radical solution to examination. I will be writing more on this in my final blog.