The New National Curriculum: Whose History?

It is now several days since the publication of the revised National Curriculum proposals; days in which my initial disbelief and incredulity have become a sense of deep, immutable despair over the future of our profession. Many excellent responses have already been penned in response to Mr Gove’s proposals for the reform of the History curriculum but nothing yet has quite encapsulated the disappointment, the anger I feel about this abomination, this ahistorical, jingoistic mess which is being peddled to our children disguised as a “history curriculum.”

Let me be clear from the start, I am not against reform. Indeed some of the key changes to the History GCSE are long overdue and in some cases I am frustrated that reforms have not gone far enough. Yet the revised History curriculum offers little in the way of real reform, little to develop the historical profession and even less still to the students it aims to educate. I had been genuinely excited by the prospect of a greater role for History in the National Curriculum. Back when creating departmental documents in 2010 I noted, “This is an exciting time to be a History teacher and an historian. It is clear that History is set to play a much larger role in school curricula than it has done over the last 10 years of Labour government.” How bitter then my disappointment with what we have been given. It transpires that there is at least one aspect of the new curriculum which will avoid criticism: second-order concepts remain. There, that’s it! The rest of the document appears to be the combined wet dreams of reactionary Tories, Daily Mail readers, Empire apologists and neo-liberal crusaders throughout Britain (or should I say this “Sceptred Isle?”)

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