A Model History Curriculum?(No, it’s a New History Curriculum that’s needed!)
Last week, The Minster of State for School Standards, Robin Walker, announced the government was developing a "model history curriculum", with diversity at its heart. This was the culmination of a journey that began in February this year at a session of the Parliamentary Petitions Committeeheld in response to the hundreds of thousands of people who signed petitions calling on the Government to diversify and decolonise the curriculum. Despite a rigorous defence of the current curriculum by the previous Schools’ Minister, Nick Gibb and his colleague, Andrew McCully, by July the Minister agreed that there was, indeed, a case for a model history curriculum to ‘tell the story of who we are and what, as a country, we have done; right and wrong’ and to ensure the place of Black history and cultural diversity was properly represented in the curriculum. (i)
According to the current Schools Minister, this model curriculum would "equip teachers and leaders to teach migration, cultural change and the contributions made by different communities to science, art, culture and society", and, moreover, will be an "exemplar of a knowledge-rich, coherent approach to teaching history".
A response to the growing demands for a proper root and branch reform of the curriculum is long overdue. The argument that the national curriculum already allows for teaching of diversity, migration and slavery, conveniently ignores the fact that the curriculum is so broad and open-ended that schools can avoid topics they feel uncomfortable with – and despite the opportunities being there to teach a good deal more about diversity, many do (as the chair of the Committee succinctly put it, the ‘challenge between what is possible’ and ‘what the reality is.’)
The result of doing little for so long has meant that the model curriculum is now caught in a polarising debate, trying to appease various interest groups. The irony is that history is always more than content and including topics of diversity into the curriculum is only part of the answer. The focus of History is, and should be always be, on learning the requisite tools of the historian, the skills of deduction, enquiry, analysis and interpretation, so students learn how to question and assess evidence and challenge the presumptions we make every day in looking at ourselves in relation to different peoples and cultures. In some ways, content is of less importance for the reality is that there is so much history that the most important thing is to know how to access and use it. (ii) When we hear politicians linking History with the teaching of patriotism and key British Values or talking of promoting a common sense of belonging and shared history without providing the framework and definition to do so, we should be nervous. The truth is we are in a mess of our own making, and that by doing nothing for so long and focusing on our island’s story, we have accentuated the division between those on the fringes who see history as the vehicle for either promoting or slating our own country. We only have to look north to the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence to see how finding a common approach to a history we can properly call ‘British’ is far from simple. David Abulafia, one of the editors of History Reclaimed quoted George Orwell’s words from 1984 in a recent article, that ‘Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past’, using it as a stick to beat the woke zealots who ‘ . . . exploit history as an instrument of propaganda – and as a means of bullying the rest of us.’ As leaders and governments have long tried to do.
So we should re-ask Orwell’s question: who controls the present? Who is the model curriculum for and what is the extent of the ambition of its writers? If it is merely to offer a guide to pointing out how diversity can be found within its present wording, then that is not ambition. Putting aside the arguments of those seeking greater diversification in the curriculum and the counter arguments from those defending the status quo, it is the curriculum itself that has to change. In a recent newspaper article David Abulafia, who is co-editor of the website ‘History Reclaimed’ along with Professor Richard Tombs wrote ‘A lifetime studying history has taught me one simple truth: to understand the present, we must examine the past. If only our leaders had a serious grasp of Afghan or Iraqi history, they might not have perpetrated such a litany of foreign-policy disasters in those countries recently – just as a deeper knowledge of Ireland’s past could have eliminated some of the terrible mistakes made in Ulster’ (iii)
Yes, I say, yes, and while we are about it, let's understand the demographics of the UK through its people and why people migrated here; explain the creation of modern India and Pakistan, Bangladesh and Hong Kong; the division of the Middle East after World War One; the scramble for Africa and so on – each would make today’s world more comprehensible to our young and perhaps make us all more tolerant of other peoples and their histories. Diversity should be at the heart of our curriculum, not some afterthought and while the idea of reclaiming history poses as many questions as it answers (from what? For whom?), as does attempt to radicalise it, neither approach can stand alone, coming as they do from vastly different starting points. What is needed is proper leadership from historians and from schools, rather than the Ministry. History is arguably the most influential subject in our schools, yet more prone to interpretation, subjective judgements and political interference than any other. What is important in designing a model curriculum is asking what skills and knowledge do we want our students to garner and what questions should they learn to ask. We need to change the language of the debate and look at history as a discipline and not just as a body of facts, something to fit a national narrative. We may need to make some aspects of the curriculum mandatory to ensure skills and attitudes are taught to all. For there are many histories of Britain that have long not been properly represented as well as those determined by race and gender. We need a return to the middle ground, to a definition of history as contested knowledge, to an appreciation of the skills required to be a historian, (including asking the right questions), and to listen to the history teachers in our schools in order that our children can better understand the world they inhabit.
Finally, and more specifically for our independent schools, the recent annual survey by the History Association identified the independent sector as lagging behind state schools in teaching about diversity. In some ways this is understandable, given their more traditional approach to education, but it is also disappointing. Historically, independent schools, with their greater resources and freedoms have led the way in curriculum reform, notably in modern languages and science. History may present an altogether different challenge, but it is one they would do well to embrace.
Footnotes:
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I was intrigued to read Nick Gibb’s eulogising of Katherine Birbalsingh telling the committee ‘I read an interview by Katharine Birbalsingh, the very well- known and esteemed headteacher. She said: “I have never met a history teacher who did not teach colonialism and slavery. ...At our school, we certainly teach about slavery, about the Amritsar Massacre as part of Indian history, about Gandhi, about the Irish famine.” I found this particularly pertinent as I had recently written an article using the teaching of history at Michaela Community School as an example and found that it highlighted rather spectacularly where the curriculum failed. Of course, Katharine Birbalsingh is not an Historian although she has her strong views on what history should be taught.
Later in the discussions, it was pointed out, sixty-nine per cent of teachers said that they disagreed or strongly disagreed that the curriculum gave children an appropriate understanding of Britain’s diverse history when they were at the age of leaving primary school. Katherine Birbalsingh may be a favourite of Government, but to take her words and observations above those of History teachers as a collective, is simply bizarre
(i)
(ii) ‘Presumptive history’ A suggested (mandatory) unit of study
(iii) This article which was provocatively entitled ‘We can never surrender to the woke witch hunt against our island story’ appeared in the Daily Mail on 9 September, 2021