Children must be taught landmark dates in chronological order from primary school, to give them a common sense of British history and identity, Ofsted tells the Government today.

Far from knowing the order of key events, such as the Battle of Hastings or the signing of Magna Carta, pupils have no overview of history and cannot answer the “big questions” it poses, the schools’ inspectorate has found.

Not only are key events in British and world history overlooked, but without a sense of the order in which they occurred, students cannot make any connections with the periods that they have studied.

The damning assessment of pupils’ understanding and the way history is taught in England’s schools, particularly primaries, comes after academics and historians have called repeatedly for a review of the way the subject is taught up to the age of 14.

“History is taught in all primary schools, but we are recommending that the syllabus is looked at to promote a coherence in what’s being taught – a core, with some local discretion,” said Miriam Rosen, Ofsted’s director of education.

Dr Rosen acknowledged that history had been squeezed in some primaries, because of their need to raise standards in the three Rs.

“We quite understand why schools have focused on literacy and numeracy, but we think they are beginning to see they can link history teaching to make sure it’s not lost and that there’s still a focus on the core subjects,” she added.

Her comments appear to be at odds with the latest proposals by the Government to allow schools to teach themes such as creativity and cultural understanding, rather than individual academic subjects, such as history and science, at secondary level.

In History in the Balance: History in English Schools 2003-7, the inspectors targeted their criticism mainly at the education of 7 to 11-year-olds, “which continues to disappoint”.

While the teachers themselves often had not studied the subject beyond 14, they were also poorly trained in history and tended to jump from one topic to the next, the inspectors found.

They cited one primary, where eight-year-olds studied the Romans one term, learnt how children coped in the Second World War the next and finished with Ancient Egypt.

Although the National Curriculum calls for pupils to develop a “chronological framework” and to make “connections between events and changes in the different periods”, the inspectors said this rarely happened in practice.

“Consequently they often have little sense of chronology and the possibility of establishing an overarching story and addressing broader themes and issues is limited,” they wrote.

The inspectors praised history teaching post14, but noted that only 32 per cent of pupils study it at GCSE level and even fewer post16. Although 66 per cent achieve A grades at GCSE, a third of A* grades are from independently educated pupils.

The report echoed concerns aired by academics and historians, including Kate Pretty, principal of Homerton College and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who said that Britain was losing a sense of shared identity, because children were not being taught basic general knowledge in primary school.

“It’s not secondary school that instills the deficit, but primaries. It’s the primary view of the great stories in the past, like Alfred burning the cakes, Magna Carta, Columbus sailing the ocean blue – all that sort of stuff,” she said. “The little tiny stories that make up the common thread which you can pull on, we’re expecting students to somehow implicitly know. It’s not about A-level knowledge of a particular subject, but a general web of understanding that binds us to a past. That seems to me is being lost somewhere in all of this.”

The report comes as the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority proposes allowing schools from next year to teach themes such as creativity and cultural understanding rather than individual academic subjects from the ages of 11 to 14.

The curriculum watchdog is already piloting a new GCSE syllabus in 70 schools where periods of history are replaced by themes including “conflict and its lasting impact” and “people’s diverse ideas”. Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, said he agreed with many of the points raised by Ofsted, which had been addressed in the revised secondary curriculum introduced last week.

“The new curriculum has strengthened the requirement that all pupils need to have a good chronological understanding of history. This is compulsory at primary Key Stages too,” he said, adding that they would improve the training of primary teachers.

However, Michael Gove, the Shadow Children’s Secretary, said the report underlined the dangers of the new curriculum. “The changes Ed Balls [the Education Secretary] announced last week would mean more of the flabby, woolly, ‘theme-based’ teaching this report warns us about,” he said.

“Ofsted underlines the importance of rigour and giving pupils a proper connected sense of what went on in the past. Ed Balls’s plans for five-minute lessons and writing Churchill out of the past are the complete opposite of that, and won’t give the next generation the understanding it deserves of our national story.”

On the curriculum

Key Stage 1 (age 5-7) Pupils learn about people’s lives and lifestyles and significant historical figures in Britain and around the world. They should be taught to place events and objects in chronological order.
Key Stage 2 (7-11) They learn about the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings; Britain and the world in Tudor times; and either the Victorian age or Britain since 1930, as well as European history, such as life in Ancient Greece, and world history, such as the Aztecs.
Key Stage 3 (11-14) Pupils learn about significant figures and events in the history of Britain, from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. They should cover the Battle of Hastings, the monarchy between 1500 and 1750, the Industrial Revolution and the Holocaust. History is compulsory in all schools in England from 5 to 14; state schools must then offer it to pupils aged 14 and over

What the experts say

“The most important thing for ten-year-olds is to give them an idea of the passage of time, because people have no idea what came between the Norman Conquest and the Second World War. What worked so well in years gone by were wall charts, where you could see by the portraits of the kings and queens how the fashions change and understand it in a sequential form.

Teachers used to complain that teaching about the monarchy was elitist, but the whole point was that the power was centred in the court and to pretend that was not the case and to imagine instead what it’s like to be a Norman peasant is a total waste of time. Without context, what are you teaching? Certainly key dates such as 1066 would help, but there has got to be a narrative, because history is about stories. The problem is that teachers start using television programmes to tell them, such as Blackadder, to talk about the First World War.

The danger is that the television image dominates and pushes out everything else. By resorting to television, teachers are also admitting that they are afraid of losing the attention of the class, which is why they rejected teaching by dates in the first place. I would like to see a core curriculum in primary schools, with caveats, because I’d also like to show the way Britain is a series of foreign invasions and absorption. This would show how families who arrived a few decades ago are linked with the Danes and Saxons who have been here for centuries.
– Antony Beevor, a historian and author of Berlin: The Downfall 1945, among others

“As a university academic who started out as a primary school teacher, I believe that children should be taught the meaning of time and space, a mixture of history and geography.

All historical events take place on given territories, so if they don’t know the rivers and places they can’t make sense of the events. In time, they need to get a sense of the long stretches, such as millions of years, and the short stretches, that is lives, as well as the sequence of events. As A. J. P. Taylor once said: “History is a simple subject because it’s just one thing after another.” But we have to instil the consequences when things happen, and what can happen as a result.

In my first history lesson for seven-year-olds, I remember taking in 100 pennies. Each represented a year, so they learnt what a century was and how many pennies were in their own life and how many in their mother or granny’s life.

This showed them the meaning of years, decades and a century. Another principle I used very effectively was to work backwards from their own experiences to past times through the generations. From what their parents lived through, to whether their grandfather rode a horse to work, things like that, ending up looking at Stonehenge. We got there eventually, but didn’t start with them because they couldn’t connect to it.

– Norman Davies, a historian and author of The Isles: A History, among others

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