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
