Richard Harris draws on their own and others' research to take stock of where the history teaching community is in terms of curriculum thinking. Harris argues that despite a number of positive developments in recent years, certain issues continue to have undesirable effects on curriculum design. Such issues include inertia and unclear rationales…

Jacob Olivey set out to design enquiries which would enable his pupils to reconstruct, using evidence, the perspectives of people in the past. In this article he shares in detail the planning and outcomes of two enquiries: one for Year 7 and one for Year 8. Olivey offers a example of 'the curriculum as the progression model', considering how to…

Mike Hill was concerned that his students were unable to genuinely inhabit the historical places they encountered in his lessons. Drawing on fields as varied as history-teacher research, philosophy, and literary and media theory, Hill identified ways to curate his students' constructions of 'secondary worlds' in the historical past, including…

Many history teachers will already be familiar with 'meanwhile, elsewhere...', a website offering freely downloadable homework resources on individuals, events and developments in world history. In this article the website's creators, Richard Kennett and Will Bailey-Watson, set out a curricular rationale for the project. They argue that using…

When planning a Key Stage 3 curriculum with his department, Will Bailey-Watson began to question some of the common sense orthodoxies regarding chronological sequencing and curriculum design. Drawing on pre-existing debates about curricular structuring in the history education community both in England and internationally, Bailey-Watson identified…

There are three basic strands to our lessons. How should we teach? What skills should we enable our students to build? What content should we use to deliver those skills? In this article Tony McConnell, who has been re-designing the curriculum in his school in response to a changed examination regimen, considers the issue of subject content. With…

Faced with cutting her Key Stage 3 curriculum to two years, Natalie Kesterton and her department were determined to do more with less. Not only did they want to ensure that their pupils developed a secure, wide-ranging knowledge of British and world history, they also wanted to address deficits in pupils' chronological security and 'sense of…

What, exactly, is learned knowledge? And why does it matter in history teaching? Does it matter? Michael Fordham seeks to use the general tenets of cognitive psychology to inform the debate about how history teachers might get the best from their students, in particular in considering the role of memory. Fordham surveys the latest research…

Frustrated by the low numbers of students from her comprehensive state school who expressed any interest in applying to Oxford or Cambridge to study history, Lucy Hemsley set out to explore ways in which she might both inspire and equip her students to do so. Her careful analysis of the explicit requirements of the two universities suggested that…

It has become a truism that Britain is a multi-cultural society yet, as Mohamud and Whitburn argue, there is still a great deal of thinking to be done by history teachers in accounting for this diversity in the classroom. Mohamud and Whitburn consider approaches to both curriculum and pedagogy when it comes to teaching about the Somali community…

Joanne Pearson reflects on her experiences as a history teacher and teacher educator, considering the ways in which she has seen women represented in the history curricula of different schools in England. She makes the case that greater attention needs to be paid by history teachers to the criteria against which they make decisions about the…

How do we relate to the past? Does it tell us who we are? Is it a source of examples to follow and mistakes to avoid? Or can we go beyond that to something genuinely historical? Arthur Chapman and Jane Facey argue that as history teachers we have a responsibility to instill in our students a sense of historical consciousness which enables them to…