Andrew Stacey-Chapman and Rebecca Sullivan

A curious notion held by both press and policymakers is that the historian is the expert even when the need for expertise calls for an understanding of what the History curriculum in schools looks like and how it should be implemented. Many round tables and expert groups can be found groaning with the weight of expertise yet remarkably light on anyone who actually teaches in a UK state primary or secondary school. Any review of the National Curriculum will invariably result in endless columns in tabloids and broadsheets listing what Professor X believes should be in the History curriculum. No other school subject elicits quite that level of press interest.¹

It is true many academics, not just historians, have a keen interest in how their subject is taught in schools, mostly with one eye on those young people whom they will eventually teach in tertiary education. However, for many, discussion about school curricula is treated as a parlour game. School History is a topic worth having a view on but, mysteriously, not one worthy of serious academic study or investment of significant time. Relatively few understand the disciplinary purpose of their subject in the curriculum, the competing pressures on subject, subject discipline, time and accountability measures with which teachers must grapple or that the vast majority of young people they teach will not be pursuing History at degree level.

Peter Mandler has a rare interest in that wider educational setting, in the variety of schools and pupils and the broader curricular requirements teachers are dealing with to create engaging and purposeful History curricula for their students.² As president of the Royal Historical Society and then the Historical Association during a period when the National Curriculum, GCSE and A-Level criteria were under review, Peter brought to these roles an understanding that school curricula are contested, living things that exist not in policy documents but in real-life interactions between teachers and their students. Central to this work is the powerful belief that history academics are, after all, teachers themselves.

In early February 2013, Rebecca was in her office listening to Parliament and expecting an announcement on GCSE reform. Andrew was half-way through his History PGCE at Cambridge. For both, the announcement by the Secretary of State that a full draft of the National Curriculum for History was being published for consultation was most unexpected.³ The document published for Key Stages 1–3 was derided by virtually the entire history community and the support given by the Royal Historical Society to the Historical Association in affecting change was vital.⁴ History was lucky that a period of significant curriculum reform – affecting all ages from four to eighteen – not only coincided with Peter’s presidency of the Royal Historical Society, but with Professor Arthur Burns as vice-president with Education as his brief. To have two highly respected and thoughtful academic historians in a position to comment with care and knowledge on the History curriculum helped history make strong representation to government at a difficult time for the discipline in schools. Arthur Burns represented the Royal Historical Society in many government round tables and – more importantly – in quieter and more detailed discussions which eventually led to the revised curriculum of September 2013.⁵ Arthur’s care in working closely with those who drafted a revised curriculum published for consultation in the summer of 2013 made a real difference. Both Peter and Arthur knew the September 2013 National Curriculum for History was not ideal, but that it was significantly better than the alternatives.

Curriculum change and development is not always a top-down dictate from government; teachers are affected by their students’ interests, by their local settings and by broader social change. Many academic experts fall into the trap of thinking the National Curriculum is a list of content teachers follow rather than a guidance document which can enable freedom to create and develop different stories for their students. A significant contribution from Peter was to articulate to a wide audience that, over the course of the last century, historical research has continuously broadened the range and diversity of the people and forms of human behaviour it explores, and that the content of the curriculum and of public examination specifications needs to be reviewed regularly in the light of current good scholarship.

Here, we see the role of Peter and other historians not just in studying the relationship between mass education and democracy, but in actively taking part in it. Perhaps the most important change in school History in recent decades has been the extent to which History teachers themselves have engaged with the processes of curricular thinking. Faced with changes to the National Curriculum and examination reform, a community of History teachers has taken up the collective challenge of shaping and reshaping the ‘stuff’ of school History to make it rigorous, wide-ranging and well-learned by students. At a whole-curriculum level, this is shown by teachers’ engagement with national debates about the curriculum in conference papers, peer-reviewed journal articles and on social media.⁶ However, it is perhaps more powerfully demonstrated by the confidence with which History teachers in UK schools make micro-curriculum decisions every lesson of every day. Faced with an unexpected extra hour of lesson time or, more often, an unexpected loss of time, History teachers are increasingly equipped to make these decisions in an informed way that maximises the curriculum’s impact on students. School History teachers, then, are not passive conduits between an expertly written National Curriculum and their students. Rather, with support from organisations like the Historical Association, thousands of school History teachers are themselves part of a process of democratisation in the historical profession by taking up the challenge of thinking about their discipline, their subject matter and how best to teach it to students. In doing so, teachers have taken up their role as experts in their own right.⁷ Those academics who have chosen to engage seriously with this process have been invaluable to recent developments in school History. And schools are, after all, where most people learn most of the history they know.