Thanks to Catherine Priggs, member of HA Secondary Committee, and Geraint Brown, HA Fellow, for this blogpost on how to use time gained in the best possible way for your history curriculum. They provide practical help to guide you in a curriculum review process.

Pupils on study leave? Exam season coming to an end? More non-contact time? Now is the perfect time to relax… and consider your curriculum.

History teachers are lucky enough to have considerable freedom to design and build the curriculum. Even within the framework of the National Curriculum and exam specifications, there is a huge scope of possible content choice. And at Key Stage 3 we have control over when we teach selected content, how our curriculum will hang together, and the types of historical learning pupils will develop.

In short, we have free rein over the scope, sequence, coherence, and rigour of our curriculum.

But with this freedom comes a great deal of responsibility and challenge:

• Topic selection is contentious.
• We need to think incredibly carefully about how to reinforce and disrupt prior learning, and how current learning enables future learning.
• We need to consider how we will make our curriculum cohere.
• And who doesn’t love a good wrestle over an enquiry question?

So we need to probe our approach to check it is robust and considered. To this end, you’ll find a series of questions at the bottom of this post. We hope they will support you in this quest to evaluate or build a high quality history curriculum by helping you to consider the four key curriculum elements.

And here’s how you might use questions in gained time:

• Find mutual non-contact time so that the department can meet as a team for a morning or afternoon (seek support for cover if this is not possible!).
• Then choose a few questions, or possibly one of the four elements of curriculum planning. Test a part of your curriculum with the questions you have chosen.
• If your responses to the questions tell you that a part of your curriculum is not robust enough (e.g. there are sizeable chronological gaps at Key Stage 3, or pupils don’t have the opportunity to look at the past in depth, e.g. no small stories/ microhistories/ case studies, in Year 8) make an action plan to address this. Try to be precise and strategic – you won’t be able to repair every issue overnight, and curriculum development is never finished! You could also use this analysis to inform your departmental development plan or priorities for the next academic year.
• Divide the work so that everyone has shared responsibility for fixing the issues.
• Plan to review the area you’re working on.

Please note these questions are a starting point, and not a checklist! The aim of these questions is, firstly, to support meaningful self evaluation. In addition, they will support meaningful conversations with your line manager about the curriculum. Curriculum design is never fully complete as we learn more from the subject community about what makes good history and good history teaching, but the questions will support your thinking whether you are at the start of the journey in a new school or renewing your curriculum once more.

Questions about the SCOPE of the curriculum

• What is the balance between British, European and world history? Local, national, international?

• What is the chronological spread of the curriculum?

• Does the curriculum reflect the diversity of your student body or of Britain in terms of race, gender, class, etc.? How far should it? How far does it/should it respond to current issues and affairs in the world?

• Whose voices are being heard? Whose narrative, or what type of narrative, is reflected in the curriculum? Is the curriculum too Whiggish, too white, too British, too…?

• What is not taught and why? Are particular aspects of world history ignored?

• Does local history feature and how is this used to support and strengthen the curriculum?

• Is there ‘scale-switching’ (e.g. from breadth to depth) to help pupils situate particular events in a broader framework or narrative?

Questions about the SEQUENCE of the curriculum

• Why this, why now: what is this content doing here?
• What is the rationale for the order of the topics and enquiries?
• Is the content sequenced in a way that builds, links to and reinforces prior learning?
• How does the sequencing create readiness for future learning?
• How do you ensure earlier content is still secure later on?

• What secure foundations of knowledge do pupils need [by the end of Y7, 8 , 9] that will act as a useful base on which to build later [at GCSE/A-Level]?
• What is the purpose and function of this part of the curriculum?
• How does sequencing support pupils’ chronological knowledge? How does it help pupils develop a sense of period?
• What ‘residue’ of knowledge do you expect pupils to retain over the key stages?

Questions about the COHERENCE of the curriculum

• What substantive concepts do pupils develop knowledge and understanding of over time?
• Do substantive concepts such as ‘power’, ‘religion’, ‘people’, ‘empire’, ‘revolution’ and ‘trade’ occur – and recur – throughout the curriculum?
• What specific factual knowledge do pupils need to gain or retain in one year so it can be manifested and operate and enable them to succeed in the next?
• What knowledge will pupils gain to be able to make meaningful comparisons across time and place?

• How do the types of questions that pupils ask and answer, or units they study, have resonance across the key stages?
• How is pupils’ developing knowledge helping them build chronological frameworks?
• Are there overarching questions or themes that are returned to help make links across the curriculum and join things together? What other strategies help to achieve this?

Questions about the RIGOUR of the curriculum

• Are the questions pupils are being asked to address increasing in challenge, enabling them to make progress in disciplinary and substantive knowledge?
• Has the department ‘wrestled’ with the wording of the enquiry question and carefully ‘chosen and planted’ them across the key stage?
• Is the Year 8 course more complex than the Year 7 course? Is this about detail, depth, concepts, independence, pace, the question…

• Does the curriculum reflect a clear understanding of what progress looks like in history?
• How do the enquiry questions look collectively – do they address the range of second-order concepts? Do they reinforce each other?
• What does it mean to get better at [causal reasoning] and how is this manifested in the type of question asked and specific topic being studied?

• Are the topics/enquiry questions grounded in and reflecting the [recent] scholarship of historians?
• How does the curriculum develop pupils’ evidential thinking?

See also this post from Richard Kennett and Hugh Richard for further support on reviewing your KS3 curriculum: Questions to help you review your KS3 curriculum / Historical Association (history.org.uk)