There’s a reason why this was dropped in the early 1990s! It just doesn’t work, and it led to all kinds of distortions (summarised here).

www.history.org.uk/publications/resource/9667/whats-the-wisdom-on-evidence-and-sources?srsltid=AfmBOoqod19WnNU2D-c2QxmZrRQB2eaMs0bDZgzsu1Agh1_mnPnpPVIh

Really interesting blog. On the point about what we want pupils to remember, I think this is where the tasks that accompany stories come in. What questions do we ask? What details do we drill (and which do we leave in the background)? Which words do we drill to ‘stamp’ the core knowledge?

Thanks Alistair! Really glad you enjoyed it.

As does the experience of being at a pretty standard secondary school in the late noughties! Autoethnography?

I love Teaching History to bits, but you can’t use it as a record of what most history teachers thought / think.

I think the approach Daisy Christodoulou takes in 7 Myths is more useful here. The many Ofsted reports she cites, and the 2007 National Curriculum, tell a different story to TH.

Hmmm. I wouldn’t say progressive history teaching is a rejection of knowledge altogether? Like you say, no one (?) ever said ‘we shouldn’t also teach any knowledge’. But it’s also fair to say that there was a much greater emphasis on discovery, group work, source skills c. 2005.

Especially since the post-2013 reforms were framed in opposition to earlier approaches.

I think if someone wrote the case for ‘progressive history teaching’, and they set out clearly which aspects of ‘traditional history teaching’ they’ve got an issue with, they might get more traction.

Obviously the world is more complicated than any model, but I do think it’s a shame that we seem to have abandoned those labels.

In my experience as a mentor, lots of new teachers find it really difficult to make sense of the education landscape in 2024 without labels

Out of interest, do you think progressive / traditional is a useful way of describing different educational approaches? I feel like people discussed this on Twitter ages ago, but can’t remember what / if there was a consensus within UK history teachers.

I just don’t agree. Thinking about education/knowledge ‘as a thought exercise’ leads to abstractions. Needs to start from experience: what specific things do my pupils find difficult about history, what do / will they find interesting, what stuff do I think is important from the to know…

None of this is possible if they can’t say the word ‘relic’, or can’t remember what a relic is in a week’s time.

If you asked history teacher in China whether kids there should learn about the Song Dynasty, they’d be really confused.

Because they’re at school in the UK? Obviously they should leave about European history in the last 1,000 years?