History, as a critical academic discipline, aims precisely at interrogating memory and the myths it generates (Evans, 2011). But more importantly, the historical consciousness it engenders helps pupils understand the complexity and uncertainty of the past, establish their own worldview, and construct their identity (Seixas, 2006; Yu, 2022). Nevertheless, research has found that there has been a generally low number of pupils who would continue to study the subject after key stage three (KS3), and there has been a growing divide between pupils that have access to the ‘powerful knowledge’ provided by history, and those that do not (Harris and Haydn, 2009; Harris, Downey and Burn, 2012). To get to the core of this issue, we need to ask: how is history – the process of cultivating a historical consciousness – taught in secondary schools? With reference to academic literature and recent research, this essay critically evaluates the curriculum, teaching and assessment of history in a comprehensive state school (anonymised as School A) in the United Kingdom (UK). Discussions are based on history education at key stage four (KS4), which can be seen as one of the most formative and crucial phase of a pupil’s learning journey: when students start to think and investigate like novice historians. Yet, students do not enter school, let alone KS4, as tabula rasa; so any meaningful analysis of the KS4 history curriculum and assessment requires a discussion on their learning journey in KS3.
History is a compulsory subject for all KS3 students in School A. Following the National Curriculum, the overall intent of the school’s history curriculum is to provide chronological coherence from the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the end of Cold War in 1991, and to deepen pupils’ understanding and appreciation of the past. Through lessons, educational visits and termly summative assessments, the curriculum aims to prepare pupils for the next stage of their education and employment by developing their historical skills. In short, the overall aim of history education in KS3 is to prepare for KS4: to build up a substantive knowledge-base, concepts and introduce ways to acquire second order knowledge, such as investigating, interpreting, analysing, evaluating, and assessing evidence as well as formulating and supporting their own judgements. Yet, from my own teaching experience, a lot of pupils struggle with second order historical skills at KS3 (see e.g. Sellin 2018). In reflection, KS3 history lessons should strike a fine balance between teaching skills, knowledge and igniting interest in history. Only with a strong command of all and a fervent interest in the subject could afford pupils a firm base to continue their history education in KS4 (see e.g. Biddulph and Adey, 2004; Harris and Haydn, 2009; ASCL, 2015; Carr, 2016).
Progressing to KS4, pupils start to engage with in-depth substantive knowledge and concepts in four historical topics, namely Elizabethan England, Medicine through Time, Superpower Relations in Cold War, and Weimar Germany. It is designed to help pupils “gain insight into the issues of the past and thus an insight into the issues of today” (School A, 2022). Although School A’s KS4 history curriculum does expose students to a range of historical periods and timescales; places and societies; historical fields of enquiry; people, groups and experiences, it has two major limitations. First and foremost, the curriculum is deemed too Eurocentric. This is in part tied to the fact that students do not have any influence over the choice of the historical topics they study. From my experience, pupils fail to relate to the curriculum and question why, but only compulsorily “studying about this woman from 500 years ago that does not represent [them]”. This rings true to most of the KS4 history pupils in School A, as roughly half of them in 2022-23 have minority status. According to a survey (Mansfield 2022: 3), 71% of KS4 teachers felt the curriculum lacked the scope to include ethnic minority history, and 78% either disagreed or strongly disagreed that the exam boards were doing enough to help. Another study (Harris & Reynolds, 2014: 483–84) has found that ethnic minority students enjoy history ‘but not necessarily what is taught in school’, and consequently are less likely to want to take the subject. While the GCSE history curriculum revision in 2016 dictates that British history must form a minimum of 40% of the assessed content over the full course, there is still rooms for introducing a more culturally-diverse curriculum within the limitations of exam preparation. As Bones (2021) demonstrated, well-worn narratives in GCSE specifications could be rendered more complex and nuanced, challenging pupils’ assumptions and building their confidence to engage in complication. For example, pupils could be given sources to compare medical practice in medieval Europe and in other parts of the world, such as Africa, China and India. In reflection, teachers can take reference from the free-to-use RETEACH website to explore hitherto neglected aspects of the specification. This will, as a result, enable pupils to offer more comprehensive answers when it comes to tackling exam questions.
Furthermore, the deeper historical debates of feminism, multiculturalism and postcolonialism could be further integrated into the curriculum. For example, the role of female in medicine and relation with superstition (e.g. witch-hunting) could be explored. Although these exercises seem, at first glance, irrelevant to exam preparation, it can be conducive in consolidating pupils’ understanding on the important role that superstition and religion have played in the early developments of medicine in Europe. This echoes with Lyndon-Cohen (2021)’s analysis, which called for schools to, rather than merely diversifying their curriculum, decolonise it, such as by making lesson content more representative and bringing marginalised voices into the classroom. In reflection, although it is certainly the teacher’s responsibility to explain and justify why specific historical topics are important, the curriculum design and lesson planning could benefit from cultural responsive pedagogy. This theory advocates that teachers should consider pupils’ cultural and ethnic identities and knowledge fundamental in curriculum design (Harcourt 2015). A culturally responsive curriculum should also stress the relationship between students’ culture and learning, incorporate pupils’ interests into the curriculum, and make connections with their real-life experience (Tanase 2022). Reflecting on my experience of using the recent COVID-19 experience to teach the history of the Black Death to year 10 students, this strategy worked effectively.
Secondly, further de-incentivising the study of history was a result of lacking firm prior understanding on historical context and a substantive knowledge-base. From my experience, while most of the KS4 thematic studies require students to have substantive prior historical knowledge, KS4 pupils actually started with inadequate understanding of the core issues of Tudor history and little chronological understanding of the middle ages and the wider international relations in Europe and beyond. This could be a result of the hugely uneven home-based learning experience due to the disruption in schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, but could also be a result of curriculum design at KS3. It also hints at the importance of ongoing interleaving and revisiting knowledge in assessments to maximise what pupils retain (Carr, 2016: 28). As thorough attention to chronology is a foundation for wider goals such as historical analysis and argument, the lack of solid prior historical knowledge makes it difficult for teaching to represent the work of historians in authentic ways (see e.g. Carr and Counsell, 2014; Jenner, 2022) and for teachers to treat pupils as novice historians, such as by giving agency and learning responsibility to pupils, and encouraging them to find their own historical truth. Furthermore, the need for exam-based teaching might risk sacrificing development of pupils’ inquiry and independent research skills. To make teaching represent the work of historians in authentic ways, teachers could consider introducing oral history elements into the GCSE curriculum, which would then diversify and enrich the pupils’ understanding of the existing specification, as well as teach pupils more about the process of historical enquiry (see e.g. Banks, 1997). For example, through encouraging pupils to interview their relatives as part of the Cold War component of the Edexcel GCSE specification, Toettcher and West (2021) found that oral history helped pupils to appreciate the complexities of truth and perspective, and expand their understanding on Cold War experience from all over the world.
In addition to substantive knowledge and concepts, through studying History at KS4, School A also aims to refine pupils’ historical skills they have gained at KS3. In year 10, history education focuses on skills including analysis, comparison, and identifying factors, change and continuity; whereas in year 11, the curriculum introduces ‘source skills’, such as judging usefulness of sources and assessing and analysing validity of opinion. With these skills, students can think more critically about information and about how the past has been presented, and make secure, well informed judgements that they will be able to justify and support. These skills are ‘transferrable’ to other KS5 subjects such as history, Politics, Philosophy and Sociology (see e.g. Goalen, 1999). The operational effectiveness of the curriculum, however, could only be measured through regular assessments that track pupils’ progress and attainment.
At KS4, substantive historical knowledge, concept and second order skills are taught in the form of ‘tasks’ in lessons, which are integrated as formative assessments for learning. To keep the lesson differentiated, basic and challenge lesson objectives are set with bloom’s taxonomy, and the use of which is beneficial for developing students’ critical thinking skills (see e.g. Godsell 2022). Teaching students with Bloom’s taxonomy are also conducive to the preparation for GCSE as well as further study in history. Most, if not all, lessons are taught through PowerPoint presentations with the help of textbooks and handouts, in which three to four tasks related to the objectives are prepared for students to complete. In reflection, although there are certain degrees of planned class interactions, such as learning through whole class and small group ‘think-pair-share’ discussion tasks, lessons could be further improved with object learning. Artefacts can turn abstract concepts visible and tactile, help with memory retention and refreshing pupils’ interest in history (Yu, 2022).
In School A, formative assessments are built into both lesson and homework planning. They are used to inform teachers in lesson planning and teaching, and the understanding of student needs and their misconceptions. For example, pupils are requested to complete assessments like revision booklets and online revision courses on topics they have learnt before in order to refresh their memory. Pupils identified in these formative and summative assessments as needing further help will have to attend subject ‘intervention’ or revision sessions to help them improve. Lessons also include numerous whole-class assessments at learning checkpoints, such as using whiteboards to check progress and post-it notes to indicate opinion on the board. For appraising learning strategies, teachers also regularly explore adopting alternative assessments such as asking pupils to organise their knowledge in writing or drawing ‘timelines’, which have been demonstrated by Carr and Counsell (2014) to be useful both as an informal and ongoing way of strengthening cumulative knowledge and as an accessible assessment tool to define proper progress for all. Another common tool for assessment of learning that the department and I have used regularly is the spider diagram, or mind map. Not only does it visualise and organise historical information, factors and relationships, it also helps to model the pupils, on a metacognitive level, into historians in ways of thinking and analysing. From my teaching experience, this tool is not as effective for pupils who are ‘coasters’ or struggling learners (cf. Tubin & Farchi, 2022), who tend to simply copy information instead of thinking how they connect with each other. In reflection, one can take reference from a physical ‘spiderweb’ model that Godsell (2022) has developed, which involves pupils in physically connecting evidences to make an argument, in order to support critical thinking and the development of voice. This process can be further enhanced by peer-learning and group inquiry tasks as pupils, from my observation, tend to learn better from their peers. In fact, to maximise peer-learning, I found it useful in my teaching practice to ask pupils to come up with their own quiz questions in groups, making the formative assessment more fun and engaging. Pupils can learn from both determining what knowledge is more important to be set into quiz questions, and clearing misconceptions whilst coming up with a correct answer as well as answering other questions. Moreover, this exercise gives agency to pupils and turns the classroom into a constructivist learning environment.
Yet, although teachers have much freedom in curating their own formative assessments, the current KS4 summative assessment policy at School A – and arguably also the curriculum – is exam-driven and led by specification, which is acutely dependent on levels of literacy. The policy is aligned with other subjects as part of an overarching school policy, which standardises the end-of-unit tests, termly ‘mock’ exams, with GCSE-style questions. Hammond (2014)’s research has cautioned any history teaching approach that is driven by GCSE mark-schemes rather than by the motivation to build deeper and more wide-ranging knowledge. But worse, this makes the subject less accessible to students with special educational needs (SEN; Harris, Downey and Burn 2012: 431-432). From my teaching experience, I have found that those pupils, especially those operating at low literacy level, are able to access the content but not the summative written assessment. For example, a pupil of mine was able to answer my questions orally during in-lesson formative assessments but could not produce a single word in an exam-style test. When I asked them why, they said ‘I just cannot put it down on paper. You can ask me. I know everything.’ To improve on assessment strategies, teachers should be able to modify curricula and assessment arrangements, making the assessment of historical knowledge and understanding less reliant on levels of literacy. For example, teachers could introduce a ‘mixed-constitution’ form of assessment that involves one-to-one spoken assessments, producing spoken presentations, designing television documentary, and drawing a historical timeline (see e.g. Edmunds & Nalley, 2006; Pace, 2011; Fordham, 2013; Carr & Counsell, 2014). I have in fact successfully trialled one of these strategies by asking a pupil with SEN to draw a storyboard to explain their views instead of writing a conventional answer. Nevertheless, although these alternative assessment strategies could indeed make history more accessible to pupils on school level, a holistic, paradigm change is needed to progress and attainment is fairly recognised on the official level. But whatever the form of assessment would be, it is only through the self-evaluation, ‘backfeeding’ process – when they consider how they can improve - that pupils learn the most. It completes the cycle of assessment, rendering it meaningful and effective.
In summary, as a senior teacher put, curriculum design and delivery is a ‘perpetual project’ (S, personal communications, 4 March, 2023). While the curriculum and assessment in School A is far from perfect, it is to a large extent successful in its stated aim: to enable pupils to think more critically about information and about how the past has been presented and make secure, well informed judgements that they will be able to justify and support. Together, the substantive knowledge, concepts and skills pupils learnt in KS4 inform their learning journey in KS5 and beyond. Reflecting on my experience, it is only through continuous critical self-evaluation, research-informed practice as well as engagement with the ever-changing student needs that a curriculum can be improved and perfected. History teachers also need to understand their important role as the middleperson between the academia and the public: they both represent and embody the discipline of history when teaching their pupils (cf. Fordham 2012). They need to think ‘outside the box’ for creative solutions to issues in curriculum and assessment because there is no ‘golden standard’ nor one-size-fits-all universal solution. Teachers need to exercise a high level of sensitivity and self-consciousness when evaluating their pupils’ learning, putting their needs at the core of teaching and planning (cf. Tai & Roth, 2008).
Key words: assessment for learning, assessment of learning, teaching, pedagogy, history, KS4, UK
Biography: Joseph Yu is currently a secondary history and politics teacher in London. He completed his doctorate in Anthropology at Oxford University researching the development of museum in postcolonial Hong Kong. Trained in anthropology, history, international relations and education, Joseph's research interest lies in the development of colonial social institutions.
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Note on Abbreviations
Please note that names of teachers, parents and pupils mentioned in this essay have been anonymised and abbreviated to protect the identity of those who have been quoted.
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