Developing a Key Stage 3 History Curriculum — Part 1: The Initial Thought Processes

One of my big tasks over the past two years since taking over as Head of History at my current school has been redesigning and improving the Key Stage 3 History curriculum. In this series of posts I want to set out the following:

1. The thinking behind the initial design of the curriculum.

2. The rationale behind the Year 7 curriculum

3. The rationale behind the Year 8 curriculum

4. My evaluation of how it went up to the cessation of normal teaching this spring.

5. Next steps for September 2020 (fingers crossed we have some remote semblance of normality by then even if, I’m sure, things will be pretty different).

To be clear — I’m not saying I’ve got all or indeed many answers. There are some big issues both with the design and execution of what we’ve done so far — fundamentally I’ve got some things wrong on this while in other places we’re inhibited by subject knowledge gaps, being resource poor, time or other constraints.

I do hope this might help, reassure or inspire other Heads of Department facing similar challenges during this period of unwanted extended thinking time that we know find ourselves with (as well planning time, parenting time and all the other demands on our time we have during this fundamentally weird time).

To start with, I think it’s important to set out some of the factors relevant to my context that have helped to shape the content choices selected. I teach in a rural school in a very small town in North Yorkshire — but an area that sits between Leeds and York, and touches on ex-mining communities to the north of Castleford. It’s not ethnically diverse at all, but we do teach the full ability range and it is certainly diverse in terms of the social ‘class’ of students. Our Key Stage 3 is 2 years long, which while not preference was something I’d been used to in my previous school.

Having taught in Leeds for 8 years previously, I think one of the things that was really different was that many (but by no means all) students were, how shall I put it, a little less ‘worldly’ than many of the students I taught in Leeds. Having grown up in a small village near a small town this is not something I was unfamiliar with — and one of my very formative life experiences entering adulthood was the shock of going from that narrow (for want of a better word) environment to going to university in Sheffield — it was like another world and I felt really unprepared for it. So helping our students now to manage this is something that I am keen to do.

As a subject, History had been a popular one in the school, but results had been in decline for a little bit. My analysis was that perhaps the teaching had, thanks to other influences like perceptions of what OFSTED wanted or the idea more common a few years ago that ‘less is more’ in terms of instruction and curricular substance, gone away from the core features of effective teaching, and effective History teaching in particular. When I encountered students at GCSE, it seemed as though they didn’t really know an awful lot and couldn’t remember as much of what they’d done at Key Stage 3 as I would have liked.

So I wanted to make sure that the new curriculum would be beefed up in terms of greater substantive knowledge in particular, and that students would be expected to remember more of it. Additionally, I wanted to make sure that the knowledge covered would revolve around two key themes. One would be the ‘big’ story of British history — I wanted students to have a good overview of the key highlights in British history — but that this would go beyond 1066, the Tudors and the Second World War. I do think it’s really important that students have a good grounding in this from a cultural capital point of view — but of course a key question is ‘what island story should we tell?’ (hence the inclusion of the rather speculative last topic in Year 8 which I’ve by no means fully thought through yet). Second would be to ensure students had a good grounding in the history of the wider world, with particular reference to groups and civilisations often considered as ‘other’ in British society. Hence the inclusion of topics like the Islamic World, the Crusades, the British Empire, challenges to racial injustice, and so on. Here, things like the RHS Report in Diversity in History, a intellectually stimulating email discussion with Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (a fabulous History student and now incredible poet at a school I taught at previously), the work of the York Clio group, teachers like Nick Dennis amongst others, reading Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I Don’t Talk to White People About Race have all helped here — although still lots more to do! I wanted students to at least have ‘bumped into’ a wider array of the rich tapestry of human experience than they might otherwise have done. Hopefully that comes through in the choice of topics that you can see below.

I also wanted to ensure we complemented, rather than duplicated, our examination content. We study Medicine, Western Front Historic Environment, American West, Anglo-Saxons and Normans and Weimar and Nazi Germany 1918–1939 at GCSE (Edexcel) and Russia 1917–1991, Mao’s China, Lancastrians, Yorkists and Henry VII 1399–1509, and the Civil Rights Movement as coursework at A-level (also Edexcel). Hence, therefore, the omission of the traditional 1066 unit (although the Conquest is discussed in the first topic of Year 7), as well as skipping from the Causes of WW1 to the Holocaust in Year 8.

In terms of designing the structure of the curriculum, the biggest influence here was, I think, Richard Kennett. I wasn’t able to attend his talk on curriculum at Leeds Trinity in Autumn 2018, but I did watch the Historical Association’s video of it and that helped me rationalise the problem I had of how to ensure students had a knowledge-rich and broad curriculum in a 2 year timespan. The solution was to make sure my topics were shorter and punchier and not too sprawling. Each of my topics has about 4–6 learning episodes within it and each whole topic shouldn’t take more than about 5 weeks if you include assessment, DIRT and so on. I borrowed heavily from his ideas to help me design my Schemes of Learning — see below for an example on the Causes of the First World War (one of my personal favourite topics).

Of course, along with curriculum goes assessment and here I’ve found the work of Michael Fordham probably most influential here , along with general principles of assessment design advocated by the likes of Daisy Christodoulou amongst others. So the basic idea was that we would do the following:

1. Mid-topic knowledge checks within each of the main topics — in the form of basic recall and multiple choice questions — to build in explicit retrieval practice (in addition to more informal forms of retrieval done through regular lessons). See below:

2. An end of topic extended task — could be a straightforward essay, or piece of extended source or interpretation analysis such as the example below on Industry (Y8).

3. A summative assessment, sat in exam style conditions, after every 3 topics covering knowledge from across those topics. Our first Y7 example is below (and I know this is a bit too GCSE exam question style-y at the moment — I’m very interested to see what other schools do here — I just give students a mark out of 24 or 28 or whatever rather than a made up grade):

[When I feedback on those (as I do at GCSE) I report to students information like the average mark for the class, as well as who was in the top 5 or top 10 in the group.]

This stuff is the beginning point — as I’ll discuss later we’ve got loads to do get our assessment in a really good place. But it’s a start and better than what we had before.

Ideally, we’d have got this all planned and ready to rock and roll in September of 2019 — but it was quite tricky. First of all, we’re a small department (3 of us). Second, one of my colleagues has another substantive role in school and the other member of staff relocated down south and so we had a new colleague, an NQT (an excellent one I might add). So I took a lot of the work for setting this up on my own which meant that I was planning the granular detail as I went along through the year. Not ideal of course but the only practical solution really.

There were also some gaps. The National Curriculum states that we need a thematic study which isn’t included above. We had a rather long induction period for Year 6s of three weeks in the summer so we put together a ‘Migration through Time’ unit for that. An explicit local element is missing here — this is as much down to a subject knowledge issue here, certainly on my part. We’ve tried to reference local examples, for example in our Year 8 Industry unit, but it is a definite weak spot moving forward.

I was also aware from the start that we’ve gone heavy on the knowledge at the expense of the disciplinary side of things. We do discuss sources and interpretations within our topics but it’s probably still a bit informal at the moment. In the time we have I wanted students to build up a body of knowledge of the past to help contextualise their later studies. We do spend more time at KS4 looking at how historians use sources and the issue of interpretations. You might well strongly disagree with that decision and to be honest, you might be right. I just wanted to make sure our students knew more stuff than they did before, as a starting point. Probably here I’ve been influenced by the WLFS History approach of Robert Peal and Louis Everett — as a department we quite like their Knowing History books (and they are dead cheap which helps a cash-strapped HoD with not many existing good textbooks in the department) and they go down a knowledge heavy route.

One of the other challenges has been about being realistic about what’s possible. You go on twitter and you get blown away by what schools are doing and how ambitious they are. Certainly I’ve been inspired by many different colleagues both in the History community and in the ‘knowledge-rich’ movement to be more ambitious about what we get our kids to do and learn about. However it’s going to take time to get to those levels — seeing curriculum development as an unfinished, evolutionary process has been an important mindset to get in.

To me curriculum development is very messy, it’s never finished, and you keep going back to the drawing board. You’ll make mistakes and never get it perfect. That’s probably why it’s so interesting to do, especially in a subject like History where the curriculum is highly contested.

In my next two posts, I’m going to explain the rationale behind the Year 7 and Year 8 topics more closely and look at the content selection, how things link together and what we do around those assessments mentioned above at a more granular level.