Primary history

John Freeman
Sunday, March 13, 2011

According to the BBC, ‘History teaching in primary schools lacks an overarching narrative because teachers do not know enough, the schools watchdog Ofsted has said.’ This raises the whole question of what we expect teachers to ‘know’. The Kings and Queens of England? The detail of which events? The broad scope? Methods of historical enquiry? And that’s just history. Many years ago I worked to support primary teachers in the introduction of primary science – and certainly there were major issues about a lack of fundamental understanding – you just can’t teach science through worksheets by recipe. And I’m not saying I could do better if I were teaching history … I’m certain that I ‘don’t know enough’ about history to do it justice. I would like to bet that the key author of the Ofsted report was a historian. And I’ld like to ask them some pointed questions about science to see if they ‘know enough’!

Primary history

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