ABSTRACT
The effective teacher needs a wide range of subject knowledge and a large repertoire of professional skills. When we made this statement in Unit 1 it served as a useful reminder of how complicated teaching is, but it still begs many questions. What does it mean, for example, for a primary teacher to ‘know’ a subject? There are difficult problems in specifying this. What a primary teacher can be expected to know about history must be very different from what a historian knows, and probably very different from what a secondary teacher knows. But what does a primary teacher need to know?
