ABSTRACT
As a relatively inexperienced professional taking over the role of history coordinator it will be useful to reflect on the change in the quality and quantity of history teaching your colleagues will have experienced in primary schools over the last five years. The national curriculum made history teaching mandatory on a profession which had little experience of teaching it and with meagre resources at its disposal. HMI surveys of 1978 and 1989 found little evidence of history being taught and where it was being taught they judged it to be less than adequate in 80 per cent of infant classes and 66 per cent of junior classes seen. This probably means that you, as the history coordinator, will be working with many people who may, until several years ago, never have considered history to be an essential ingredient in their curriculum provision, except as a bolted-on fragment to a topic whose central thrust was some other area. An OFSTED report (1993), however, notes that history in primary schools now has a ‘significant and accepted place’. In 1992–3 standards in history were satisfactory or better in 80 per cent of Key Stage 1 lessons and 70 per cent of Key Stage 2 lessons seen. The inspectors praised the teaching of the skills of sequencing and chronological understanding and the confidence of children in handling sources. Your job, then, would appear to be significantly easier now than if you had taken it over five years ago. History seems to have won an accepted place in the primary curriculum and its teaching appears to be steadily improving. To continue this upward momentum requires a clear picture of where your school is, in history curriculum development terms, so that realistic goals can be set for the future benefit of children’s historical knowledge and understanding. This chapter aims to help you define the key tasks of the curriculum coordinator for history and offer you a range of practical activities that will assist you in your new role.
