Booklets

These six documents, originally conceived as course booklets, provide an introduction to the teaching and learning of history in primary schools as well as an outline of the subject knowledge required. They reflect my belief that history is a creative subject but one that is chiefly valuable for the insights that it provides into human nature past and present. It requires imagination but it is based on evidence. To reconcile these two perspectives needs both factual knowledge and a sense of underlying pattern. This is what these documents have been designed to achieve.

Thanks are due to the many unacknowledged colleagues and students who have contributed to what follows. If they recognise their ideas I hope they will accept my lame excuse that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

  • Teaching History in the Primary School: An Introduction

    The 1960s and 1970s saw many changes in primary schools. The Plowden Report (1967) had established that the child was 'a lamp to be lit, not a vessel to be filled'. In a developing world knowledge was seen as much less important than the ability to learn new skills. Teaching methods needed to change in order to stimulate childrens' interests and encourage them to work more independently...

  • Teaching History in the Primary School: History Around Us

    'History is a fable that everyone believes.' So wrote the 18th Century philosopher and playwrite Voltaire. This module is mainly concerned with the history that is real, the history that still exists around us in the shape of buildings, artefacts and landscapes, the history which is part of our everyday lives. At the same time it develops the approach taken in the introductory teaching and learning module in its search for what we might call a 'comprehensive' or three dimensional view of the past, one that is clearly a workable alternative to the present...

  • Curriculum Leadership in the Primary School: History

    The new National Curriculum of 1988 imposed a host of new obligations on primary school teachers. Not least of these was the duty to acquire or re-acquire the subject knowledge necessary to teach all ten of its subjects in the detail laid down. Until 1988 most primary school teachers had regarded themselves as generalists whilst the cornerstone of the so-called 'progressive' approach (which by then was almost universal in schools) was the topic...

  • Early Societies: Britain and the Ancient World

    How do you get a place in the history books? As we know from recent tragic events most ordinary people are famous by accident. Some become famous because they're heroes or criminals; a handful are famous simply because they were present at a dramatic event and described what they saw (like Samuel Pepys and the Great Fire of London). Some are famous like Lindow Man or the 'Otzi' the Ice-Man because they provide unique evidence of a whole culture or way of life...

  • The Tudors - A Century of Change

    This booklet consists of a series of short essays on different aspects of Tudor England, together with some suggestions for teaching the period to primary school children. It isn't in any sense a complete or comprehensive history, simply a personal choice of themes that may help the reader to see the period in context. There was no sudden break in 1485 or in 1603: the Tudors inherited a medieval system of government which they left almost unchanged to their Stuart successors, despite the many changes that occurred as a result of the Reformation...

  • The Victorians - Towards the Modern World

    What does the word Victorian mean? Clearly it's more than just the time when Victoria reigned, otherwise the phrase 'Victorian values' would make little sense. Ragged children, thundering mills, fog, dark clothes, oppressive morals, unquestioning deference; cold, misery, over-crowding, gaslight; Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Florence Nightingale; operations without anaesthetic or antiseptic; explorers and missionaries, machine guns and Zulus, Darwin, Brunel and the railway; corsets, top hats and the Music Hall: all these are aspects of Victorian Britain and they all have one thing in common. Though familiar, they seem very strange, cut off from us by the mobile 'phone, the internet and television...

  • Oral and Visual History

    History, as we know, is not the same as what actually happened the past: it is a story, sometimes based on a very selective use of evidence, that makes sense to the historian. As such it has always had a rather uneasy relationship with 'objects' whether they are the homely finds of archaeologists or great cultural monuments such as the Parthenon or the Mona Lisa...

  • Modern World History

    Modern world history is difficult territory for the primary school teacher. Not only do the issues underlying many of its conflicts seem incomprehensible to young minds but there is also the cruelty: the Vikings may have been fierce but the damage they caused was merely local - nothing to compare with the clinical massacre of six million Jews by the Nazis or the equally methodical massacres carried out by Stalin in his attempt to modernise Russia...