Last updated: 18 May 2007

F: QCA perspective

The secondary curriculum review is providing the opportunity to evaluate the purpose and content of secondary school history and to make more explicit its contribution to the wider curriculum aims, values and purposes along with the Every Child Matters agenda.

The changes being made aim to ensure that the continuation of high standards, the subject is accessible to all pupils and school history is relevant to the needs of young people in the early 21st century. This work also continues on from the success of our Innovating with history website.

This year our evidence collected has indicated that the most essential kind of exemplification to support a revised key stage 3 history curriculum would be hard copy exemplar and guidance materials. QCA recognises this and has recently published some additional scheme of work units to support teachers.

One unit, 'How and why is the legacy of British rule in the Indian subcontinent interpreted in different ways?', suggests how teachers can cover the key background to the struggle for independence. It looks at why India was such an important part of the Empire and the events leading up to and after independence. It considers the impact of the key figures in the struggle for independence and to what extent the legacy of partition still influences the Indian subcontinent today. As part of our future review programme in history we will be evaluating the success of these new units of work and asking what additional resources are needed to support teachers in schools?

In addition, QCA believes that there is a real need to support teachers who are finding it difficult to develop personal learning skills and attributes through the subject. We are therefore producing further guidance on this issue as part of the secondary curriculum review.

The secondary curriculum review is also being used to address a number of other longstanding concerns relating to history. In particular, greater emphasis will be given at key stage 3 to developing pupils' chronological understanding and to diversity and its impact on periods, individuals, societies, events and developments studied.

Structural changes to A levels will mean that courses will become more coherent and content within these will be broadened so that there is less emphasis on the 20th-century dictatorships. Further opportunities for students to develop their investigative and independent learning skills will be introduced through a compulsory element of internal assessment in A level history and current regulations governing internal assessment will be tightened in order to restore public confidence in the use of coursework.

QCA continues to be concerned that history teachers often assign pupil levels within key stage 3 with pupils being over-assessed to meet schools' requirements for frequent reporting of levels. Of particular concern is the over use of summative assessment and the inconsistent quality of formative assessment.

As a result, guidance and exemplar materials have been published to support more effective teacher assessment at key stages 1,2 and 3. These are designed to help teachers identify, track and enhance pupil progress. QCA is keen to illustrate assessment as an integral part of teaching and learning across the key stages. How else can schools be encouraged to engage more fully with the principles of assessment for learning and share next practice with other schools?