Developing a Key Stage 3 History Curriculum: Part 2 — Why we included what we included (and why we didn’t include what we excluded)? Year 7 Version

In my previous post on this topic I outlined the initial thought processes behind the revamping of the History curriculum in my current school. In this post, I’m going to take a look at the specifics of what was intended to be in there as of September 2019, to outline some of the thinking behind that and then perhaps to make a few comments on how it went up to the point that the world changed in March 2020.

I want to note at this stage that I am not some kind of genius original thinker here. I’m trying to cobble together some of the very good ideas of the online History community, with a few of my own, to try to meet the exacting demands of the National Curriculum in a 2 year course. It is messy and imperfect. A lot is determined by what I can resource and where my subject knowledge is (which is not as strong for pre-20th Century History). Again because of time I’ve prioritised the substantive over the disciplinary — something I’m looking to address a bit in the revised version of this which I’ll discuss in a later post.

A reminder of what the initial outline looked like (each topic would last about 4–5 weeks):

Immediately there’s an issue with the above image. In my school we had an extended transition for new Year 7 students where they would come into school for the last three weeks of their Year 6 (as part of our timetable rollover arrangements). Annoyingly, not all of the students would be in as one or two of our feeders kept them in their school for most of that period. My solution to that was to devise a Migration through Time thematic unit for this period which borrowed heavily on the resources in the Monarchs, Monks and Migrants textbook produced by Pearson. One of my big foci for this curriculum was to broaden student horizons away from the ‘northern, predominantly white, village’ world that the catchment come from. In the revised curriculum for 2020/21 (where that extended transition clearly won’t be in place) my aim is to lead off with this unit. This will hopefully also help develop student knowledge of historical periods and chronology which I think is a weakness for many of them coming out of primary school.

Year 7 proper then started with a heavy diet of the Medieval world. First of all, I decided to abandon the traditional ‘Why did William win the Battle of Hastings?’ unit — without entirely ignoring the Norman Conquest it must be said. Why? Well, we teach the Anglo-Saxons and Normans unit at GCSE (Edexcel) and I was keen in two years not to overly duplicate GCSE content in KS3. Secondly, I think that question and topic is a bit old hat. Thirdly, I wanted to focus more on what it was like for ordinary people in medieval England and some key developments within that (the advent of Christianity, the Norman Conquest and the Black Death). Unfortunately I think I got this wrong — my scheme of work ended up being arranged chronologically roughly in the order above — and I actually think given the enquiry question for this topic, I needed to go thematic — perhaps looking at the following:

• Women
• Religion
• Health and Disease
• Law and Order
• Working life

So this unit needs looking at again and it may be we focus more on the Normans itself again as it’s a bit easier to resource and as a department our knowledge of this is stronger. Thankfully, the excellent NQT we appointed to start in September 2019 is a medievalist so I can see some delegation homing into view here!!!

We then move on to look at the Islamic World and the Crusades. I wanted students to be able to see that the Islamic world was arguably much more advanced than medieval England at that time and perhaps help to challenge one or two preconceptions students might have about Islam and the Middle East more generally. Within this we looked at the story of the foundation of Islam, the Arab Conquests and Baghdad as a centre of learning within the Islamic World. One of the big challenges is that geographical knowledge of students of this region is quite poor (this touches on, I believe, some of the things Mike Hill touched on his curricularium talk), so one of the tasks I do to help with this is a map quiz as seen below:

We then move on to look at the Crusades — as a way to try to bring together the Medieval Life work and the Islamic worlds work. This time I decided that we would focus mainly on the First Crusade, and look at the causes, events and consequences of this in depth. I wanted a depth element having done a lot of ‘breadth’ stuff so far, and preferred the first one over the Third Crusade (the obvious other choice) as it is less Anglo-centric and there’s enough of that in the curriculum already. Again the Monarchs, Monks and Migrants book had quite a lot of useful stuff that I could magpie to help with resourcing here.

Key Topic 4 returns to the Medieval world with an examination of medieval monarchy between 1100 and 1500. Learning from my previous lessons on the medieval life topic, I did go down more of a thematic approach this time, as follows:

• Introduction (using the Dream of Henry I picture below and a big picture timeline of key events that we read through, unpicking the key vocabulary, and categorise, also below).
• Kings and the Church (looking at Becket and then King John’s problems in this area).
• Kings and the Barons (focusing on John and then Henry III and the de Montfort Parliament as I really wanted that in to set up later work on the Civil War).
• Kings and the Peasants (focusing on the Peasants’ Revolt).

I actually think I quite liked this approach (and it ensured the unit did not get too sprawling as has happened when, for example, I’ve tried to bring in Edward I and Wales and Scotland — important topics but timing is a problem), although had we done the Normans better earlier on it might have made this more effective. I think my view in hindsight is that, when the next round of spec changes comes up, I’ll start with Key Stage 3, and then build the examined topics around that (rather than the other way round which is what we have here especially with regards to GCSE which I was loathe to change in coming in for reasons of workload as much as anything else). What I mean is that I think most Year 7 work on Medieval Britain does need strong knowledge of the Norman Conquest — therefore I’d question whether I need to come back to it again at GCSE?

After Key Topic 4 we would move into the Early Modern period. I wanted to start with a general unit on the European Renaissance and Reformation however this had to be abandoned due to time and workload pressures to resource it from scratch in the middle of the year. I think there’s real potential for this topic however to look at issues of belief and attitude in the Early modern period — including things like witchcraft and the scientific revolution and Enlightenment as well. The problem is, however, lack of resources and lack of subject knowledge (outside of the European Reformation) on my part. The Renaissance, a bit like Communism, is one of those foundational concepts I’m desperate to make sure is explicitly addressed in my KS3 to help get pupils up to speed for the GCSE more quickly.

The rest of the year would be a fairly standard trot through the Tudor and Stuart period. I really like doing the Tudors through the lens of religious change. The Reformation is so interesting and then foundational for understanding the Civil War and Glorious Revolution as well as some of our modern topics like 20th Century Germany that we study at GCSE. Then we double up on the Tudors by doing a depth study of Elizabeth — a topic that is again a personal favourite of mine (I taught the Edexcel GCSE unit on this at my previous school and it’s ace). I like the ‘religious rollercoaster’ task and idea generally for shaping this unit — I know it may be a bit ahistorical for some but it gives me an opportunity to include an end of topic task that’s a bit more creative than is normally my instinct to put in. I don’t just want to set essays and source questions all the time if I can (or at least I’m not sure if it’s right to)!

The Elizabeth unit does the standard stuff on Mary, Queen of Scots and the Spanish Armada, but we also look at what it was like to live in Elizabethan England as well as the beginnings of Empire and overseas exploration (with a focus on the Roanoke story), which sets up work we’ll do in Year 8. I have a personal stake in looking at life in Elizabethan England as I am a child of Stratford-on-Avon and the room below — featured in many textbooks on this topic — was actually my form room as a Year 13 pupil and the site of many assemblies when I was a lower school pupil in the school that it resides in. So I can bring a few anecdotes and bits and pieces here. (NOTE: If you teach this topic at GCSE then I highly recommend Michael Wood’s In Search of Shakespeare (first episode I think) which sadly seems to have disappeared off of YouTube but there’s some great bits about his school life which gives a good insight into that Education in Elizabethan England bit in some of the specifications).

Then we finish with the 17th Century and explore why Parliament became more powerful than the King. The reason for this is because I’ve felt that everything after Charles I’s execution traditionally gets short shrift and I really wanted to bring in the Glorious Revolution at least. That then does justice to the earlier work on the Reformation and the Protestant/Catholic divide. I try to scamper up past 1700 briefly and at least mention the arrival of the Hanoverians and the emergence of the position of Prime Minister with Robert Walpole. It’s another strange curiosity that many pupils in England know so little about the most important political office in the land and where it comes from (would the same be true in other countries, I wonder?). How many Year 7s do you teach who still think the Queen is the most important person in the country? I’d imagine it’s probably a lot!

It’s a lot to pack in and definitely I found that I had planned to do too much pretty quickly into the teaching. So I’m looking at slimming this down a bit — perhaps by putting the Islamic world and the Crusades into 1 unit, perhaps by thinking more creatively about how to include more of a European angle into the typical Reformation stuff. An alternative approach may be to use the ideas of the York CLIO group in terms of ‘slot-ins’ to cover some of the bits of narrative that I can’t do elsewhere (Natalie Kesterton’s work is one to look at here)! I’m certainly open to any other suggestions. We use the Meanwhile, Elsewhere tasks for some of our homeworks and they’ve also been very useful.

I’ll have a look at Year 8 in the next post and posit some thoughts on my experience of teaching Empire, the Industrial Revolution and the Holocaust and how we go about this.