history in education project -...

Summary of Recording – Jon Nichol

Importance of link between university expansion in the late 1960s and the emergence of

new thinking about history teaching as young academics unable to get positions in

universities turned instead to teacher training institutions as a career option. Influence of

Kirti Chaudhuri and Rex Walford on Nichol’s thinking about games and simulations in

history. Early career – early publishing for primary schools in collaboration with teacher

at Repton School – Blackwell History Project. Involvement in exam board work –

importance of networking and patronage in securing research funding. ‘Traditional’

content of new history courses – cultural continuity in terms of the content of history

teaching since 1904 – classroom pedagogy changes but content stays the same. Arrogant

educationists. Working as a teacher trainer alongside teachers. Role of John Fines in the

early development of the Schools Council History Project – Nichol’s work with John

Fines on Nuffield projects – Fines’ background and early work – his work on history and

drama – story-telling. Influence of HMIs Roy Wake and John Slater on development of

history teaching. Gossip about the writing of the National Curriculum and the role of the

HMI. Fines’s opposition to the National Curriculum – value of the National Curriculum in

boosting primary history teaching. Link between Plowden Report and emergence of good

history teaching at primary level. Problems of agreeing content in a multi-cultural society

– political aspects of decisions about content in history courses. Development of the

SCHP in three phases – Sylvester – Shemilt - Culpin. Opposition to Shemilt’s ideas in

SCHP. Why Sylvester’s approach is better. Contribution of Unstead to history teaching.

Importance to history teaching of having an underlying philosophy of the discipline – in

contrast to Religious Studies. How Nichol got interested in using computers in history

teaching – early work on computer simulations – demise of computer simulation work –

value of commercially-produced ICT in schools. Gifted and Talented initiative. Adapting

ideas about teaching history to the changing primary curriculum – how ideas for teaching

history come round again – Alan Blyth’s Place, Time and Society (1976) an integrated

course. Criticism of the National Curriculum as ‘Stalinised’. How teachers develop their

methods of teaching and why it is very difficult to make them change – the importance of

practical demonstration in teacher training.

Transcribed by: Susan NichollsSeptember 2009

INSTITUTE OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH

HISTORY IN EDUCATION PROJECT

INTERVIEWEE: PROFESSOR JON NICHOL

INTERVIEWER: DR NICOLA SHELDON

3RD AUGUST 2009


History in Education Project 2009-10Page 1

[Track 1]

Okay, I’m Jon Nichol, I have recently taken early retirement from a position as a

Professor of Innovation and Enterprise at the University of Plymouth. The history

education aspect of my work has been a sort of base interest for the last five or six years,

but has not been a central feature in what I do. Before that I was a PGCE secondary tutor

at the University of Exeter and all my work revolved and related to that and we can talk

about that in relation to question one.

Yes. Can you briefly sketch out your career in history education in reverse?

One of the arguments I put forward about the development of history education in this

country – and I’m going to use the term history education because I think it is a good one

– is that from the late sixties it had a relationship to the expansion of the universities in the

context of a host of young bright eyed and bushy tailed research students doing PhDs or

masters degrees or research degrees in general who were then unable to get employment

in the university sector following the staffing of those universities during that great period

of expansion of what are known as the plate glass/red brick universities and a significant

number of them went into teaching as a, not a preferred option, but as something which

they had to do for a variety of reasons. And I can think of several of that generation:

Bernard Barker and myself, John Fines – slightly earlier – who would fall into that

category.

Are we talking about the late fifties?

We’re now talking about the late sixties into the early seventies. And this is really quite

important because it does have a seminal influence in that you had a group of young men

and women coming into history education who were academic historians and that means

that they had a very clear and full grasp upon the nature of it as a discipline within the

context in which they were doing their doctoral/masters research. And that has had a

lasting and penetrating influence, particularly upon the skills and processes dimension of

what has been going on.



[0:02:01]

So can I ask you, did you leave university and then go straight into teaching or did you do

a PhD then?

Well I did a doctorate at Cambridge, or did the research and then ran out of money and

then ended up either, as I say, I could have been a cynic or a sceptic, and I took the

sceptical route and instead of working for the Conservative Party’s research department I

went into teacher training. And we won’t talk about my politics, which are quite

interesting but confused. So I did the, as I said, inferenced, I did the academic stuff in

terms of doing a doctorate with Eric Stokes at Cambridge, was a great privilege and a

delight.

What years was that Jon?

Oh, this would be ’67 through to ’70. ’67 through to Yes, about ’70-ish. And then I

trundled off because of, as I said, into the teaching training and one of the issues there is

that the influence of that affected the way in which I approached the teaching of history.

Remember at this point in time they were just beginning to think about the ideas of

Sylvester and the Schools Council History Project grounded in Collingwood’s thinking.

And they were also beginning to think about sort of more creative approaches and there

was a natural relationship between my PhD, in which I had again the privilege of sitting

next door to a man called Kirti Chaudhuri, who created or was Britain’s earliest and

perhaps greatest econometric historian who was interested in the modelling of the East

India Company as a commercial enterprise on the same sort of scale in its time as

Unilever or Shell or whatever, and the East India Company was operating effectively in

the mid eighteenth century and he sat at one table doing his work on the East India

Company, I sat at my desk doing my work upon the East India Company in the context of

the Conquest of Bengal with Clive of India. As I say to people who say what is your

academic expertise, I say quite happily, I’m the world’s leading expert on Bengal politics

in the 1750s, which is translated into the Black Hole of Calcutta, the Conquest of Bengal,

Clive of India and all that. But the serious point about that is that Kirti was fully engaged

in producing analytical models which were related to the computing of the economic data



and on the basis of that, when I went to do initial teacher training and came across another

major influence upon my early thinking on history teaching, I came across the new

geography where they had developed through a man called Rex Walford, games and

simulations which were based upon models of geographical situations, ie the abstraction

of the key features and then making them dynamic through the simulation mode of

operating, and so it was very logical to put Kirti Chaudhuri’s East India Company and

gaming and simulation and geography together and I came up and wrote on my teaching

practice, a simulation called Trade and Discovery, which was the first, to my knowledge,

dedicated, developed history game of simulation. And that was contemporary with those

Bernard Barker was developing with a friend whose name I’ve forgotten now. There was

this relationship between the academic and the teacher training and the development of a

form of teaching which was dynamic, interactive, engaging, intellectually rewarding, at

least for me if not for the kids.

[0:05:18]

So you started teaching 1971?

Something like that, Yes.

Where were you teaching first?

Oh vaguely, I went back … well we started off in Birmingham obviously and I went to

Birmingham to train in Birmingham schools and then I went to a small grammar school in

Shrewsbury and stayed there for a few years, about two or three years and then trundled

off down to the Institute … not Institute of Education, I had a year’s fellowship at the

School of Oriental and African Studies, working upon textbook development. That was

very kind of them, very nice, and I had a very nice year. I wrote the first lot of textbooks

I produced.

And then you went down to Exeter then?



Yes. That was in ’79, so had an interesting and varied early career. But when you said,

back to the career in history education, we go back to the development from the teacher

training phase and then on the basis of that I went and worked for three years in a school

called Repton and met a man called David Burt who was very able, very interested in

publishing. One of the things I’ve always done is I’ve tended to work with people, for

whatever reason, and I’ve always found that a catalytic idea, is that the combination of

two people in some ways is better than … the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

and David and I worked together and we had been contacted by Blackwell’s at that time

and also by Longman and the consequence, outcome of that was in one side my evidence

series of books for Blackwell’s, which are focussed very much upon the primary area, the

history of England really, in manageable chunks for kids and teachers but embodying the

ideas behind, the thinking behind what one might call the new history and the new history

teaching on the one hand. And on the other hand we did a whole series of games and

simulations for Longman and produced a small book called Games and Simulations in

History, the outcome of that. And after that it was all very much developmental work and

I came down to Exeter ’79 and ran the PGCE history programme.

So was Repton a primary school?

No, Repton is an outstanding jockstrap second division public school.

[0:07:24]

So how did you get your primary experience?

Never had any.

But it didn’t prove a problem writing for primaries?

Hilarious isn’t it?

What led you then to concentrate on history teaching in primary/middle school? Because

you’ve mainly concentrated on the sort of 7-13 age range haven’t you?



Well that might be your perception of it, but I always worked in the secondary sector.

And the books were very amenable and open to that age range and the evidence series had

massive sales inside the secondary sector. Because in fact it was a curriculum for the

secondary sector and then the next series on was what we called Blackwell History Project

– ho, ho, ho, take an original idea and steal it – as in the Schools Council History Project.

And the idea there was to apply the ideas and thinking behind let’s call it the new history

– we can come back to what that might mean – and to apply that to the GCSE phase. I

should add at this point in time I was a member of the Associated Examining Board’s

GCSE/O level/A level steering committee. There was ten to a dozen of us. We ran the

whole shooting match, the largest exam board at that time. And the point about writing

on curriculum development is you need to have your networking feet under the table to

know what’s going on, ie if you’re inside the curriculum development work inside the

examination board, you’re then in a position to actually create and develop highly

marketable and highly commercially successful resources for schools. And that’s what we

did with the Blackwell History Project, very very much so.

That was a publishing venture? The curriculum development venture?

Well it is a curriculum development venture because the two things go together, ie, but it

was a curriculum development in the sense it was reacting to changes in the examining

system which were then being introduced for GCSE. Remember we were going from

CSE and O level to GCSE and everything was up in the air of how the hell do we do that,

and being on the exam board, all the discussions, debates, arguments etc, of what was

going on, the structure and framing of the new curriculum, however that is defined, you

have the knowledge and the teachers need the resources, the books to work with the kids.

And therefore you’re in a position to write them, which is what I did.

That’s in 1989?

In the 1980s, yes. ’88, ’89, yes. So that all comes out of working through having inside

knowledge and the networking knowledge, etc, etc. In the same way that you’ve picked

up this project because of David Cannadine’s links with Lord Sainsbury. That’s not a



problem and this is how Nuffield works and my Nuffield funding, which began in the

1980s – we’ll come back to that later – is all based upon networking and I support it.

[background noise] It’s almost on the eighteenth century patronage system whereby you

actually go for good people, you obviously check the whole thing out, you then do the

proper stuff, as opposed to public competition which produces far more duds than it

provides live shells and there’s an interesting debate to be had there about … for the

funding bodies. I did go to an evening thing in Exeter on this where there was quite a bit

of fur and feathers flying around in which one of the people in the – Lord Brain – was

playing hell with the man who ran Leverhulme who was saying this is how we do it, you

know, on the Nuffield patronage system.

[0:10:38]

So back to the curriculum development in history work. All the work which was the

evidence series came off an interest in the new history. I’ve talked about the simulation

role play, and then of course being involved in the Schools Council History Project,

however tangentially, and then looking at how can you create something to get kids

thinking, to get teachers to accept it and the key here is to make something which is

radical and different, appear to be conservative and the same.

That’s something that’s interesting isn’t it, that Schools History actually did appeal to so

many people who were perhaps of quite conservative tendency, ie teachers at the chalk

face. Why do you think that was?

Well you made it look the same. So when they started looking what you were doing and

asking the kids to do, they lit up a bit because what they’d had previously was – and we

mustn’t do a parody of it – was what you called the transmission of stuff, the textbook, the

Cootes and Snellgrove, the kids working in a particular pattern and so on. I’m not going

to decry that, that approach to teaching history which is still almost universal throughout a

great deal of the world, has had certain great strengths to it and has a great, a clear and

specific purpose. But what we tried to do is to say let us take that framework of

knowledge which is in the mind of a teacher and in terms of how they can work with

children, make them, or suggest that they do it differently, but to build a different

pedagogy into it. So what you’ve got on the one side is - let’s use this word – the



substantive content side of the curriculum, look the same, Plato to Nato, here we come.

The whole entrenched curricula which have developed and in fact as I believe you’ve

come across at the International Journal of Historical Teaching Learning and Research,

there’s an interesting edition on this, with an interesting article in it looking at the origins

of the textbook in England – your good lady friend ought to look at this – where in fact

the idea of the kind of knowledge that kids take out of schools in the old state system,

there were no textbooks, there was no history on the curriculum, this is really before 1904,

but what they did have were the readers, the stories of the great and good. And that was a

wonderful insight and that was how the historical knowledge was imparted, it was

imparted through the tales and myths of these great biographical, the biographies of these

great figures. And this was a lovely idea.

[0:13:12]

So it’s a sort of innovation by stealth?

Very much so, an innovation by stealth. And in fact if you look at post 1904 textbooks -

and I’ve got the Oxford and Cambridge one from 1904 - after the 1902 Education Act,

whatever it was, if you actually look at the content it’s exactly the same content which we

have now. It’s extraordinary, the cultural continuity in terms of that which is taught. And

it surfaced again brilliantly in this Rose Curriculum, its theme of human, social – what

was the other, reading it on the train this morning – understanding. And suddenly it got

on the politician’s desk and it came back as historical, geographical and social

understanding. Back to the 1904 curriculum, which Robin Alexander has actually put that

down in his latest report. Fascinating, fascinating stuff where you’ve got a continuity of

curriculum which carries on. Men may come and men may go, but that historical

continuity and the culture of the school community has a marvellous continuum. And

therefore to bring about change you accept the mindset, the understanding, the orientation

of your teachers and you give them something which looks very, very different but when

they begin to work with it they say, yes, now this is so much more interesting, this is a

much more interesting way of doing that which I was doing anyway.

So it’s method rather than content?



It’s not method, it’s pedagogy. You’ve got to be very clear about this, it’s a pedagogy

grounded in the knowledge and understanding of the nature of the discipline. There is a

great danger of dismissing method which has been done by the arrogant educationalists

who couldn’t teach their way out of a paper bag. They know nothing about education

whatsoever, but kind of control the education world, and I can be quite virulent about

them because I think they’re a pain in the butt. They have great virtues and great

strengths, but in relation to failing to understand that the strength of faculties of education

is in those who may demean and dismiss, which are the people who are actually doing the

professional development of teachers at all phases, and they tend to dismiss that.

Do you think that teachers have adopted a new pedagogy without realising it or it’s been

…

Don’t know.

…filtered in through training?

Don’t know. The evaluation, Shemilt’s evaluation of the Schools Council suggests that

they didn’t and it was a real issue here as they would go on teaching the same way. We

just don’t know. We don’t have the evidence. Maybe you have it, I don’t. Nobody’s sat

down and looked at this as a … it’s a really serious research question. But to my

knowledge, and I may be completely ignorant, the lads in the Institute of Education might

know about it if there’s any worthwhile research being done into this.

[0:15:49]

With your trainees that you had in Exeter and Plymouth, you were deliberately developing

a pedagogy with them?

Yes, absolutely.

So is it feasible that that’s happened across the country and infiltrated?



Who knows? It’s feasible, yes. It’s a hypothesis. Got no evidence!

When you go into schools do you see lessons that …

I go into schools very little now. I haven’t done anything for six or seven years.

But when you were going into schools?

Well this is a lovely one, it’s a really good question because you don’t see anything other

than your trainees. How many teachers, how many times do you see other teachers

teaching? And what I do say is all my curriculum development research, we talked

interestingly about the primary in terms of that early stuff and never having taught it, but

everything I wrote for kids on the secondary I went and taught it with a teacher. And the

interesting issue here is I worked closely in two teachers’ classrooms over twenty years, I

have not a single piece of evidence that the work I did with their children with them

looking ever had any influence on them whatsoever. And there is a theory about the

transfer of expertise from a trainer to a trainee, however that is defined, from an expert to

a novice, which is called cognitive apprenticeship, which is actually a very powerful

model – I’ve written extensively upon this – and that, what it involves is basically

somebody looks, you kick their arse, make them do it and then they might learn. That’s to

give you theory summed up very neatly and very succinctly.

Just want to take you back to the content.

It’s called demonstration modelling review implementation. But you have to do it. You

know, you learn something by doing it. It’s a very simple idea and by looking you’re not

doing it and you’re not absorbing it, it’s a different kind of knowledge in a way and it’s

very much a hands-on, an active training experience and it’s very, very well worked out.

We ran our in-service along these lines with John Fines, but carry on, yes.

[0:17:51]



Going back to the content issue, would you not agree that Schools Council History Project

introduced a new approach to content? And of course there’s been Modern World

courses that have done this since the sixties.

Well yes, absolutely right. But the whole thing came together. What I was doing and lots

of other people were doing were taking a lot of the ideas of the Schools Council History

Project, plus what had been fuelled by our own experience in terms of our own academic

upbringing, which is not to be dismissed. And what I found very much with the Schools

Council History Project was the congruence of ideas, that what Sylvester was doing was

in some ways an intellectually valid and appealing rationalisation of that which I was

almost doing intuitively and John Fines was almost doing intuitively. And of course we

would rationalise it, but there was something going on there which we could associate

with very closely. And as I say to people in terms of John is, as John told me and in fact

at that seminar you were at Peter Lee corroborated it, John wrote the great handbook of

the Schools Council History Project. I’m sure you’ve seen Denis Shemilt, but Denis

produced this huge wodge of paper and John told me he went away and effectively he

wrote and produced the actual 13-16 book and Peter Lee said the same thing. I don’t

know what Denis says about it, what his view on it, take on it is, but I’m only second-

hand, hearsay reporting what John told me. Which is interesting.

Well it is. That brings us on to John Fines. When did you first work with John Fines?

[0:19:14]

Ah, as PGCE tutor… I’ve got no memory for dates. One of the things I did with my

PGCE tutoring was to say that there’s no point in having an external exam, it’s a complete

waste of time. You should treat them as a consultant, so you go for the best people you

can find who will then help you in terms of creating and developing your course. And

that’s how I met John, I got John to be my external and that would have been in the late

eighties, can’t remember the dates at all. And that’s when we began working together.

And then we went and we went to the Nuffield Foundation and got them to fund …

Nuffield was funding me already extensively on something else, but that’s by the way and



we’ll come back to that. And we then picked up the primary history project and the A

level project.

So how did the …

The A level project and the primary … that’s the right way round it went. Well easy,

because we were so fed up with the wretched National Curriculum that we felt that let’s

try and get something else going on primary and A level history.

And what was the chief thing that you were trying to do?

Well, introduce a methodology of getting kids doing it. Let’s take the doing history

through, and what we’d understood of the nature of historical learning and ways in which

it could affect young people and then translate that into the curriculum. So what we did is

we, both in the primary and secondary, we started from this basic premise of we wanted

kids to be doing history in terms of processes, protocols, skills, all the rest of the stuff.

And that has been an underlying conception ever since. And Jack Hexter’s The History

Primer, if you said do we have a textbook for that or single book, and really the real

driver was our own experience as historians – and I can talk about John on that in a

minute – is that there is a book by Jack Hexter called The History Primer which is a

wonderful book, which nobody seems to know about, it’s a major book on the theory and

practice of history as an academic discipline, and we used that and referred to it. And an

idea about where is the driving force coming out of history as an academic discipline

came from is, with social overtones, was John’s own story of how he … his epiphany, his

moment of conversion was John at Cambridge enjoyed life and to the extent that his tutor

– John told me these stories – his tutor wrote to every education department in the

country, said this man is unfit to teach, do not take him. Which I think is an interesting

development. And despite that somebody took the plunge and John trained, he didn’t get

a job in academia or he turned it down, I’m never quite clear which, and he ended up as

being a history teacher who fulfilled the worst, worst fears of his tutor at Cambridge. And

he was so bad that he had to keep the kids in detention, and who are we to mock anybody

else with our own earlier, even later failures in discipline haunting us? And John was

doing his PhD upon the recusants of the Tudor period and in order to pass the time of his



very large detention class, he would bring along his recusancy records, his cards, and he’d

get the kids to help him work on this stuff for his PhD. And that was all okay until

suddenly a queue formed outside the detention room of kids wanting to join Mr Fines’

club. And that was it. Getting kids engaged with resources, getting them thinking, getting

them discussing, debating, enjoying etc, and then away went John and became the great

man we all know him to be. But it’s fascinating that there was suddenly a … this

accidental, you know, rather like the person who was terrified of his wife, who discovered

how to make rubber out of the stuff which came out of rubber trees. He was

experimenting, his wife accused him of a wasteful … and trying to make, turn, you know,

this stuff into rubber. His wife came home and supper was cooking and he didn’t dare to

tell her he was still working on developing rubber and he shoved the substance into the

oven. And when it came out baked hard he said, ‘Ah!’ That’s apocryphal. John had his

conversion, but there you see is an interesting issue of the relationship between academic

history and teaching. In my case as I told you, it’s about the modelling and seeing

something and doing the creative connection between the two, the creativity is making a

connection. Often the more interesting the creativity the more unnatural and unexpected

are those connections, which once you’ve made them seem totally obvious.

That suggests a connection just between practically looking at sources and enjoying

history …

Absolutely right.

But John Fines’s ideas go beyond that don’t they?

And that’s where it started, that’s when it all started and in terms of John and the

intellectual origins of what was going on, I can help a little bit but please, please don’t

quote me because I mean it was incidental conversation. A great influence was Dorothy

Heathcote and drama and the great influence there was a man who I think was an absolute

genius, a man called Ray Verrier. And you come across Fines and Verrier. Now Ray is

still alive, he’s probably become a monk. He was a most diffident, shy, self-effacing man,

but if you read the stuff he wrote, he was something special and he worked at Bishop

Otter when John went to Bishop Otter and Ray came back and told John about Dorothy



Heathcote and Ray started doing all the drama stuff. So the driving influence there was

Ray. Where the influence on storytelling came in, I have no idea. They could have been

the same source, but certainly on drama that was Dorothy Heathcote. Where he

developed this ability to tell stories … Ray used to say, he used to do it at school because

he was always in detention, to tell stories to teachers, to amuse the teachers, and he told

some wonderful stories about his school days in that context. But when you put the whole

thing together by … he’d obviously gone into Bishop Otter and he’d then become

acquainted with Roy Wake and in particular Roy Wake picked him up – I’m just doing

this off the top of my head so I don’t know – and that very, very great man John Slater,

who picked John up. John Slater was … I came along when John Slater was stamping his

b__ on history and he was a totally benign and positive influence and a very, very great

influence. And his pamphlet on history – pamphlet, if you call it pamphlet, booklet –

History in the Primary and Secondary Year was extremely important, extremely seminal.

Are you seeing John Slater?

He’s in Australia. So I haven’t been out there. I have got an email contact…

But what a good idea. He was really very, very good.

I had the book when I trained, the History in Primary and Secondary Years and as well as

your own book.

Yes, but he was very important. He was ‘behind the curtain’ importance. And I don’t

know the politics of the Schools Council and all the rest of it and all the rest of it and all

the rest of it, but John was very influential in there. And of course a great disaster was

when David Sylvester failed to become the Staff Inspector following him You probably

know that story where he got up the nose of whoever and that extra… champagne and …

chorus girls and champagne bottles, corks, Hennessey became the HMI for History and

the man who wrote the National Curriculum for history. I’m too old to be unkind about

people, but I don’t know if you’re going to talk to Hennessey. Hennessey wrote the

National Curriculum, do you know that?

Well he’s credited with having a lot of influence.



Well it’s more than that, he actually sat down and did a lot of the writing, because Robert

Guyver was a very close friend of mine and Guyver told me all about what was going on

at the time.

I’m going to talk to Mr Guyver, so I’ll be able to find out.

Yes, Bob’s great fun. But he really … but he was very powerful and very influential and

much more so than he should have been. I mean he was not the neutral observer during

that writing that National Curriculum and Robert talked about him actually being on the

typewriter and doing things, whatever, at that time. And he was … we’ll leave it at that,

if I may. Robert’ll tell you exactly what went on.

[0:27:40]

But John Fines wasn’t completely negative about the National Curriculum was he?

Yes.

I’ve an article here from Primary History which actually – from 1994 – which is about the

Dearing Review, but he’s actually credited: ‘National Curriculum in history with its many

defects has in fact had a remarkably good effect on the education of young children’.

Well that’s absolutely fine. That’s no problem about that. Because that’s not an issue, the

issue is the first time history went into the primary curriculum as opposed to being

virtually nothing there at all of any value or interest. I mean the Peter Knight work - poor

Peter died - that ESRC project showed actually just how very skimpy and very, very

limited history as a subject in primary schools was before 1988/89. This was a revolution,

very, very important, so it had a phenomenal impact. But in terms of the National

Curriculum itself it was just a complete nonsense. John and I felt very strongly about that

and anybody who looked at it objectively said it was a scheme invented by idiots

implemented by morons and, you know, it’s like that one … oh, God you just look at it

and say, what were they playing at? But when you look at it they did actually have the



skills and processes and the substantive element side by side, so that was very, very good.

But the real impact on primary schools is they put it on the primary curriculum. That was

where the great impact came on. And just talking very loosely, in the south west of

England we only knew of two examples of good primary history practice in the whole

south west of England.

Before the National Curriculum?

Yes.

And how many did you know about afterwards?

Oh, it was a very, very large increase. Can’t put a number on it, but it was being put in

and implemented and so on. And when you look at all the stuff we did on our GEST

courses and so on, there was a major move, a major change which took place in late …

and the National Curriculum was a catalyst for that. They had this Association of Primary

History Teachers which then merged with the Historic Association. And let’s face it,

things have been looking up a bit, we’ve now got … circulation’s gone up about a

hundred or fifty or something. Primary History we’ve got 700 going out. So something’s

happening and I’m doing my very best, particularly in the context of the … and the Rose

Review to have a real whack at slamming it back into school, because as I said, the

politicians having – I said earlier about having this atavistic curriculum, looking back to

the ancestors. And he’s done it again; historical, geographical and social understanding –

whoopee! Back to 1904. Great. Great for the Historical Association. And they just

swept away any idea of change and development over the last thirty years, they just put it

into the shredder.

[0:30:23]

Well, does that mean that teachers themselves have changed the way they teach or that

they …



Well I think there is an argument they have … I think the argument about how they teach,

there’s a congruence between Plowden, the teaching and a Piagetian based teaching which

underlaid the Plowden Report and good history teaching and that is what Peter Knight

said in his research into … when they looked at the effective teaching of history in the late

seventies, early eighties, from memory. And that’s what you can pick up, so there is no

real problem. Then you have to give the teachers the critical knowledge and

understanding of the nature of the discipline and then the pedagogy related to it in order

for them to implement it and make the thing that much more intellectual. Well,

intellectually, that much more - not viable - that much more coherent, have substantive

basis instead of just being mimicry in some shape or form.

So are you saying that the politicians had been the friends of history in the primary sector

and not in the secondary?

I wouldn’t say anything about the secondary sector, but in the primary sector I’d say that

they were the friends in the National Curriculum coming in that they actually put it on the

curriculum for primary. In terms of secondary I’ve got nothing to say about it really, no

comment at this point in time. Thank you. Well it’s a National Curriculum subject, but

you will have picked up is this whole issue about the politicians harking back to the Plato

to Nato heroes, heroines, etc, etc.

So would you say that the content doesn’t matter, because you said …

No, I’m saying the opposite. Because that’s why I wasn’t going to comment on it. I think

there is a view inside the history education community, in some peculiar way, that content

doesn’t matter. Or that the content which is – Our Island Story - which I must get hold of

because I’m going to put it into my next edition of Primary History, and if you look at

Hodgkinson’s work on chronology, doesn’t really look at the question of is chronology. Is

it about dates? Is it about political education? When you actually look at what those dates

and the framework, the narrative framework, it’s a question of mythology, it’s a question

of identity, it’s a question of trying to get some of the young people of the country in

some sense locked into the key factors or features of how the country evolved and

developed so that they can get a very clear sense of where their citizenship comes from.



And that’s what that Plato to Nato curriculum is about, it’s very contentious, particularly

in a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society, to put it mildly.

[0:32:51]

So what would your preferred alternative be?

Oh, I’d call it a contemporary history curriculum, but that’s another story.

I’d really like to explore that though. I mean if it’s important, how do you make the

decision about who decide … you know, how …

These are second order issues. But the second order and third order issue of actually

arguing and debating and who … then away you go, obscures the first order issue, is what

is the kind of knowledge and understanding of their past that we want youngsters in a

plural democracy to have when they leave school, and retain in some significant way

through their adult, into and through their adult lives.

And would you say that debate has not been had?

Yes, I’d say it’s been had. The politicians think they have won it, the history

educationalists think they’ve pulled the chain on it and flushed it down the whatever, and

the question is, where are we on this one?

Where are we?

Don’t know.

At the moment?

I don’t know. The argument to that, well we do know where we are, ask Peter Lee about

that children’s knowledge of history project they ran a couple of years ago. Do you know

about that one?



The CHATA one?

No, they’ve had one after that and …

They’ve not published anything from it as far as I can see.

No, but you need to talk to them about it because they actually did a survey of what kind

of historical knowledge kids have at school, who take from school. That was their last

major research project, was its latest research project. I don’t know what it was called.

They published a bit on it. And basically what they came up with is that the kids know

absolutely sod all about sod all, which is not very much of a surprise really is it? But

there is research into it, ie what kind of knowledge are these children taking away from

school in the context of a substantive dimension of it, as opposed to the syntactic skills

procedure side of it.

And does it matter if they haven’t any concrete knowledge to take away from it?

Well it depends what concrete knowledge is, or whatever it is, or if they’ve absorbed the

skills and knowledge processes side of it, maybe you’re right but there are issues here. I

wrote in editorials in Primary History on this, is how do we avoid 7/7, how do we avoid

young English citizens from blowing up the underground. That’s the political dimension

to that. And that’s why I said, you’ve got to look at this idea of a … I don’t like this idea

of frameworks, John thought they were absolute nonsense, I’m sure he was right. But

what kind of view of their own country within that historical dimension do the young

have, which they take into adult life. And the problem about The Island Story and the

politicians is it’s Rule Britannia, etc, etc, etc, you know, as in the context of history

education. Parodied as I was told by Raph Samuel – no, I’ve been talking rubbish. Raph

Samuel, that very, very great man, wonderful, wonderful man, pointed out – it may be

apocryphal again – 1066 and All That is a serious political statement about the kind of

history which led to the slaughter of the First World War. Isn’t it an interesting point? So

this is an issue and a debate which I think does need looking at with sensitivity – and I’m

not going to say there is a consensus of opinion around what kind of facts kids should be



taking away or knowledge and understanding kids should be taking away from school, but

it is not to be pooh-poohed because it’s a very difficult and contentious issue, which is

where we were coming to. And that is a problem. I’d agree with that. Anyway, I’m

being radical on that one.

That’s okay. I wanted to ask you about Schools History Project, which we’ve referred to

already. You referred to it as having three parts: David Sylvester’s, the Shemilt concepts

and then Colin Shepherd’s good works, as you describe them. So could you just elaborate

on what you mean by the three phases?

[0:36:32]

I think what we’ve got to say here is I can only talk about the first two. And I can talk

about all three, but very quickly, I mean Sylvester to me – and I hope this ties in with your

interview with him – was he had an intellectual coherence, understanding. I went to the

talk which he was giving in 1972 about it. What he was doing, what he was doing - very,

very interesting. And he was very clearly of an understanding and he took the

Collingwood Model – I hope he did do that, I don’t know if I’m wrong – about What is

History?, he looked at the idea of history, he took a lot of the things that he then tried to

translate into pedagogy off that book and said this is an alternative to the Plato to Nato

transmission model. And this was built around the idea of constructivism, the use of

evidence, the idea of representation of understanding from the perspective of a child as

historian, for want of a better term. And then Shemilt did this evaluation and so that was

phase one for Dave and his project team, etc, and he produces the What is History? packs

and so on. He then moved into creating and developing the exam course by the end of

three years, understandably, etc. And the History of Medicine course, that’s what he

knew about, etc, etc. And the ways in which different forms of knowledge; study in-

depth, outline and whatever you look at, local history came into that. We won’t worry too

much about that because we could spend all day talking about those. But then Shemilt

produced this evaluation and something happened very peculiarly because we suddenly

got this idea of history is about teaching from concepts and this was all then picked up by

Peter Lee and what they did in the context at the institute. And this then became …

Shemilt is the Schools Council History Project. I just sit there, this is bonkers. The



evaluator is the guy who created it. Now, the argument could be is the evaluator and

interpretation of the evaluation by Lee in particular with Denis, and they’re working

together in the Institute of Education paradigm, may not have led to a re-conceptualisation

of what the Schools Council History Project was, but it ain’t nothing to do with what the

original thing was and the one which I identified with. And then you move on to the

Colin Shephard period, which has effectively become basically a sort of … well not Colin

Shephard but - my brain’s gone to putty - Chris, whatever his name …

Oh, Chris Culpin.

Culpin. Chris Culpin was very, very philosophical and very sane.

[0:39:11]

Section embargoed until 2022.

[0:40:25]

So would you say that Sylvester was about engaging children and developing their

understanding whereas Shemilt is about thinking skills?

Well I’m sure, I think that the first point of your statement is probably quite right and

Sylvester’s is about the thinking of the paradigm of how historians operate and work

within the context of the world of a child. So the idea that it’s not thinking skills is a

nonsense because it is thinking skills, it’s processes, it’s concepts, it’s protocols - and

that’s one thing I come on to – is the protocols related in terms of history in different

forms like biography and local history, narrative, or whatever. And so I’d have thought

Sylvester was very much the whole thing’s about thinking, but within the contextualised

… within … then grounded in the academic discipline and the different forms which

academicians take in terms of what kind of history we’re getting the kids to do. Whereas

to me, I’m not very clear about where the Shemilt stuff came from, but then their

argument – and Counsell has carried this on – is oh, these second order concepts and

therefore we build our programmes of education around these second order concepts,

which is completely bonkers. I mean to put it simply, the Sylvester approach is holistic, ie



the whole thing is a holistic process, whereas the Shemilt/Lee approach appears to be –

and certainly the Counsell one – is to break it down, not atomise it because they’d rather

not, into these big chunks like causation and chronology, these second order concepts and

interpretations and so on. And so you’ve got these second order concepts which are

driving the whole thing forward, which is putting the cart before the horse, which is

actually getting terribly confused in the real sense about what is the nature of the

discipline.

Thank you. Makes it much clearer.

That’s mine, that’s my sort of view.

[0:42:21]

I was going to ask you what you thought had been the overall effect of SHP on history

teaching?

I think the overall effect, very oddly is to say in terms of moving on from a paradigm

which is grounded in Our Island Story and that wonderful man, Unstead, and how he

presented it, which was to freshen up, cheer it up and tell the stories and make them really

interesting and exciting and fun for kids, which is what he did brilliantly. And of course

the – and not to do this one – but all that tends to get thrown into the dustbin without

recognising its great qualities of workmanship. But it moved that on to a form which is

congruent with the idea of education getting kids to think, defending your discipline in the

context of being attacked from various sides, what is the relevance of it, what are you

doing. And interestingly, when I ran things in Exeter on a humanities programme and I

was running it with one of our religious studies people and he came along to my sessions

with undergraduates – I never teach undergraduates, I don’t stand up and do that [mimes

lecturing] little bit, very little – is making them function in terms of solving historical

problems and the procedures of questioning, investigation sources, making the …

discussion and debate and obviously with a large substantive element in what they’re

reading, well let’s call it for the want of a better term, the secondary sources on the first

hand, whatever. And based upon a clearer statement of what the discipline’s about. He



sort of said, Jon, really it’s very interesting to see you working here because compared to

religious education, you actually have an underlying philosophy of your discipline, which

never occurred to me before, but it just struck me as pretty obviously what we were doing

there. And of course there’s a great problem doing that in a university sector with these

very nice young ladies, often very bright, it had sod all to do with the kind of history

they’d had at school. Which is, again the culture is enshrined in the examination system,

which reflect the model, the successful models of teaching of those at that point

dominated, which was the transmission/transformation model. And I’m not decrying the

qualities of that, don’t get me wrong, it has great, great strengths in a certain way.

Certainly for mental training of a certain kind. I’m not going to be knocking it.

[0:44:33]

I want to come on to now your own particular interests, particularly starting the

simulation, that was an early interest, one you mentioned. Yes. So do you think that

simulation really brings the learning of history alive more to younger children or that it’s

qpplicable throughout …

It’s applicable to all age stages and it’s all phases of life. And as a training method it is

used universally across all disciplines and all areas of training. It’s the basic tool of

training people to do any professional job, if you engage them in some form of simulation

work – war games, call it what you like.

How did you come to connect simulations to history teaching?

Well I told you earlier, it was to do with the East India Company, Kirti Chaudhuri

modelling, etc. Rex Walford, historical games and then seeing how you can actually

produce models of historical situations and that was what the Longman book was about,

and it’s continued from then on. And so that’s been an underlying feature of our work.

And then you’ve developed your work in ICT. Did that spring out of simulations?



Absolutely. And that came, very interestingly – and nobody really knows this – 1982,

January and a man called - my brain is gone, completely gone – turned up from Imperial

College London. Not Reynolds, what the hell’s his name? Ennals, David Ennals. And –

Richard Ennals is David’s father, the politician, Richard Ennals - and he had been very

interested again in simulation and he had been employed by Imperial College, a man

called Kowalski, the great intellectual father of logic programming in this country, which

was going to be the thing which swept computing into the twenty-first century, and

Kowalski had been to his children’s school in Wimbledon, Wimbledon Middle School,

and had been horrified at the BBC, at the kind of inane computing which was then being

developed in the early 1980s on a language called BASIC. He tried to get the school to

teach the kids in what was called Prolog – programming and logic – failed, and he

employed Ennals to do it. Programming and logic, the logic program if you don’t know –

no, don’t have any knowledge about this? No? Why should you have any? … It’s what it

says. You get a computer language which is based upon predicate logic and the damn

machine thinks logically. You put rules in, you put data in relating to those rules and the

machine goes chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, come out with a set of logical statements and

logical conclusions. In other words it’s actually, in a recognised and human way, that

machine is thinking. And I saw that in January 1982 and thought this is fantastic because

it ties into the whole question of modelling in terms of gaming and simulation, rules,

structures, etc, and then the next stage took nine years, I spent all my time doing logic

programming and then what was knowledge based systems, expert systems with people

from Imperial College. I found it very interesting.

Did you produce commercial simulations for distributing?

No, we didn’t do anything commercial but it was all very effective and I’m sure the

thinking behind it … and I ran something called PEG, it was just called PEG – Prolog

Education Group. And I ran about nine or eleven international conferences. It was …

For teachers to …

No, these were academics. Academics mainly, across the world. Ran the last one in St

Petersburg in 2003.



So these weren’t simulations to be used in schools then?

Yes, they were. They were … that’s how we developed it, but the whole idea of logic

programming, the idea of knowledge based systems and the way in which you get things

to represent understanding and you get kids to program using logical language and their

knowledge and understanding developed from processing information in order to get it to

function as a computer program. And you got them to do it in English because you

produced what we called ‘shells’ where you could put the information in and we had

shells for simulations, we had shells for investigations, for dealing with the clarity of

databases.

So this was an international project that …

It was a project which was funded by Nuffield which had huge international ramifications

which we … and we ran these project programmes etc, very successful internationally.

Were they based on …

Prolog Education Group that was. PEG.

Were they based on children completing simulations in tandem in different international

locations?

Oh no, they were about my work with anyone who worked independently. These were

people who came together. It represented a way of thinking about the use of computers,

not only in education, widely, and the educational side, it was … we worked with some of

the very leading computer scientists in this country. People like Ben du Boulay at Sussex,

and it was another side of my life which I don’t talk about really because I rather enjoyed

doing it. But it’s only tangentially related to history education, history in my brain. But it

came out of the history education and it came through Ennals having been – who was a

history teacher – having been employed by Kowalski.



[0:49:21]

What came out of it that was actually long term?

Sod all.

Nothing. But you’ve written about simulations quite a bit haven’t you though? The use of

simulation in the classroom?

Yes, but I mean its influence affects things but in terms of, I mean in terms of information

in computing and ICT, in a way the thinking behind what we were trying to do, which is

use this as a powerful tool for thinking in a way which mapped on to the discipline, which

mapped on to substantive knowledge, that is absolutely appropriate right up until now.

And I don’t want to go into this in too … because things have moved on. But it really

was a very, very powerful set of ideas. And of course all the history education work was

going on at the same time. I did that for a very, very long time. And I’m sure we were

right, I mean you don’t spend all that time spending a huge amount of time and energy

doing something if you think it’s wrong. I’m quite happy to scrap stuff and say it’s

rubbish.

[0:50:13]

But in terms of teaching in the classroom, obviously simulation was used as … from text

originally and then computer simulations came in and then it seems to have gone off the

agenda.

It has indeed because those computer simulations were … and the simple answer is, why

can’t you do it with pencil and paper. And we had a huge war with Francis Blow and all

these people because – and also the micro-education program, the whole … there was a

completely different philosophy behind the logic program which was to get the kids to

write the computer programs and through that to develop and extend their understanding

of whatever they were looking at. You would get them to write their own computer

simulations upon whatever topic of simulation they were using, whether it was a voyage



of discovery, whether it’s Francis Drake, whether it’s the Battle of Jutland, or whatever.

And you then get them to do investigative databases and one we produced was called

Greendie, which was a murder, classic murder mystery. Oh a lot of these – done the

Princes of the Towers in as well, and the classic one, the first one we did was called

Greendie and it was John Doe’s Collingwood Mystery and it is actually a marvellous

computer simulation, we still use it and it’s online and all the rest of it. But it never took

off or never got widely adopted. Why not? Oh, probably not very good at the

dissemination side I suppose. Frankly. And it did not map on to the conventional wisdom

of the sort of – must be very careful here – information technology in education’s split

into two groups. There were those who had been working away, squirreling away on their

BBC Acorns at home and teachers had been working in their attics, okay. And then there

were the computer scientist worlds. I’ve got to be very careful about this, it’s very crude.

And the hackers, the enthusiasts took over educational computing in this country and they

got it completely wrong and it’s been a complete disaster in reality if you look at it.

Hopeless. Total waste of money in a real sense, like the National Grid for Learning was

the classic example. One billion pound project, the same as the Dome, not known about,

impact to evaluation study showed it was a complete and utter waste of money, and that

was typical. And I don’t want to get into this conversation, but the computer sciences

stuff, the work we were doing conceptually, I’m absolutely convinced was right. These

were powerful tools for supporting thinking and tools through which thinking could be

developed and extended for children.

[0:52:40]

Do you think that there has been progress made in recent times because a lot of the

surveys I’m getting back show that history teachers are using technology a lot more.

Yes, absolutely fine. The interactive blackboard stuff is very powerful, very important.

Although the research shows they’re used in exactly the same way as they used to use a

blackboard.

They do get children to do documentaries, use …



Yes, that’s fine. That is used, that is multi-modality, the idea of all my work, as I said,

why on earth do you … and this – did a lot of work on this as well – is genre is the key

thing. I’m a great fan of the thinking behind the national literacy strategy which is called

functional literacy, which is genre theory and yes, absolutely marvellous, why - and

actually my idea is for a CPD on this - why on earth shouldn’t teachers represent their

knowledge and understanding in terms of what they’re doing in schools in an appropriate

genre instead of writing these 4,000 word essays for academic education which is just to

show the academic educationalists how clever they are, it’s complete nonsense.

But you call that just a shift in mode of communication?

That’s multi-modality, mode of communication, an extremely powerful shift. And the

whole idea of using blogs, interactivity and all the rest, totally in favour of all that stuff.

No problem with that whatsoever. What we were talking about, the actual nature of

resources which are produced in the context of the computing specialists in the eighties

and nineties for history education. History education’s just a minor leaf on the whole tree

of that whole movement. And where is it all now? Basically a complete waste of time,

and money.

[0:54:13]

So do you think that there’s hope for the use of computers in the future?

Oh massively, and I go back to Andrew Hunt who ran Nuffield Science, the Nuffield

curriculum, and Andrew said very quietly one day – lovely bloke, very, very nice, very

powerful man, very powerful in his thinking – he said look Jon, he said, the only

educational use of ICT computing in schools is that which has been commercially

successful. And that is a really powerful argument. Very powerful way of looking at it.

You know, take the whole power of the, the huge amount of incredibly successful

commercial software, apply that within the context of the schools and then the thing takes

off, like the interactive blackboards, like the use of technology to produce documentaries,

the idea of interaction in terms of through webcams and all the rest of it and shared ideas

and conferences, and that’s all commercial software. The actual stuff which has been



developed by educationalists for education purposes, you’ve got to look at it with very,

very grave doubts and very grave concern. And I went to the BECTA, I was invited to the

BECTA annual, you know, giving of awards stuff, about two years ago by Tribal and you

just sat there, they gave these awards, this sort of self-congratulatory group of commercial

software writers and … and you just look at it and, you know, Mickey Mouse rules again

and they were producing stuff and clapping each other, using all the gizmos. You said,

well wait a minute, that kind of basic thinking was done way back in the eighties and

nineties, you know. Like another idea of high level, high quality thinking from the world

of computing was like Logo, the whole Logo movement in mathematics. And they were

doing Logo program … and you go along to BECTA and a lot of the stuff they said, oh,

this is primitive compared to the … Never mind, but that was all the commercial world.

But I can witter on for a bit on that. We’re not doing too well on our timetable are we?

[0:56:58]

We’re okay. I wanted to ask you about the Gifted and Talented which you told me had

been a major interest in your career over the last six or seven years.

Oh we’re quite a long way down here aren’t we, yes. It’s always very difficult to talk

about the Gifted and Talented thing, in that when … oh, getting old now. The National

Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth, right, let’s go back. This is worth knowing.

Let’s go back to basics. The Assisted Places Scheme by the Tories until 1997 in effect

produced a valve for talented kids in the comprehensive system to have what was

allegedly an academic education. These are crude, brutal, simplistic and probably wrong

statements. The Labour Party in ’97 introduced an abolition of the Assisted Places

Scheme which meant that that valve for what you might call the old grammar school kids

from working class backgrounds, that valve was then turned off. Whether that valve was

ever open is … that’s why I said it might be crude and simplistic, but that would be a

perception and we’re not prepared to discuss things here because we don’t know. The

government has a most interesting minister who’s now Transport Minister, a man called

Lord Adonis. Do you know about all this stuff?

Oh yes.



Now, Lord Adonis – and do put it into Google – I’m going to tease you. Put him into

Google and get his biography from Wikipedia.

I’ve read it.

But what an amazing background. And he in fact became Tony Blair’s principal private

adviser in 10 Downing Street. Talk about a minister behind a curtain or an eminence

grise, he sat … by Tony Blair’s – I’m going to lose my brain power – by his third ministry

he had in effect become an incredibly powerful and influential figure inside 10 Downing

Street. And one of the arguments put forward of why Tony Blair’s final ministry in many

ways was more successful was because of Adonis’s influence. An interest which Adonis

developed in the late 1990s was gifted and talented education. And he promoted and

pushed it on all through ten years until he got up the nose of Ed Balls who moved him on

and now Gifted and Talented has disintegrated. And in 2001, again shaggy dog stuff, I,

with two or three other people wrote the bid for Exeter University for the National

Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth. And my role is this ability to be extremely off-

the-wall, creative thinking and I simply said to the Vice-Chancellor, you’re mad, which he

took as a compliment. The idea that we are a highly prestigious academic university

ranked along with Imperial College, Durham, Oxford, Cambridge, Warwick, you know,

we’re clearly in that class. [laughs] So flick it over. We’ll go for the polyversities. Yes.

So we’ll write a bid based upon a consortium of the big polytechnics to compete against

the elitist. Get it? Turn our weakness into a strength. And the man who drove that idea

forward was a man called David Burgess, a great maths guru, major national/international

figure. And David and myself and to a certain extent a man called David Reynolds, and

the V-C himself. The V-C went into overdrive on this. Talk about club man networking

Lord Sainsbury and all that and David Cannadine. Sir Geoffrey Holland was in there, he’d

been a permanent civil servant … he was great. And so we had a whale of a time and we

won the bid for NAGTY, but Tony had promised to his mate who was V-C of Warwick.

So we were runner-up. And as a consequence to that, David who’s – David Reynolds –

who’s very, very well connected, we were offered one of the summer schools and I ended

up directing the summer school for Exeter. Now here I am. And then I wrote the bid for

the South West Universities partnership of Exeter, Bath and Plymouth Universities at



which point I’d been culled out of Exeter, had been made redundant, etc. Too old, too

expensive, too useless, and I took the bid to Plymouth, which upset Exeter no end, but

never mind, that’s history, and I’ve been massively working ever since in Gifted and

Talented Education. But also in that context applying the ideas through history education

and I run the summer schools and master … which I deliver as through history. And so

that’s been that influence. And if you look at my Primary History stuff, you’ll see quite a

bit in there about the cognitive acceleration in history education, which I believe in very

strongly. I think it’s the best of all the, what you might call the teaching theories about

how you actually get the teaching to operate effectively with kids, called CACHE.

Cognitive Acceleration in Science Education it was based upon, which is Shayer and

Adey, and that has been a major influence and in fact I’m going to put a bit on it in the

next Primary History which is, ho ho ho, Planning for Historical, Geographical and Social

Understanding, which is in the bag. Which is again on this whole business where we

started earlier, how do you do things, you go with the flow, you go with what the teachers

know and understand and therefore they’re faced with this challenge so we produce a

highly simple, practical set of ideas how they can actually implement a new thematic

curriculum in the context of historical, geographical and social understanding, which is

one of the six new themes, and take it from there.

Adapting the old curriculum to the new …

[1:01:40]

Section embargoed until 2022

[1:03:10]

Email me and I’ll send it as an attachment. Because what she’s doing there is she’s

picking up Alan Blyth’s work, which is, which we both bought, where there was a three

year project on dealing with the … and look what it says, look at the title! Look at the

subtitle, look what it says! And what’s the new National Curriculum?

Yes, history, geography and social studies. Yes.



[1:03:42]

But then what you’ve got here and this is where we’re talking about, this is quite a useful

thing to end on – or not – but this is quite interesting because what we’ve got here is, this

is really up-to-date, 2010 innit? ’09, ’08, ’10? What? You must be joking. 1976.

I suppose it’s true, what teachers say, all the best ideas come round and round.

Yes, but the sharp point on that is this was a proper academic project.

It was funded by …

Schools Council. One of the range of those … and this is the one which is stuck with us,

it’s stuck in all our minds, and suddenly we’ve blown the dust off it. And this tried to say

well, what are the kind of philosophical underpinnings to how you actually deal with this

and I was reading it this morning, you know, I said we’ll do it on the train, pass a little

Mickey Mouse booklet over because that actually is one … [pause]

I’ll stop the tape if that’s okay? I can move beyond the interview or …

Well no, because this in fact is really important for the interview and we can switch it

back on when I find it. [break in recording]

‘In discussing the place of concept’, this is Alan Blyth 1976, Place, Time and Society, an

introduction to their big book, Curriculum Planning in History, Geography and Social

Science. ‘In discussing the place of concept in children’s learning about place, time and

society the project team came to see that there might be particular advantages in looking at

their subject area to see where some common elements could be found which were

important to history, geography and the social sciences. These common elements could

be described as key concepts. There are four substantive key concepts, many concerned

with elements and processes in society, communication of power, values and beliefs,

conflict and consensus, and three methodological’ – what we would call second order

concepts – ‘Many concerns we raised were analysing society; similarity difference,



continuity change, causes and consequences’. And of course in history we’d put evidence

and chronology in as well. But so the whole project was built around these ideas.

‘Subjects can be looked at in more than one way. First, they are what is found on the

timetable of traditional secondary schools, these should be called school subjects, etc.

Secondly, behind these school subjects there are subjects in the fields of scholarship and

research. So history as a school subject is a body of information and a set of skills and

ways of thinking, which is affected more or less by what is going on in history as a

research and academic discipline. The same is true in a slightly different way of

geography.’ So how modern are we? ‘This means that they are taught, they should be

drawn upon in a balanced way in the actual programme that is followed in the middle

years’. And this is a concept, I come back on this, the idea of critical thinking, the project

emphasises critical thinking, and subjects as tools, ‘Something to be drawn upon in the

relation to the development of these concepts and understanding, both substantive and

syntactic.’ And then you go on and talked about it. This is 1976. But this is in many

ways radically new now as well because in 1988/89 the government Stalinised the

curriculum, they nationalised the curriculum and they destroyed it by putting into the

curriculum the atavistic knowledge and understanding of what education was about

through the lens of the memories of highly intelligent politicians and their advisers who

were harking back to the golden age of their prep schools. At which point I’ll shut up.

Thank you very much Jon.

[End of track 1]

[Track 2]

A big influence on me has been, well it’s been an influence because again, as with

Sylvester’s rationalisation, something called Harland and Kinder 1997, Journal of In-

Service Education, a typology. What are the factors that make change occur in the

teaching’s pedagogy? What makes an innovation change? And they produced three levels

of influence. The first is the resources, teaching approaches, tips for teachers, that’s the

bottom level. Very, very little influence whatsoever. And then the second level is dealing

with curriculum issues and planning inside the school and that has some influence, some



lasting influence and importance, like when they meet and work in teams. And the top

level is values, congruence on one hand, are the values and beliefs of the teacher or the

values of the teachers congruent with those providing in-service? Do they have a shared

belief in what they’re doing and if they have that, then change is likely to occur. And the

second one is where the idea is that there is a deep understanding of the discipline or the

area of knowledge. Not just as in the history stuff, is grounded in an understanding of

what is history, what is the nature of historical study.

But when you’ve got a non-specialist teaching it, that’s really difficult to achieve isn’t it?

Well the issue then is that you’re going to have to have in-service to provide that kind of,

enough of that kind of deeper knowledge for them actually to have an understanding of

what they’re doing. And the belief side of it can come in any way related to that. But

you’re quite right and that is one of the problems of having a curriculum in which the

teachers have not been educated in relation to both the beliefs and the knowledge side at

the top level of that pyramid and when they’re dealing in a way with little tips for teachers

stuff at the very bottom end. So when we ran our GEST courses it was very much on

involving the teacher in the concept of how they’re going to develop an understanding of

history through the activities we’re doing, they were dealing with resources, problem

solving, questioning, challenge, presentation of ideas. So they got an understanding of the

nature of the discipline in relation to a very advanced pedagogy.

[0:02:03]

Section embargoed until 2022.


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