Listening doesn’t come easy to Gove. He’d rather just pontificate about what he thinks is best for us, irrespective of what we believe. So when he has to backtrack he obviously puts this down to reluctantly giving into to unwelcome pressure rather than belatedly seeing the light. I , for one, am just grateful for any changes to his hopeless first attempt at a shamble of a history curriculum.
We now know that the changes he has been forced to make to the history proposals are more sweeping than for any other subject. We know that he has had to admit that his curriculum is too Anglo-centric and too much a stampede through time with no opportunity for work in depth. We also hear that he is reconsidering the cut off point between primary and secondary, something I urged him to do as you can read in earlier blogs. All these changes are necessary but far from sufficient. We must hope and press for more. His final report is due in June with the Programmes of Study published in early Autumn. This will leave us with less than a year to prepare for the most fundamental change to the history curriculum in the last 25 years. Teacher of KS2 must be quaking in their boots. Let’s hope sanity prevails and that Gove realises that a U-turn means just that not a few minor modifications.
