Autumn 2025

DRAFT Response to Policy Exchange’s Lessons from the Past 

In the Policy Exchange Report entitled Lessons from the Past, the authors state that ‘history education in schools plays a vital role in developing the public’s knowledge and understanding of the past’. HTEN were pleased to see this conclusion being drawn by the authors.  History remains a popular and successful subject in schools, and it therefore comes as no surprise that school history remains an important source of the public’s knowledge of British history.  

Indeed, HTEN agree with several points contained within this report. We appreciate the report highlighting history teachers’ longstanding concerns that the History GCSE programme is ‘over-burdened with content’ (p.59). We welcome a review of the GCSE national criteria (and their interpretation within examination specifications) that involves all stakeholders. 

However, while there are some useful findings contained within the report, the methodology and some of the findings are problematic. The primary method of data collection was FOI requesting curriculum information and resources from schools and HEIs. There was no attempt to talk to teachers and teacher educators to understand their curricula and resources in context.  This has led to decontextualised materials and potentially distorted findings. The examples presented in the report are selectively deployed and the report gives no sense of how these examples were used (as best practice examples or as artefacts for critique) or how widely they were being used (if at all).   

Given that the report presents a ‘broadly encouraging’ picture of history teaching in England, the reference to teacher training as ‘school history’s weakest link?’ (p. 83) presents a contradiction. HTEN welcome the authors’ push for more time for the subject in ITE. Yet in Chapter 7 many of the providers criticised for having limited subject provision are highly regarded HEIs offering ITE provision known for their strong subject-specificity. The authors make incorrect assumptions about content based on session titles alone. No attempt to request information from school-based providers (SCITTs) was made, and no explanation for this important omission is provided (even more surprising given that the ITT Census revealed that 34% of postgraduate preservice teachers trained on SCITT routes in 2024/25).  

In Chapter 8 several of the ITE resources are misrepresented. There is also a serious and striking dichotomy in this chapter that suggests school history should teach children to be ‘proud of their past’ (p.92) but also that schools should follow Ofsted’s warning to avoid framing historical content ‘in ways that strongly suggested there was a particular ‘right’ answer to complex historical questions’ (Ofsted, 2023). That this anomaly has been included and then overlooked by both the authors and by those endorsing the report is worrying and disappointing.  

HTEN remains proud of the work undertaken by the sector, alongside teachers and the history subject communities, to support history teachers to design and teach curricula that can provide both ‘windows and mirrors’ (Style, 1998) for their students, enabling them to ‘gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world’ (DfE, 2013).   

References 

Department for Education. (2013). National curriculum in England: History programmes of study. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study  

Department for Education. (2024). Initial teacher training census: 2024 to 2025. Explore Education Statistics. https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/initial-teacher-training-census/2024-25 

Ofsted. (2023). Rich encounters with the past: History subject report. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/subject-report-series-history/rich-encounters-with-the-past-history-subject-report 

Policy Exchange. (2025). Lessons from the past. https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/lessons-from-the-past/  

Style, E. (1988). Curriculum as window and mirror. Listening for All Voices, Oak Knoll School monograph. https://www.nationalseedproject.org/Key-SEED-Texts/curriculum-as-window-and-mirror