“Fewer and fewer students want to study the past,” complained the Tory MP and historian Chris Skidmore recently, adding: “[G]iven the way it is currently presented in schools, who can blame them?” In 2011, in 159 schools no pupils at all were entered for GCSE history. “We are facing a situation,” he warns, “where history is at risk of dying out in schools and regions in the country.” His remedy is to reorient the GCSE towards “our national history, rather than focusing on Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia or the history of medicine. We should introduce a narrative-based exam that covers every age in British history across a broad chronological span”, instead of focusing on isolated “bite-sized” chunks of history. “Local history,” he adds, would bring it all to life and “can easily be woven into the school curriculum”.
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