In this article, Jacob Olivey describes his department's efforts to both diversify their Key Stage 3 curriculum and secure greater curricular coherence. Building on a large body of research and practice, Olivey sought new forms of curricular coherence through the selection and sequencing of substantive content across the curriculum. He reflects on…

In this article, which is based on Huijgen's PhD dissertation "Balancing between the past and the present", Tim Huijgen and Paul Holthuis present the results of an experimental method of teaching 14-16-year-old students to contextualise their historical studies in a different way. In the four lessons described, students' initial…

Faced with cutting her Key Stage 3 curriculum to two years, Natalie Kesterton and her department were determined to do more with less. Not only did they want to ensure that their pupils developed a secure, wide-ranging knowledge of British and world history, they also wanted to address deficits in pupils' chronological security and 'sense of…

As postgraduate historians with teaching responsibilities at the University of York, Bridget Lockyer and Abigail Tazzyman were concerned to tackle some of the challenges reported by their students who had generally only encountered women's history in a disconnected way through stand-alone topics or modules. Their response was to create a series of…

What is historical empathy and why is it important? What has gone wrong and what had gone right in past attempts to develop students' empathetic understanding? What does progression look like in this area of historical thinking and what are the preconceptions that can act as barriers to progression? Lee and Shemilt address these issues, drawing on…

What kinds of interaction take place in a history department? What might be their value? Between 1999 and 2003, Simon Letman, then history teacher and Director of Studies at The Royal Hospital School in Ipswich, set out to discover how the rich variety of between-teacher- interactions, so much a feature of the department he had worked in for…