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According to Ofsted, history is successful in schools. Not so, says controversial historian Niall Ferguson : the inspectors are missing the ruination of the subject Is there a crisis in the teaching of history in British schools? Not if you believe the conclusions of History for All, the report published earlier this month by Ofsted. Based on evidence from inspections conducted between 2007 and 2010 in 83 primary schools and the same number of secondary schools, the report begins on a reassuringly positive note. “There was much that was good and outstanding” in the history lessons the inspectors observed. “Most pupils enjoyed well-planned lessons that extended their knowledge, challenged their thinking and enhanced their understanding.” In secondary schools, we are assured, “effective teaching by well-qualified and highly competent teachers enabled the majority of students to develop knowledge and understanding in depth”. In short, history is “generally a popular and successful subject, which many pupils enjoy”. Attainment at the secondary level is “high and continu[ing] to rise”. Well, that’s all right then. Clearly, all last year’s talk by Michael Gove, Simon Schama, myself and others about the urgent need for reform was mere alarmism, doubtless actuated by some sinister political motive. Or was it? A closer look at the main body of the report suggests that there are indeed grounds for concern. First, it can hardly be a cause of celebration that students in independent schools are almost twice as likely to study GCSE history as those in maintained schools. In 2010, more than a hundred state secondary schools entered no students for GCSE history. Second, as the inspectors’ report acknowledges, England is the only country in Europe where history is not compulsory for students beyond the age of 14. Worse, many state schools now offer a two-year key stage 3 course, which allows some pupils to stop studying history at the age of 13. And here are four more facts that are not in the Ofsted report: • 25% of all schools no longer teach history as a discrete subject in year 7 • 30% of comprehensives spend less than one hour a week on history in the years up to age 13 • More GCSE candidates took design and technology than history last year • More A-level candidates took psychology. It is a paradox indeed. History has never been more popular outside schools than it is in Britain today. Yet history has never been so unpopular in British schools. Even more disturbing is the evidence of widespread historical ignorance among school-leavers. A recent survey of first-year undergraduates reading history at a reputable UK university found that: 66% did not know who was monarch at time of the Armada; 69% did not know the location of the Boer war; 84% did not know who commanded British forces at Waterloo (a third thought it was Nelson); and 89% could not name a single 19th-century British prime minister. Such evidence should make us very sceptical indeed about Ofsted’s claim that history is “a successful subject in schools”. How did we get here? The problem is surely not poor teaching. Rather, it is the stuff that teachers are expected to do, which is the product of an unholy alliance between well-meaning politicians and educationalists, not forgetting over-mighty examination boards. The politicians ranged from Kenneth Baker, who vainly hoped that a new national curriculum would force schools to teach a rather traditional kind of history, to Gordon Brown, who decided (Scotsman as he was) that schools should be pressed to teach British rather than English history, in order to promote a sense of “Britishness”. Such initiatives from above provided the proponents of a so-called new history with a golden opportunity to reshape historical education. Historical “skills” such as source analysis, they argued, should be elevated above mere factual knowledge. And “discovery” by children should count for more than dusty old pedagogy. The result was a national curriculum designed to instil in schoolchildren all kinds of “key concepts” like “chronological understanding”, “cultural, ethnic and religious diversity”, “change and continuity”, “cause and consequence”, “significance” and “interpretation”. And these were to be taught with reference to an impressively wide range of subject matter. Who could possibly object to such an enlightened scheme? The trouble is not so much with the theory as with the practice that has evolved in too many schools. As Ofsted admits in a damning passage on primary pupils, “some … found it difficult to place the historical episodes they had studied within any coherent, long-term narrative. They knew about particular events, characters and periods, but did not have an overview. Their chronological understanding was often underdeveloped and so they found it difficult to link developments together.” The only thing wrong with this observation is that Ofsted seems to think it applies only to primary school pupils, whereas it could equally well be applied to those in secondary school – and students at a good few universities, too. In fact, as the inspectors concede elsewhere, in 28 of the 58 secondary schools they visited, “students’ chronological understanding was not sufficiently well developed: they had … a poor sense of the historical narrative”. This is hardly a minor deficiency. It’s a bit like saying that maths is a successful subject in British schools, apart from the fact that pupils in half of schools can’t count. I have complained before that it is possible to leave school in England knowing only about Henry VIII, Hitler and Martin Luther King Jr. This is a caricature, admittedly, but it is not a wholly unfair one. Commenting on a not untypical primary curriculum, the authors of History for All say that “its principal weaknesses are the disconnected topics and the potential for the pupils to be left with a fragmented overview”. You can say that again. Consider this list of topics spread in this order over four years: • Romans and Celts – why have people invaded and settled? • Ancient Egypt – what can we find out from what has survived? • What can we learn about history by studying a famous person? • Why did Henry VIII marry six times? • Tudor times – rich and poor; exploration • What was it like to live here in the past? • Victorian children • Victorians – how your area has changed since the Victorian era • The second world war • Ancient Greeks • Britain since 1948 The word smorgasbord doesn’t really do justice to this random assortment. Lost, as Simon Schama has justly lamented, is the “long arc of time”, to be replaced by odds and sods. And some of those odds really are odd, especially if you go on to GCSE and A-level, where the “methods” become ever more idiosyncratic. If you really want to understand what’s going wrong in English schools, take a look at some of the lessons Ofsted singles out for praise… “Students in year 8 analysed the changing attitudes towards Oliver Cromwell from the 17th to the 20th centuries and, in year