Why Big Up Your History? Time to Develop Students’ Scale Hopping Skills

Evidence from England suggests that school students are not good at establishing ‘big pictures’ of the past. The new history national curriculum recognises this weakness, stating that students should “gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales’ (History National Curriculum, 2014). In this paper I will report some of the classroom practices being developed in response to this challenge. I will also critique the current boundaries of the school history curriculum in England presenting arguments for why we need to “big up” school history further, alongside a discussion of how studying history at different scales can be supported. Finally, I will discuss the implications of this critique for classroom practice and present some of the promising practices being developed.