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interviewee noted that a significant minority of more adventurous teachers had used the
advent of modules at AS and A2 to introduce modules related to different periods.
Nevertheless, the interviewee suggested that a number of factors inhibited the realisation of
these opportunities by some teachers. An important consideration was the issue of teacher
attitudes and understanding:
I think that there are some teachers who seem to be not that confident about teaching,
particularly multi-ethnic history. And the other thing I think is attitudes where I have had
some teachers say to me ‘Well this is nothing to do with my school, our school is largely
white … and that’s clearly a worry. If anything it is certainly as relevant to those schools
but even more so. I think that schools in inner cities are forced to address this and I have
had teachers in inner London say to me, ‘Well, I’ve changed my curriculum … what I was
doing before wasn’t resonating with them [pupils from different ethnic and cultural
communities] and at GCSE and A level I was losing students … So they addressed it in the
light of that and probably, if you work in an inner city, you have got that commitment
anyway.
The interviewee considered that this was not helped by limited INSET opportunities available
for continued professional development in history for both primary and secondary teachers. A
second issue was the decision by some teachers not to develop diversity options within the
Modern World History GCSE course in their schools. The assumption was that teaching
about Nazi Germany would increase the number of children opting for history and GCSE and
AS/A2. Thirdly, the interviewee felt that many published resources were often inadequate
with respect to teaching for diversity:
If you look at the resources that exist, you can see that a lot of them don’t address that;
so you might see textbooks purportedly on British history [but] they are not, they are
on English history and very mainstream: they don’t recognise the gender issues, the
multi-ethnic issues … Not all textbooks, but quite a lot.
The interviewee was optimistic about the scope to develop a more diverse history curriculum
in the future. They said that a history lecturer at the University of the West of England had
suggested that it would be useful to have a bibliography for primary and secondary teachers to