General matters

Chris Skidmore Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Chris Skidmore (Kingswood) (Con)]

I wish to discuss history teaching in schools, because the study of history in schools has reached an all-time low. Last year, for the first time, the proportion of pupils being entered for history GCSE dropped beneath 30%, but the situation is actually far worse than that. Yesterday, I released a report, “History in Schools: A School Report”, which reveals that in vast areas of the country—often in the most deprived areas of our nation—history is being forgotten entirely. In 77 local authorities fewer than one in five pupils is passing history GCSE, but we need to break the figures down and examine individual local authorities, because in places such as Knowsley under 8% of pupils are passing history GCSE. Only four pupils in the whole of that local authority area passed A-level history. In 2010, 159 schools in this country did not enter a single pupil for history GCSE. We must address the situation urgently.

Often it is the Daily Mail or academics who discuss what type of history should be studied in schools, whose history should be studied, how history should be studied in the curriculum, whether we should have a narrative form of history or a more interpretive form of history that looks at sources, and whether history should be seen as a framework of facts. The Government are instituting a curriculum review, and we welcome that. I hope that it will examine the process whereby history is studied in bite-sized chunks and pupils do not get a sense of a narrative framework of history—they dot around from ancient Egypt to the Victorians, then on to the Tudors and off to 20th century history. Although we can debate whose history and what type of history should be studied, we should not deny that history is a crucial subject that binds us as one nation. However, it is becoming a subject of two nations, and that is the issue that I wish to raise with the House.

Britain is dangerously isolated in Europe—and not for a good reason— because we are the only nation apart from Albania that does not make the study of history compulsory beyond 14. I do not believe that we should be in that club, so I put my case to the Government that although the curriculum review is ongoing and will carry on until 2014, there has never been a more compelling time to make history a compulsory subject to study to 16. If I was to tell the Minister what my ideal Christmas present would be, as the vice-chair of the all-party group on archives and history, I would say that it would be to make the study of history compulsory to 16 for all pupils. I wish everyone a happy Christmas.