Oral Answers to Questions

Tristram Hunt Excerpts

Monday 11th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Gibb]

I agree with my hon. and learned Friend about the importance of teaching history in schools, particularly British history, and we know that teachers share this view. Having the flexibility for teachers to be imaginative in how they design the curriculum within a broad and balanced context is a key feature of the academies programme, and the improvements we have seen in academies’ GCSE results suggests that this approach is working well among academies. However, we hope and expect that the curriculum review will deliver a high-quality national curriculum that academies will wish to adopt. It is important that we do not limit aspiration, as my hon. and learned Friend has said, and that is why we will be publishing data specifically about the GCSE results of lower-attaining students on a school-by-school basis.

[Tristram Hunt (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab)]

Will the Minister confirm that the most recent Ofsted report stated that the decline in the teaching of British history was a myth? Is not the real issue that the average 11 to 13-year-old receives only 38 hours of history teaching a year, with academies being among the worst-performing schools in that regard?

[Mr Gibb]

There is a lot of very high-quality history teaching taking place at both primary and secondary level but we are concerned about the drop in the proportion of young people taking history at GCSE, which fell from 35% of the cohort in 1997 to just 31% in 2009. Addressing that lies at the heart of the reason for introducing the concept of the English baccalaureate.