Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they intend to include the history of the Commonwealth in the national curriculum; and if so, what steps are they taking to ensure this.

Schools are free to judge whether pupils should be taught about the Commonwealth. The national curriculum for citizenship education, introduced in September 2014, requires pupils to be taught about local, regional and international governance and the United Kingdom’s relations with the rest of Europe, the Commonwealth, the United Nations and the wider world.

There are also a number of opportunities in the history programmes of study for pupils to be taught about the Commonwealth. For example pupils are taught about British history from 1745 to 1901. This includes the development of The Empire, and they are taught a topic on the end of The Empire and Britain’s place in the world since 1945.