E 1 · The place of the historic environment within national curricula
There are four curricula for schools in the UK: statutory curricula in England, Wales and Northern Ireland; and curriculum guidelines in Scotland. The historic environment can be used as a resource for teaching many aspects of these curricula. In practice, it will be used most where the curriculum orders and guidelines make direct reference to it. Schools in England are provided with exemplar schemes of work by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), but are non-statutory the recent Primary Strategy documents, Excellence and Enjoyment, stresses that schools are expected to take control of the curriculum.
In spite of this, the Schemes of Work are often followed closely by teachers, sometimes more closely than was intended by the QCA. On the evidence of discussion with teachers and with very many staff at historic sites, there is a disparity between the intentions of the QCA and the interpretation placed upon it by schools and their senior management. Indeed, the DfES constantly makes the case that the National Curriculum is not intended to be prescriptive, and regrets that it should be seen in such a way.
The National Curriculum in England offers a flexible guideline to teachers, which can be interpreted in a number of ways. A visit to a historic site is quoted as an option, sometimes more than once, within various subjects including Art and Design (KS1, Can buildings speak?), Citizenship (KS1 and 2, Developing our school grounds), Geography (KS3, Images of a Country), Design and Technology, History (KS2: What were the differences between the lives of rich and poor people in Tudor times?), Religious Education (KS1: What can we learn from visiting a church?) and Science (KS2 and 3, Materials and their properties). The new emphasis on education for sustainable development has led the QCA to suggest ways of enhancing their schemes of work to bring out a sustainable development focus, leading to a greater emphasis on the built environment within the curriculum. Exceptionally, in Britain 1750 - 1900 (KS3) the study of a local history component becomes statutory.
The Welsh curriculum includes at KS2 local history topics such as The history and changing function of a local castle or church. Housing or a building are also given as examples within local history in Northern Ireland at KS2. Also in Northern Ireland, prehistoric settlements and sites are mentioned in Life in early times at KS2. In Scotland, the People in the past unit of environmental studies provides various opportunities for the historic environment, including: How homes have changed, The use of war memorials as evidence for how people remember the past, Explaining the meaning of the term heritage (e.g. in relation to castles). Houses and homes are given as an example within People and place and People in society. In practice, teachers often consider that they can only justify a visit if it will illustrate a prescribed aspect of the curriculum. If the class is studying the Victorians, then the visit must concentrate on Victorian issues even if the site is not primarily or at all important in terms of the nineteenth century. While this situation can stimulate interesting and inventive improvisation by education staff at the sites or indeed by teachers, it can also lead to a distortion of the real nature of the place visited, or to the avoidance of visits to places of great interest which are seen to be excluded from the National Curriculum. One problem is that teachers often lack confidence both about teaching about the historic environment, and about justifying it as a suitable subject for the school timetable unless it is specifically mentioned in the curriculum.
At present the National Curriculum for History at KS2 does not cover the period between the early seventeenth century and the beginning of the Victorian age, except in terms of local history – obviously excluding the eighteenth century, (which had such a powerful impact on landscapes and on historic houses), and the Industrial Revolution. For the study of the historic environment this is a problem, particularly since this is one of the stages in a school career when classes are most likely to make visits out of school. We found examples of sites which feel obliged, by pressure from teachers, to deviate from their actual strengths in order to offer experiences which are thought more appropriate.
For Blenheim Palace, a country house built for the first Duke of Marlborough in the early eighteenth century and one of the finest examples of English Baroque architecture, the changes made at KS2 in 2000, when Stuart history was excluded from the schemes of work, were a disaster. The property had to reinvent itself. Now the two principal courses offered for schools are (a) Blenheim in the Victorian Age, and (b) Sir Winston Churchill in the 1930s.
At Stourhead, the great Palladian house in Wiltshire with one of the most important landscape gardens in Europe, the formal visit for schools offers an experience of Victorian Stourhead. At present the eighteenth century effectively does not exist for schools.
On the other hand, some sites with established reputations are able to avoid making sacrifices to teachers’ interpretations of the curriculum – as at Dulwich Picture Gallery, where the collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century paintings bears no relation to Schemes of Work. Dulwich has been very active in exploring the local history option, as well as the opportunities for developing historical skills offered by portraits.
While there are no plans at present to make a study of the built environment a recommendation within the National Curriculum, teachers can incorporate it into lessons when they consider this to be appropriate. It seems likely that the curriculum for England will continue to be increasingly non-prescriptive.
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