I started secondary school in 1985. It was the era in education when significant change was afoot. Not that we knew it as students in classrooms around the country.
Looking back now, the writing was on the wall. You could see it coming when the then secretary of state announced in a speech in Sheffield in January 1984 that he intended to seek broad agreement about the objectives of the five to 16 curriculum. We know where that ended up...
An interesting work from the UCL Institute of Education looks at the experiences of teaching history from 1985 to 2011 (Woolley, 2017). It states: “There were dramatic changes in history teaching across this period, in terms of teachers’ epistemological position, professional status and pedagogic practice. All of the teachers interviewed perceived and experienced a loss of autonomy.”
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