Put the Civil Wars back on the syllabus, Mr Gove

The English Civil War, the Civil Wars, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms: call them what you will, they are the most important and perhaps the most exciting period in British history and they should be at the core of the school curriculum throughout the UK. That is the conclusion I came to following a question put to me by a disgruntled teacher at a recent conference in Cambridge on how I would organise the National Curriculum for history.

The question was prompted, quite reasonably, by a committed and conscientious professional sick of panelists like me with little or no experience of the classroom bemoaning the shortcomings of history teaching in Britain. It is all too easy to pontificate about ideals when one is spared the budgetary constraints, large classes of varying ability and — a concern that cropped up repeatedly — appallingly low levels of literacy that teachers have to deal with on an everyday basis.