Planning and teaching linear GCSE: inspiring interest, maximising memory and practising productively

As proposed changes to the National Curriculum are furiously debated, and details of future changes to GCSE are anxiously awaited, history teachers in England are already wrestling with the implications of one change to the public examination system: the end of ‘modular' GCSE courses and a return to final examinations. Although modular courses and opportunities to re-sit particular exams have only been available for a few years, the need not only to build secure subject knowledge but to help students to retain that knowledge in order to deploy it effectively in explanation, analysis and argument many months (or even years) later has posed new challenges to teachers - or reminded them of old ones. In revisiting the ‘enduring principles' that underline effective history teaching for students of all ages, Katharine Burn reminds readers of the wealth of examples from Teaching History to which they can turn for inspiration, while Catherine McCrory and Michael Fordham offer different case studies of the principles at work in their own GCSE courses (SHP and Modern World respectively).