Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references are outdated.

For children history is a story, and a story mainly about people.(Schools Council, 1969, p12) It is interesting that Grant Bage (1999) used this quote to begin his chapter on Making Meaning of Story and History in, what has become, the definitive book on learning history through narrative in primary schools, Narrative Matters. It is a simple statement which seems to echo those long distant times when the Schools' Council held sway over the curriculum and, like many simple statements, it contains a great truth – that the stories of people from the past can teach us a lot about our humanity,