Matthew Bradshaw shares the early, tentative efforts of his history department to shape a new Key Stage 3 workscheme in the light of the 2008 National Curriculum for England. While his department's scheme is designed to secure progression in all conceptual areas, he chooses to focus here on the concept of diversity. He shows how his department has attempted to go beyond treating diversity as a content descriptor and is instead trying to foster a form of problem-solving and a type of historical account. Bradshaw's rationale for whole-Key-Stage coherence and progression is based on repeated revisiting of the challenges involved in discerning and characterising ‘similarity and difference' within past situations. He anticipates some of the difficulties students will face and explains his department's early thinking on how students might be supported in addressing (rather than avoiding) such difficulties.