This article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

Once upon a time, educators believed that there was a property of children’s minds known as ‘understanding of time’. According to this belief, young children had little ability to understand when things happened, even within their own immediate experiences, much less in the distant past. As they got older, their ability to understand time became progressively more developed: In the early years of primary school they began to understand concepts such as ‘before’ and ‘after’, then to learn about minutes, hours, days and so on, and finally, in early adolescence, to be capable of dealing with the more expansive periods of historical time. Recent theory and research have demonstrated the inadequacy of these older beliefs. Several studies have led to a more complicated - and optimistic - view of children’s thinking about time, as well as to practical guidelines for improving their understanding.