Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

What is the role of history in the curriculum? Is it to give a traditional education or because history is a powerful teacher that we all can learn from? In my view well-taught history doesn't leave history in the past. It's easy to look purely at technological change and think that civilization has moved on apace, but some of the issues we face today are similar to those of a couple of hundred or even a thousand years ago. How do you run a country? What are human rights? And how do you decide what is right and wrong? To use a cliché: history repeats itself. This happens because the big issues remain, but each generation shapes its own response and often that response is down to individuals making a change. Many ordinary people in history have left a huge legacy...