Pupil-led historical enquiry: what might this actually be?

The current National Curriculum for history requires pupils to ‘identify and investigate specific historical questions, making and testing hypotheses for themselves'.

While Kate Hammond relished the encouragement that this gave to her pupils to engage in the process of historical enquiry, she was keen to develop a much clearer sense of what successful pupil-led enquiries would involve and to ensure that all the pupils in her class - not just the higher attainers - could succeed in this endeavour.

Here she outlines a provisional list of attributes that might characterise successful practice and explores in detail how two of these attributes - generating worthwhile historical questions and recognising the need to keep testing a hypothesis - can be effectively developed...