Joining the debate launched in the last edition, John Dixon argues that in relation to competing subjects, history has become harder. He believes that this could be reviewed without loss of standards. He highlights what he sees as a perverse situation of conflicting trends: on the one hand, practice in the classroom has become more innovative, more rigorous and more inclusive of all abilities; on the other, examination requirements have become more and more reductive, alienating and divorced from quality practice. His argument is that pupils of lower ability are the chief losers: whereas we teachers do have plenty of ways of making challenging historical learning accessible to them, aspects of the examination process now unfairly discriminate against such pupils. John Dixon also feels that the voice of the ordinary history teacher is not heard enough in debates on examination and assessment.