Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

As a local authority adviser, Andrew Wrenn's advice has often been sought by history departments, both those seeking to resist ill-conceived and potentially damaging cross-curricular initiatives and those keen to exploit new opportunities for meaningful inter-disciplinary collaboration.

Drawing on his knowledge of the varied practice in different schools, on conversations with advisers in other subjects and on important analysis of the work of leading curriculum theorists, he outlines two possible courses of action. The first is well-informed defence of the value of disciplinary thinking and the ‘signature pedagogies' required to support it within subjects. The second is the assumption of a leadership role in rigorously planned, logically coherent, and appropriately limited, inter-disciplinary innovation.