Rosie Turner-Bisset describes a systematic attempt to teach non-specialist trainee primary teachers to understand how the discipline of history works. She reports encouraging results. The training methods described here are based on a working assumption that teachers must be passionate and excited about a subject in order to teach it well, and that an understanding of the discipline’s concepts, structures and processes is crucial in achieving this. Rosie argues that non-specialist trainee primary teachers need varied and effective models or ‘repertoires’ of teaching approaches that help them to see the subject’s structures and concepts at work in teaching and learning. Secondary teachers need to find out what conceptions are held of history in partner primaries: whether our primary colleagues are teaching history at a high and sophisticated level or whether they are still operating with misconceptions of history as ‘information’ (and therefore viewing history tasks as ‘reading for information’), the secondary teacher who is interested in securing progression needs to know. As Jenny Parsons has argued ( Teaching History 98) two-way dialogue between primary and secondary teachers is essential.