Planning for historical understanding a conceptual framework:

Responding To The Rose Report Through The Lens Of The Cambridge Review.

Introduction

At last we have Children, Their World, Their Education: Final Report and Recommendations of the Cambridge Primary Review, (Alexander 2009). This is an independent study funded by the Esmee Fairbairn Trust, which was begun in 2004. By contrast, Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families asked Sir Jim Rose to undertake the Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum (2009) to inform a new curriculum for primary schools as recently as January 2008.

Both recognise the need to create a more manageable primary curriculum. Both emphasise the importance of developing appropriate values, and recommend a curriculum organised around similar ‘areas of learning', which Alexander describes as ‘domains'. Both subscribe to the importance the distinct concepts, knowledge and processes of enquiry within each subject, which were identified in the National Curriculum (DfES 1999).

The Rose Report

The Rose Report is best interpreted in the context of the much larger Cambridge report, Towards a New Primary Curriculum. This is the most riveting, stimulating, reflective and intellectually lively text on education I have read since the 1960s and 70s and the people who inspired me then are integral to the arguments which underpin it: Basil Bernstein, Lawrence Stenhouse, R.S. Peters, B.S. Bloom and key constructivist theorists. Discussion of primary history education in this report implicitly assumes links between history academics and history educators, between E.H Carr and John Fines, for example.

This is energising. It reminds me why I was originally excited by the idea of primary education.