Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references are outdated.

The history of primary history in state schools is a chequered one. Until the National Curriculum the quality of history teaching in primary schools depended largely on the enthusiasm and interest of individual teachers. This resulted in a great deal of uninspired and uninformed teaching of the subject as testified by the DES Primary Survey of 1978. The 'revolution' in teaching history was largely brought about by a number of enlightened history educationists researching in the secondary sector who realised that it was the process of learning history; the research, the investigation, that was as important as the historical knowledge that evolved from it.