Dale Banham continues a theme explored by many other teacher-authors in recent years, how to ensure that progression does not just stop in Year 9, leaving pupils stagnant in key areas of historical learning before getting picked up again in Year 12. He produces a more thorough rationale and commentary on his original ‘Cunning Plan’ in Teaching History 100, relating it to some wider recommendations for keeping up motivation, access and challenge throughout the GCSE course. In particular he focuses upon the need to contextualise coursework, arguing that teachers will secure a much better response from pupils if board-set coursework is avoided, and real, motivating, local enquiries are constructed as frameworks within which assessed work can play a more natural part of the normal flow of learning. His message is that planning should be driven by the dynamic of the historical story, by the teacher’s passion and enthusiasm and by the rigorous application of the subject’s concepts and methods in the context of intriguing historical puzzles. Reliance on extrinsic motivation, such as appeal to levels in markschemes, just bypasses this, thus failing to transform those very pupils who need most improvement in their learning and most help in seeing history’s relevance and power.