Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated.

Alternative curriculum models can take many forms. Some seem to be imposed on reluctant history teachers with little opportunity for planning. Other teachers are given the opportunity to really embed and revise models that might become more suitable to their particular pupils and context. Homewood history department holds a ‘Princes Teaching Institute Schools Mark for History', serving the local, rural community with talks and projects that inspire an interest in the subject in a wide range of people. When the school was looking to develop its approach to the curriculum the history department knew that it had to be at the forefront of the planning. After five years of teaching under the new model, which includes both discrete history lessons and integrated classes for 60, several lessons have been learnt which may prove interesting to departments about to embark on planning integrated or project-based curriculum models.