Overwhelmed by overview? Bewildered by how to teach bigger pictures? Tied up in mental knots by trying to work out the difference between thematic stories, frameworks and outlines? You are not alone.

Like many history teachers, you feel more confident when teaching depth studies but find yourself beating a rapid retreat when faced with the challenge of teaching coherent overviews. More by accident than design, your schemes of work tend to consist of a series of in-depth enquiries. Pupils undoubtedly enjoy their history lessons and demonstrate a secure knowledge of particular episodes, which they use to construct answers to historical questions. But at the back of your mind nags the awareness that they are unable to join these little stories together into any kind of coherent big picture...