Articles by Michael Fordham

From Bevan to Blair? The Case for a Compulsory Modern British Paper at GCSE

15 July 2020 // 1 Comment

In a recent post I suggested five changes that could improve the current GCSE History. In this post I want to expand on one of those ideas: that all boards introduce a [...]

Ethics and History Education

20 June 2020 // 0 Comments

Ethics is a matter of what is right and wrong, how we should act, and how things ought to be. It underpins and permeates everything we do. We can’t rise above ethics or [...]

Five Ways to Improve the History GCSE

29 May 2020 // 0 Comments

I have said a few times on Twitter in recent months that, when the next round of GCSE reforms comes about – as they surely must – then we need to be ready with a set of [...]

How useful are generic educational ideas?

9 March 2020 // 0 Comments

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once made a helpful distinction between a ‘practice’ and an ‘institution’. For MacIntyre, a practice is a social activity that [...]

What did I mean by ‘the curriculum is the progression model’?

8 February 2020 // 1 Comment

The term ‘the curriculum is the progression model’ is increasingly thrown around today, not least because it has become part of the language of the school inspectorate. I [...]

The Importance of Subject Leadership – or, why do we need more Giles Fullards?

7 February 2020 // 1 Comment

I did my PGCE in 2006-2007 under Christine Counsell at Cambridge: it would be hard to imagine a more rigorous welcome to the world of teaching, and I have written plenty [...]

Why is England’s education revolution faltering?

4 February 2020 // 3 Comments

It has been over a year since I wrote a post on this blog, and my writing in the year before was infrequent at best. There are a range of reasons for this, mostly involving a [...]

Can we have shared professional meaning in teaching?

12 November 2018 // 2 Comments

I have a longstanding interest in how teachers create meaning from the things that they teach. Indeed, this question was right at the heart of two papers I had published a [...]

Relevance, meaning and the myth of the empty vessel

7 November 2018 // 1 Comment

We all should now know that Yeats never said that “education is not the filling of a pail”. The sentiment, however, is true. Various ‘constructivist’ theories of [...]

Critical thinking and domain specificity

14 October 2018 // 1 Comment

As a consequence of a pleasant Twitter thread over the weekend, I am currently revisiting two papers that have heavily influenced how I think about the idea of ‘critical [...]

Getting past gobbets: creating well-read pupils in history

5 October 2018 // 1 Comment

Pause, for a moment, and think back to your own school days, however distant those may be. Think back to your English Literature lessons, and see if you can produce a quick [...]

Why does pedagogy dominate curriculum?

3 October 2018 // 1 Comment

In my previous blog post, I argued that one of the reasons we have ended up at the door of very prescriptive approaches to pedagogy – such as scripted lessons – has come [...]

Curriculum neglect, pedagogical prescription and the problem of the scripted lesson

1 October 2018 // 2 Comments

I read an interesting blog post today that took a critical look at an approach to curriculum that involves providing teachers with scripted lessons and very limited choice [...]

Ofsted Inspection Myths in Teacher Education

29 June 2018 // 0 Comments

A few years ago, a number of myths emerged in school inspections. These myths included things such as ‘inspectors expect a certain style of teaching’, ‘inspectors want [...]

Can one know before one understands?

14 June 2018 // 3 Comments

Consider the following: “I know about Magna Carta” What does this statement tell us about what you know? The answer here, I think, is that it does not tell us very much. [...]

Is it more important to understand than to know?

12 June 2018 // 8 Comments

I read an interesting post by Debra Kidd today about how, in history and other subjects, we should aim not just to know, but also to understand. I have written before about [...]

Ofsted and the curriculum

25 April 2018 // 0 Comments

Ofsted yesterday published a blog by Sean Harford, and it was rather good. It said some very sensible things about the curriculum in schools, and it gave a helpful steer in [...]