Raising the bar: developing meaningful historical consciousness at Key Stage 3

John of England signs Magna Carta. Image from Cassell's History of England - Century Edition - published circa 1902.

How can we help pupils make sense of the history that they learn so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts? How can we help pupils develop and sophisticate their understanding of historical time and of the changing relationships between the past, present and future? Rick Rogers addresses these questions through a discussion of a sequence of learning that set out to help a Year 7 class think about the meanings of Magna Carta and about the ways in which these meanings change over time and in the light of the questions that we ask. Rogers describes how a ‘topic based framework' was developed to structure this sequence of learning and suggests that such frameworks can have dramatic impacts on pupil thinking...