The idea that history is constructed can be a difficult concept for pupils to grasp, yet it is foundational to disciplinary understanding and crucial if pupils are to understand both the relevance of history and the responsibility of the historian. When asked about the nature of history, many of my pupils talked blandly about ‘the past’ and seemed to view history as something passive, a body of largely objective kinowledge, that they simply ‘receive’. Given the rigour that our department strives for in our curriculum, with many enquiries focused on interpretation and evidential investigation, I was rather disheartened with this gap in our students’ disciplinary understanding. This deficit was raised as a common trend in Ofsted’s 2023 Rich Encounters With the Past: history subject report, which commented that,

In most schools, pupils had misconceptions about how historians and others study the past and construct their accounts...