LAUSR

On seeing the theme of this issue, one may reasonably ask ‘why focus on the humanities at this time?’ Are there not more urgent priorities in primary education, such as ensuring that all children can and do attend school, behave properly, learn to read and write fluently and acquire a sound grounding in mathematics; and that teachers are trained to deliver the curriculum efficiently and effectively? Certainly, these seem to be the main concerns of politicians, policy-makers and those who disburse funding for research. This initiative – a Special Edition of Education 3-13 focused on the teaching of the humanities in primary schools in the four parts of the United Kingdom – started with a series of discussions in 2013 between four academics and teacher educators based in Oxford, England. Two of us are geographers, one a historian and one interested in cross-curricular approaches, spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and primary classteacher expertise. We were all convinced of the importance of the humanities in helping children to understand themselves and the changing world in which they are growing up in the context of globalisation; and the uncertainties that accompany this. However, we were concerned at the current emphasis on propositional (content) knowledge for young children in the National Curriculum in England possibly at the expense of skills, procedures and values; and the lack of time and emphasis given in practice to anything other than literacy and numeracy. Indeed, one recent description of the attitude to the primary curriculum has been that the humanities, and the arts, are simply seen ‘as desirable but inessential’ (Alexander 2016, 2). The loss of curricular breadth and balance, especially in the final year of primary schooling when children and teachers are preparing for tests in literacy and numeracy, which often seem to take centre stage, was also troubling. Factors such as the influence of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and other international comparison tests in the home language, mathematics and in some cases science seem to have led to a greater emphasis on the ‘core subjects’ and the marginalisation of the humanities, and the arts, in most education systems. Initially, we were thinking of the humanities as the subject disciplines of History, Geography and Religious Education and possibly others such as citizenship. We soon discovered that there was a startling lack of information and research about these – specifically about how and how well they were taught, and by whom, in primary schools in England – even from inspection reports. As time went on, we came, slowly, to recognise that our assumption that the humanities should necessarily be conceptualised in this way might be too anglocentric. Contacts with colleagues in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales indicated that policy and practice were very different in these other jurisdictions of the United Kingdom; and our limited knowledge of other systems (for instance, in Canada and Australia) suggested that this was so elsewhere. We discussed the idea of ‘powerful’ disciplinary knowledge which has been debated in some humanities subjects, particularly in secondary education (see Young 2008; Young and Muller 2016). We considered the level of subject knowledge required by primary classroom teachers, in the light of the consistent findings (see, for instance, Catling and Morley 2013; Catling 2014; Carter 2015) about the importance of this and the relatively low levels of many primary teachers’ subject knowledge in History, Geography and Religious Education; and the need for pedagogical content knowledge as well as subject knowledge (see Eaude 2012). Linked to this was a concern at the reduced amount and quality of sustained professional development opportunities in Initial