Curriculum planning for post-16 history

As all schools and colleges have their own schemes of work I have not made the modelling of good schemes of work too much of a priority. However, given the absolutely dire quality of some of the exam boards’ published schemes I do need to say something.  If you look at AQA’s schemes for Russia you will find 75 activities stated – sounds impressive until you realise that the majority are called simply ‘research’ and the rest would easily appear on a Y8 scheme. OCR have some bizarre examples of activities, such as the one on the Mid-Tudor crisis, that send students to the Resource Area to find out about modern-day crises and then report back to the rest of the class. Who on earth has time for this, let alone inclination. In another lesson they ask students to answers simple questions on a 12 minute film about Chartism only to be then asked to watch it again in case they missed anything! But rather than telling you what you already know about planning good schemes, I want to introduce you to the idea of the student learning planner. This maps out on a lesson-by-lesson basis what the students need