What is really being taught to our children in history lessons?

History is an area of remarkable success in our schools thanks to recent education reforms. However, these impressive strides forward risk being undermined by a new wave of activism in classrooms.

Following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, 83 per cent of schools have made changes to ‘diversify’ or ‘decolonise’ their curriculums in recent years. In many cases, this shake-up has brought politicised and one-sided narratives into schools. Inaccurate and poor-quality teaching resources are being used to give students a mistaken impression of the past.

During research for Policy Exchange’s report,  Lessons from the Past, we found children being taught the ahistorical claim that Stonehenge was built by black people. Elsewhere, pupils learn radical and contested interpretations of the past: such as that the West African kingdoms, which sold other Africans to European slavers, were unaware of their role in the global slave trade. In one case, a membership organisation for subject experts has produced teaching resources describing the genital mutilation of slaves in ancient Rome as an early form of ‘gender transition’.