History is a subject which obviously is very politically sensitive; you wouldn’t find the same thing being said about politics. There is a fundamental misunderstanding, which is the confusion of history and memory. What politicians are concerned about is the public national memory, and of course what they all, from Michael Gove to Simon Schama and Niall Ferguson and many others, want to do is to use history as a means of constructing a positive national identity. It’s an English national identity, not a British national identity, which is one of the problems about these proposals.

They always want the patriotic narrative, so they get steamed up about the fact that students don’t know who commanded the British forces in the great victory at the Battle of Waterloo, for example. Niall Ferguson gets very worked up about this. If you look at it you find that a lot of them weren’t British; a lot of them were Dutch, Hanoverian. The British didn’t actually win the battle; it was the Germans who won the battle because it was the rival of the Germans actually much earlier than the Duke of Wellington claimed in the day that actually turned the tide…

You can go on and on; the patriotic narrative is a series of myths. For me, history is a discipline like physics or chemistry where you teach people skills: skills of analysis, thinking carefully about issues, reaching a judgement, expressing your views; many skills which are, of course, all useful in later life in whatever you do, and you can’t learn these skills, of course, without facts and that’s clearly very important. It’s essentially an analytical discipline in a chronological context. I’m very, very worried that this is going to be destroyed in the schools with this crude emphasis on factual knowledge.

What are exams going to be about? How is it going to be taught? Are we going to have rote learning? It’s all satirised beautifully in an old but still very funny book, ‘1066 and all that’ where they have spoof exams: “arrange in order: Edward I, Edward II, Edward III”.

The second thing I want to say is what kind of national identity do we want to create? Do we want to create a narrow, patriotic identity, that essentially is part of the whole turn to isolationism and inward-looking national culture which we find with euroscepticism, attitudes to immigration and all the rest of it? For me, this drive to focus exclusively on British history is part of that, and I think it’s deeply damaging. I would like a national identity which is much more the traditional British national identity which is open, outward-looking, cosmopolitan, tolerant.

The third thing is that there is actually a national curriculum. It does have a chronological sweep of British history from 1066 to the present, it has European history, it has other bits and pieces, the Incas and so on. I think the national curriculum is very good. The problem with it is that it only goes up to fourteen, so it’s been truncated. I would very strongly favour just simply extending it up to sixteen and making GCSE History compulsory, not for patriotic reasons, but because I think History is a very important key discipline.

Schools, particularly primary schools, don’t have the resources to teach it; it’s because of the league tables which focus very much on Mathematics and English language skills. League tables prioritise other subjects, and so more and more schools have been cutting back on their hours and appointing on-specialist teachers.

The final thing is that there is a problem with GCSE and A-level which is not that there is too much foreign history, and you get the feeling that the conservative commentators are complaining about that, but that it repeats things. It’s fine to study Hitler, but not twice. We should have a variety of different subjects and different topics.

The very last thing is academies. Over 50% of secondary schools are now academies and they teach relatively little history. Only 20% of students from academies go in for History GCSE, whereas the national average is 30%. Again, the conservative commentators, and I include people like Tristram Hunt and the Labour party, all moan all the time about the decline of history, but History’s always been taken by about a third of students at GCSE ever since GCSEs came in. It’s academies that are doing the damage now. At A-level, entries actually have been going up; it’s been a success at A-Level for the last fifteen years.