• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

Terry Haydn

  • Home
  • About
  • Learning to Teach History
    • PGCE Student Teacher
    • ICT in History Teaching
    • Time and Chronology
    • Assessment
    • History and Citizenship
    • Evidence
    • Causation
    • Substantive concepts
    • Empathy
    • Drama and Role-Play
    • Significance
    • Values and dispositions in school history
    • Class management
    • Interpretations
    • History and newspapers
    • Purpose of School History
    • Inclusion and diversity
      • Parent’s story
      • Claire’s full story
    • CPD
  • Managing Pupil Behaviour
    • The Haydn Scale and ‘The Right to Learn’
    • Levels of Control
    • Links to the research
    • How to get the class quiet; what do teachers say?
    • ‘Coping’; how do teachers handle things when they are not in complete control?
    • It isn’t quick or easy…
    • Sending pupils out; what do teachers say?
    • Moving pupils; what do teachers say?
    • Classroom rules; what do teachers say?
    • Why do some teachers become better than others at managing pupil behaviour? What do teachers say?
    • Complex and sophisticated skills
    • Mistakes: what do mentors say?
    • Zero tolerance: what (some) heads and deputies say…
    • Some of the Variables that influence Classroom Climate
    • Refusal
    • What use is the Scale?
    • Links to Other Useful Resources
  • NEET in Norfolk
  • Pupil Disaffection
  • Blog
  • Contact
You are here: Home / PGCE History at UEA / PGCE Student Teacher / Purpose of School History / Employability

Employability

History for employability (and underemployment, leisure time, early retirement?)

A curriculum which must give young people a sense of purpose and an awareness of the potentialities for their lives when they will not be working. Whatever we feel about the future of unemployment, all young people are going to be living in a world where they will retire younger, work shorter working weeks, and enjoy longer holidays. If the curriculum as a whole, and history in particular, does not defend its contribution to the use of leisure in a powerful, convinced and publicly unapologetic way, it will have contributed to major social problems for which the tax-payer retrospectively may well justifiably criticise the school curriculum.

HMI (educationalist) (1985) History in the primary and secondary years, London, HMSO.

A subject that insists on the critical evaluation of evidence … and encourages the analysis of problems and the communication of ideas, not only contributes to pupils’ general education but develops skills and perceptions that increase the employability of young people.HMI (educationalist) (1985)

History in the primary and secondary years, London, HMSO: 12.

‘History provides qualities of mind which can be successfully applied to a range of administrative and social tasks… Indeed, it is possible to argue that history is the best training for potential administrators, precisely because the problems it deals with are recognised from the outset as complex rather than simple, and with people whom it seeks to understand rather than to categorise… it emphasises consequently, powers of reasoning which are balanced and humane – characteristics that it may be hoped a society would want not only in its administrators, but also in its men of business and public affairs.’
Sylvester, D. (1972) ‘What’s the use of learning history’, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 11 February.

Copyright © 2025 | Terry Haydn | All Rights Reserved