Our migration story: history, the national curriculum, and re-narrating the British nation

ABSTRACT

This article explores schools as a key organisational context for the (re)production of national identity, and uses ongoing debates around the national curriculum for history, to illuminate the ongoing lacunae in Britain’s national memory. Taking the recent Windrush scandal as a starting point, we examine how these events reflect broader processes of historical forgetting in contemporary discussions around migration, empire and its loss. While this has been challenged by academic historians, there is a significant gap between these discourses and how history is taught in schools, which remain a key site for the transmission of a highly selective historical narrative/repertoire. We use the experience of the recent Our Migration Story project to consider alternative ways of thinking about Britain’s history, and to explore the importance of, and the difficulties in, challenging dominant memorialising practices.

KEYWORDS:

• British history
• curriculum
• education
• Our Migration Story

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk

2 Before 1962, British immigration laws applied only to ‘aliens’. The Aliens Act of 1905, Britain’s first piece of immigration legislation, was passed in response to Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. See Feldman (1994).

3 https://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/34b5a3c7-0f52-4dcd-91ba-cd1e33074021

4 This ‘training plus resources’ model was tested in a pilot programme of professional development for English and History teachers, led by The Runnymede Trust and the TIDE project (McIntosh, Todd and Das 2019).