Race and identity in England's school history and citizenship education

This project explores how prevailing notions of national identity are embodied in the National Curriculum and represented and enacted through commercial textbook use. It analyses how, in a post-racial neoliberal political context state curriculum and commercial textbook discourses reflect and/or challenge racialized narratives of Britishness.

In England's neoliberal policy context, education is neither fully state controlled nor subject to a free market. There is a National Curriculum (NC), established in 1988, that does not apply to each school and there are commercially produced textbooks that may have been written with the NC in mind. Moreover, educators position themselves as content curators-choosing which materials to use, and how.

This gives rise to the questions: what is the relationship between discourses of national identity in curriculum policy, those presented in textbooks, and those enacted by curriculum leaders? And, in what ways are racialized narratives of British identity reproduced or challenged in interactions between curriculum specifications and commercial textbook use?

In reaction to exclusionary definitions and histories, public calls to decolonise the curriculum, present more honest appraisals of history, and embed vital minoritized histories in the national narrative are growing. This appetite is unmatched by the current curriculum.

Following a critical approach, which aims to understand structural inequality, this project seeks firstly to historically trace the interplay between notions of national identity in the National Curriculum and textbooks as a whole from 1988 to present, and secondly to interrogate the ways in which educational professionals may reproduce, interrupt or complicate potentially exclusionary narratives in teaching history and citizenship.