Laura Covington is Head of Humanities at Harris Academy Battersea, London. She participated in the Be Her Lead Spring 2020 Programme and is now part of our Teachers’ Committee. This blog is based on her research for an MA, for which she wrote about female representation in the history curriculum.
Left out: why representation matters
“Representation matters: seeing yourself in history is vital to achieving empowerment. Working-class girls rarely experience this.”
Representation of women in the curriculum begets engagement of girls in their education. This was the main finding of my research into the representation and engagement of working-class girls in their history curriculum at a school in an ex-mining town in South Yorkshire. Though the sample size was small, and the situation far from universal, the conclusions of the research can and must inform decisions that all educators make when planning their curriculum.
Laura attending a Be Her Lead training day at the Feminist Library in 2020
Having attended a prestigious university as a middle-class girl from a state school, I wanted to find out if girls from lower socio-economic backgrounds felt that the lack of women in their curriculum affected their aspirations. I was lucky to be relatively unaware of gender discrimination at school. I suspected that this was due to my comparably affluent background. While the lack of women in the current history curriculum largely drove my decision to undertake this research, this was further encouraged by the overwhelming focus in current pedagogical discussions about boys’ engagement in their schooling, at what I perceive to be a disservice to their female classmates.
Education Minister Ellen Wilkinson – “Wilkinson worked tirelessly to implement the 1944 Education Act, which provided universal free secondary education”
Curriculum design and gender equality are key issues in education, and my research endeavoured to explore the relationship between them and recommend a way forward. Findings from this case study demonstrate that working-class girls believe that there is a lack of women in the history curriculum and that this should be addressed. Most notably, it affirms that if more women were in the curriculum then it would have a direct and positive impact on working-class girls’ aspirations.
The history curriculum has always been a contentious part of the story of education reform. Ministers, boards, and consultative frameworks have discussed in-depth why we study history, what sort of history to teach when we teach it and how best to. A significant proportion of education secretaries have been women, appointed by prime ministers who feel obliged to have a woman in their cabinet. Additionally, the majority of those in charge of education have had little to no first-hand experience in schools. A glaring exception to this rule of neglect was Ellen Wilkinson, the Minister of Education from 1945 to 1947. Wilkinson worked tirelessly to implement the 1944 Education Act, which provided universal free secondary education and raised the minimum school leaving age from 14 to 15. However, overall it is symbolic of the problem of women’s exclusion from the curriculum that the Minister of Education is considered a befittingly insignificant role within the cabinet and thus suitable to be given to a woman.
The gendered history of history
![“[Gove’s] reforms are the most recent of many policies that have ignored both the complexities of gender and class and their interaction with the curriculum”](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b6b0afc4cde7a6408997069/1612275009798-L5EONAX6KR93RXGBOASI/C12B822316CD4A72A07AC86318FEAAC6.jpg)
“[Gove’s] reforms are the most recent of many policies that have ignored both the complexities of gender and class and their interaction with the curriculum”
The discipline of history began as a means for 19th-century elites to create a nationalist narrative in an age of colonial fervour. Hence, the teaching of history was founded in the predication that important knowledge is a given, as it created a canonical body of information that reflected the knowledge of the powerful. Whilst this narrow view of the discipline's role has waned over time, it has been reinvigorated in recent years under Michael Gove’s reformation of the curriculum (2010–2014). Gove’s view that schools should be engines of social mobility, where pupils are helped to overcome their disadvantages of birth through accessing powerful knowledge, is a reaction to progressive trends. His reforms are the most recent of many policies that have ignored both the complexities of gender and class and their interaction with the curriculum, and so have failed to reconsider and recontextualise key events of the past when presenting them to pupils.
The curriculum is part of a larger system in which knowledge is a key instrument of social control, and therefore the curriculum is a tool for reinforcing particular knowledge over others and thus reproducing gendered and social inequalities. This canonical knowledge alienates disadvantaged students because it is neither accessible nor representative. The current curriculum negates this issue purposefully, under-developing critical consciousness of the oppressed to serve the interests of the elite. Therefore, the solution is not to integrate the oppressed into the structure but to transform the structure itself. To do so, the curriculum must include the feminine.
The lack of the feminine
“The working-class girls that I interviewed were inspired by stories of ordinary women doing extraordinary things.”
The omission of the feminine from history is stark. The named men in the national curriculum are from an array of backgrounds, professions, and time periods, while the women are limited to the 16th century and early 20th century: either queens or agitators. Not only is there a lack of women taught about in history, the women who do make the cut are often merely referred to in relation to a significant man, e.g. Henry VIII and his wives. Through the curriculum, girls are delivered powerful messages about who they are now and who they might become in the future. In addition, the curriculum offers a reductive view of learning for and about the working class as struggling, accepting, or complying. Curriculum-led pedagogy that acknowledges working-class girls’ agency increases their capacity to reflect on their own social position and that of others, therefore enabling social mobility. Representation matters: seeing yourself in history is vital to achieving empowerment. Working-class girls rarely experience this. Building on students’ funds of knowledge within the curriculum can create classrooms that are learning communities, where students feel valued and therefore create a positive identity and connection with the world around them. I do not see how this can be achieved without a gender-balanced curriculum.
“The curriculum is lagging behind our cultural situation” – image from the 2016 film Hidden Figures
What a girl wants
Six, a musical about the six wives of Henry VIII that centres their voices and experiences
The working-class girls that I interviewed were inspired by stories of ordinary women doing extraordinary things. I firmly believe that the representation of women in the curriculum will enable working-class girls to see more possibilities for their future. All the pupils interviewed agreed that women’s stories should not constitute a separate module: they should be diversifying the main historical narrative. My interviewees also acknowledged that the curriculum is lagging behind our cultural situation. There is currently a huge focus on the empowerment of women, in both the media and in educational campaigns across the world, but the curriculum in most schools still reflects the male perspective. Educators must meaningfully centralise the stories of women in ALL subjects to raise the aspirations and engagement of their working-class female students.
What we can do
“I would recommend that school leaders reconsider their focus on working-class boys’ engagement”
I believe that school leaders must empower their staff by providing them with the time and space to meaningfully redesign and adapt their curriculum to include the female perspective. Additionally, I would recommend that school leaders reconsider their focus on working-class boys’ engagement. While this remains an issue to be tackled, my previous Head of Department raised concerns in her interview that this was one of the reasons why the male perspective was so prevalent in our curriculum. To raise working-class girls’ aspirations and engagement in school, I recommend that school leaders should ensure that their progress is not neglected in favour of the boys’.
The most important recommendation I can make based on my research is to policymakers. While my previous Head of Department felt empowered to include the female perspective at Key Stage 3, she admitted to feeling very limited as to what she could achieve in terms of GCSE and A Level. History teachers acknowledge that although there is a lack of women in the curriculum that must be addressed, teaching to the examination board dominates their practice. Therefore, the examination boards have a responsibility to ensure that the specifications they provide include more women. The government must advise the examination boards to include more named women in their mainstream historical narrative to positively affect the engagement and representation of working-class girls across the country.