Delighted to see my contribution on the black presence in thirteenth century England is now live on the Runnymede Trust site Our Migration Story - The making of Britain in the Migration stories AD43 -1500 section. The work is based the black presence in the Domesday Abbreviato which I have written about elsewhere in this blog
The opportunity to write the piece came
about through my work as a co-covener of the What’s Happening Black BritishHistory (WHBBH) series of workshops for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. I was
invited along with several other historians to take part in an initiative by
the Runnymede Trust in response to the new curriculum - OCR new History GCSEs is Migration To Britain c. 1000 to c. 2010,
which will be taught from September 2016.
The Runnymede Trust activity was itself an AHRC
migration history funded project, led by the Universities of Cambridge and
Manchester and supported by the OCR GCSE examination board.
The new course meet with some hostility from the Tory press and several eminent yet conservative historians who accused the syllabus of being an indoctrination , a dangerous dogma written in response to demands for political correctness and that the
course was rewriting history which was a total distortion and it’s outrageous.
Nothing could be further from the truth the
syllabus is an attempt to as Mike Goddard, Head of History at OCR said:
[To explore] and understanding the constant shifts in the British population in a rigorous and exciting new academic topic for young people in schools to be able to study in detail for the first time. We can’t understand Britain economically, culturally or politically, if we don’t understand our relationship with the world. Migration into and out of Britain is and always has been a central part of this relationship.
Through my work at WHBBH I had the pleasure of meeting several of those
involved in creating the syllabus and writing the books to support the
classwork. I can confirm that ideas such as indoctrination, political
correctness were not on their minds or part of their agenda. They were looking to give a new generation of
school children a fair and rigorous
review of where the inhabitants of these
islands came from over the years.
The first of the two GCSE Migration books is now out: published by Hodder Education.
