Welcome to SHP Curriculum PATHS

SHP Curriculum PATHS was founded by the Schools History Project (SHP) at Leeds Trinity University. SHP Curriculum PATHS is a community of people who are committed to improving the quality of history education by ensuring ethics remain at the heart of curriculum decisions in schools. You can find more information on our website: www.schoolshistoryproject.co.uk/curriculumpaths 

Curriculum PATHS is open to all teachers of history, as well as those who support history teaching in schools. It is free-to-join and democratically accountable to its members.

The membership of SHP Curriculum PATHS believes that current attempts to centralise and control curriculum planning; to outsource curriculum content choices to the academic discipline; and to promote a narrow range of pedagogical approaches via a ‘model curriculum’, de-professionalises teachers of history. To address these concerns, SHP Curriculum PATHS has developed six core aims:

1. Recognise and highlight the excellent curriculum-level work being done by history educators in their school contexts. 
2. Empower teachers by developing a framework of Ethical Principles to support the framing of curricular rationales and guide ethical curriculum development at a departmental level. 
3. Be accountable to the community by establishing a democratic process for creating, approving, and renewing the Ethical Principles, drawing on expertise from across the sector.
4. Provide multiple examples of ‘curriculum paths’ – curriculum constructions rooted in the Ethical Principles. 
5. Offer suggestions for resourcing to support teachers in adapting ‘curriculum paths’ for their own contexts. 
6. Develop a network to collect and share these ‘curriculum paths’.

Ethical Principles for Curriculum Design

A large part of the work of Curriculum PATHS has been to create, ratify and share the framework of Ethical Principles to support a considered process of curriculum construction.

The Ethical Principles are designed to empower teachers of history to:

• Plan their own ethically grounded history units and curriculum overviews.
• Share curricula and curriculum units, alongside clear explanations for their ethical underpinnings.
• Integrate ethically grounded curriculum units or curriculum overviews, shared by others, meaningfully into their school contexts.
• Have opportunities to work with other teachers of history, across multiple contexts and age phases, and be active in discussing about what makes an empowering history education.

The Curriculum PATHS Council and Constitution

SHP Curriculum PATHS is led by an elected Curriculum PATHS Council (CPC) in line with our Constitution. The CPC has representation from different sectors of the history teaching world. In this way we hope Curriculum PATHS will remain dedicated to the needs of history teachers across the Primary and Secondary sector, and crucially to the needs of young people in classrooms across the England and the wider UK.