Welcome to SHP Curriculum PATHS

Curriculum PATHS (Principled Alternatives for Teaching History in Schools) was founded by the Schools History Project (SHP) at Leeds Trinity University in 2022. Curriculum PATHS is a community of people who are committed to improving the quality of history education by ensuring teacher professionalism and ethical decision making remain at the heart of curriculum development in schools.

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.

You can find out more about our work on our blog: http://curriculumpaths.schoolshistoryproject.co.uk and via our Sharing Hub: www.padlet.com/cpaths/hub.

What do we do?

The Curriculum PATHS membership believes strongly that teachers play a vital role in young people’s education. History teachers are constantly involved in making ethical, professional decisions about how best to meet the needs of their pupils and their community contexts. These ethical decision-making processes are currently under threat from AI and other attempts to remove teachers from the processes of curricular planning. The Curriculum PATHS membership also believes deeply in the power of community. We are seeking to create spaces (online and in the real world) where teachers can meet, share and develop a common language about what makes an empowering history curriculum which can truly meet the needs of young people.

The past decade in education has seen many attempts, including the recent impact of AI, to centralise and control curriculum planning and to reduce the role of classroom teachers and departments in deciding on the nature and content of their history curricula. Although we are concerned with teacher wellbeing, the Curriculum PATHS membership are more concerned that centralising and outsourcing curriculum decisions erodes teacher autonomy, breaks down professional networks, and ultimately gives children and young people a worse deal in the long run.

To empower teachers, Curriculum PATHS have developed:

• A democratically agreed-upon set of Principles for History Teaching to guide and support history teachers in their curricular planning. These Principles are rooted in international agreements about the nature and purposes of education developed via the UN and other organisations.
• A membership organisation for teachers to join, to both grow a professional community, and to shape the future development of these Principles for History Teaching.
• A regular newsletter to share planning and teaching inspirations rooted in the Principles for History Teaching.
• A community Sharing Hub where teachers can download units rooted in the Principles for History Teaching. In addition to this, the Sharing Hub allows teachers to share their own units, or collaborate with others to share units, rooted in the same Principles.
• A series of awards to recognise the amazing work being done by so many teachers of history around the country.

Curriculum PATHS will continue to fight for high quality, ethically grounded history in schools. Our mandate derives from our membership and the democratic accountability of our actions. We hope to keep growing in the coming years and to continue to shape debates about empowering school history.

Why join?

Curriculum PATHS is free to access for anyone. However membership gives you the opportunity to shape the direction of the project and enter more directly into professional discussions with colleagues via the Sharing Hub. 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.