The history national curriculum has been substantially cut, while preserving some of the best elements. Everything except the level descriptions is now integrated with the study units. No study unit contains more than six topics, and the content suggestions are advisory. So everything is fine now - or is it?

Whenever I talk to teachers about national curriculum history, the word which crops up most frequently is “time” - not historical time, but classroom time. One will say: “I haven’t the time to get through it all” and another “It takes time you should be using for basic skills.” Both are correct in their ways, but they depend upon the proposition that you have to “do” history for a certain proportion of the week, term or year. That’s the law, they tell me, and if we don’t, the Office for Standards in Education will find us out.

In truth it is not the law, and there are dozens of ways of combining subject time that will help solve the problem that history is so interesting that it takes up more time than it should. By combining fruitfully with other subject areas, everyone can benefit and the strain and stress is released. Let me offer three examples.

First, how about an arthistory project on the Victorians. Many galleries, like the Tate, Birmingham, and Manchester will supply very cheap poster-sized Victorian narrative pictures. When I did this project with five to 11-year-olds at West Wittering School, West Sussex, we had a great deal of fun, using photographs as well as paintings, and very young children found they could contribute much by just looking.

We used Luke Filde’s “The Doctor” from the Tat...e, for example (I think it cost just Pounds 3 then). It is a picture of an anxious-looking doctor with a sick child. Why is he worried? Will she survive? As we looked deeper we found an anxious father, and then a distraught mother. We then saw an inner room, right there at the back, and as we looked closer, various items, some betraying poverty, some strangely valuable.

We faced a problem - what story did this painting tell, and how well? As we examined the face of the kindly old doctor we began to learn of a world before antibiotics, a world before the health service, a world with a different kind of poverty than we know.

A second project (at Birdham School, West Sussex, with nine and 10-year-olds) which used drama extensively, focused on a similar subject. We were looking at the setting up of the health service as part of a study of Britain since the 1930s. We ignited the children’s interest by organising simple role-plays involving two characters - one a man from central government come to persuade the reluctant local doctor to join, the other the doctor himself.

The children pitched into the debate, setting up a new hospital and thinking all the time about how much we have to learn about today from studying the past. But these children were learning much more than history - they were learning how to think and speak effectively. To give children a voice is certainly a major goal of the national curriculum, but it is also a source of great pride for any school to achieve that goal.

Lest anyone thinks that a project involving drama and debate is merely a matter of making it up as you go along, let me hasten to add that it was all based on documentary sources provided by Kim Leslie, the education officer at our local record office. Using documents is important in the history curriculum, but many teachers complain that most of their children can’t yet read that well, and textbooks use highly edited snippets of source material to get over the problem. The situation is very much the same at A-level. We have found that there is a serious reading problem, and we have a duty to face it. Our approach is to get the teacher to read the document we are going to use with the whole class, dealing with problems of vocabulary, and pointing to particularly rich areas of evidence. Only then do we pose the question, and discuss it, still with the whole class. Then those children who think they are ready to work on their own move off, while the rest stay with the teacher.

Adopting this technique for our work on the Roman Empire, with 12-year-olds at Midhurst Intermediate School, West Sussex, we have been able to use whole chunks of Suetonius, Pliny and other contemporary writers to excellent effect. My colleague Tony Hopkins is in the middle of the third trial of this unit and it is a joy to see his children debating learnedly on whether Marius or Sulla was best fitted to govern Rome.

Again, we have not just been teaching history, but also reading. And, of course, stretching their minds, because good history teaching is always about thinking deeply, trying to understand something very different, trying to rethink the thoughts and lives of people dead and gone.

The children involved in our projects have demonstrated the thinking skills they have learned, and this has made all the time we have “borrowed” from other areas of the curriculum worthwhile. Time is of the essence, but it all depends how we use it.

* Professor John Fines is president of the Historical Association and co-director with Dr Jon Nichol of Exeter University of the Nuffield Primary History Project. The project’s work will be published later this year, but readers can obtain some KS3 units on the Roman Empire, the American Natives and the French Revolution for Pounds 7.50 from the project office secretary at West Sussex Institute of Higher Education, Upper Bognor Road, Bognor Regis, West Sussex