When was the last time you thought about the gender ratio of the content you teach? For example, in a given lesson, have you ever considered the number of male names and female names you mention? What about the time spent on achievements attributed to men versus those of women?

It seems strange that such a question would need to be asked in 2020. However, curricula seem to still struggle to properly represent women and tell their stories.

A number of organisations are trying to change that and so are individual teachers. Samuel Atkinson-Sporle is one such teacher. We caught up with him to find out what he has done to correct the imbalance.

Tes: Is the gender balance of a curriculum something students pick up on?

Samuel Atkinson-Sporle: To answer that question, I offer you the following example. I asked my Year 7s to do a blind vote on whether they had noticed that we hadn’t covered any females in our history lessons. All of the girls had noticed; only two of the boys did. The same happened with every single other group I taught.

Would you say that the exclusion of female voices is a problem across primary and secondary age groups, and in other subjects?

Unfortunately, yes. The focus in history, for example, is on significant events. That is usually framed around enquiry questions featuring protagonists of those events. In my experience, those protagonists are always male. For example, we ask: “How did Caesar conquer Britain?” We need to think hard about whether we need the question to be in that format to enable an exploration of the knowledge we wish to cover. I would argue we don’t.

And this isn’t just the case in history. In every subject, we tend to leave the female voice out when we structure our units of work. That needs to change.

What prompted you to look into this in more detail?

Ofsted’s shift to focus on curriculum enabled these conversations to take place and gave teachers the power to make changes. I was clear that gender balance had to be a key part of the process of reworking our curriculum.

So how did you go about doing that?

The main focus has to be broadening your knowledge. So I listed all the content areas we were set to teach, and gave my team and I the task of thoroughly revisiting each with a focus on finding the female narrative within that topic.

So, for the Norman conquest, I read books such as Queens of the Conquest by Alison Weir and Matilda by Tracy Borman.

Too many people assume that the silence of the female narrative indicates there wasn’t one at the time, but some fantastic work is being done that shows those narratives just need to be unearthed.

Using this knowledge, I then planned my enquiry questions so that they did not fall back on traditional male narratives.

For example, traditional enquiry questions such as “Why did William win the Battle of Hastings?” do, by their nature, completely exclude the female voices. Through my research, I knew that Matilda, William the Conqueror’s wife, was treated as his equal in the 11th century. So why have we decided she doesn’t matter in the enquiry question?

Our new enquiry question is: “Were William and Matilda well suited for the roles of King and Queen of England?”

Beyond this, we now plan the female voice into all of our schemes of work, ensuring that we are reflecting the true picture of the time we are studying, not simply doing what we have always done and seeing things from the male view only.

Did you and your department find this difficult?

Creating a five-year curriculum is a huge task, but doing that while also challenging the narratives you have been taught since your own time at school made things a lot trickier. But through a really collaborative effort across the team and by keeping the aim of ensuring our lessons were accurate and representative, we managed it.

Did you get any pushback from staff?

At all stages of the process, the members of my department have been fully supportive and engaged in the concept. One teacher commented that “restoring gender balance in history curricula is a task that is timely, necessary, ambitious and rather exciting. It has compelled us to ask questions about ourselves as teachers of history by also asking questions of the past as historians.”

For many, this was a good opportunity to delve deep into their subject knowledge - and so obviously they enjoyed that or they would not be history teachers!

What has the impact been so far?

The new curriculum was rolled out from September, so obviously we are in the very early stages of it and it has been disrupted slightly by the coronavirus restrictions.

Early signs of increased interest in the subject from female students are very encouraging, and I hope that this transfers to increased participation from female pupils in extracurricular activities such as History Club and increased uptake at GCSE level.

But we did this because it was the right thing to do - we can’t keep pretending that women did not exist throughout history and if we don’t challenge that, who will?

What advice would you give to other subject leaders wanting to do a similar thing?

Whatever the subject, this is something that every subject lead should be investigating. You would be surprised just how one-sided things are, and also shocked at how many female narratives have been silenced.

So if you haven’t already gender balanced your curriculum, these are the three steps I would take:

• Take the help that is out there. There’s a huge amount of discussion around gender and curriculum within subject associations, and in wider subject-specific groups and forums. Tap into the professional knowledge that’s already out there to make your journey easier.
• Do the reading. As explained above, this job is impossible unless you have a good knowledge of your subject, but you also need to seek out the female narratives. Unfortunately, the mainstream history books don’t always give you this perspective.
• Be ruthless. Every enquiry question and scheme of work should be interrogated and, if it is found wanting in terms of gender balance, it needs to go. There is no room for sentimentality.

Samuel Atkinson-Sporle is head of history at Poltair School in Cornwall and a lecturer for PGCE trainees at the University of Exeter

This article originally appeared in the 9 October 2020 issue under the headline “How I…gender balanced my curriculum”