How to teach the monarchy meaningfully in your curriculum

The monarchy is one of those topics that tends to slip into the curriculum by habit rather than by design. The Tudors arrive in Year 8, the Norman Conquest sits at the start of KS3 in most schemes of work, and somewhere in Year 9 or 10 there is a unit that touches on the Stuarts or the civil war. The result, in many schools, is a sequence of monarchs treated mostly as a chronological scaffolding: A line of kings and queens that students learn to recite without ever quite understanding what kingship actually is, what it does, or how it has changed.

The Coronation of King Charles III in May 2023 was a useful prompt for departments to revisit this. For many students, it was the first major royal ceremony in living memory, and it sat alongside conversations about colonial legacies, public spending, and the role of the monarchy that have not gone away since. Treating the institution seriously, rather than ceremonially, is one of the things history teaching can do well if the planning is right.

This guide is about teaching the monarchy in a way that draws on Christine Counsell's writing on disciplinary history, the recent debates around decolonising the curriculum, and the practical realities of a Year 8 hall on a wet Tuesday afternoon. It is aimed at history department heads, KS3 leads, and individual teachers building or rebuilding monarchy units.

Before talking about how to teach it well, it helps to be honest about how it often goes wrong. A few patterns show up repeatedly in monarchy units across English secondary schools.

The most common is the king-list problem. The unit becomes a sequence of named monarchs with personal narratives attached. Henry VIII had six wives. Elizabeth I never married. Charles I lost his head. Students remember the trivia but do not develop a usable understanding of what the monarchy actually was as an institution.

The second is the personalisation of structural events. The civil war becomes a story about Charles I being stubborn, rather than a constitutional conflict about the relationship between Crown, Parliament, and the law. The Glorious Revolution becomes James II being Catholic, rather than a settlement that fundamentally changed what the monarchy could and could not do. The personalities are easier to teach. They also tend to obscure the bit that actually matters.

The third is the silent treatment of empire. For most of the period covered in a typical KS3 unit, the British monarch was at the head of the largest empire in human history. Schemes of work that walk past this leave students with a domestic-only picture of kingship that does not match what was actually happening. The decolonising-the-curriculum work, including the Runnymede Trust's Our Migration Story project and the Black Curriculum Project, has been pushing departments to handle this more honestly. It is not about replacing the monarchy with empire, but teaching them together, because they were.

Christine Counsell's writing on disciplinary history, particularly in the late 1990s and 2000s, set out a now widely shared argument: History is not just a collection of stories but a discipline with its own concepts, methods, and ways of thinking. The substantive content (the kings, the wars, the dates) sits alongside the disciplinary content (causation, change and continuity, significance, evidence, interpretation). A good unit teaches both.

For a monarchy unit, the disciplinary lenses that tend to do most work are change and continuity, significance, and interpretation.

Change and continuity is the natural one for monarchy. The institution has existed in England in some form since the early medieval period, but what it means to be a monarch in 1066 is barely recognisable as the same thing in 2026. A well-built unit makes that change visible. The monarchy did not simply continue. It was repeatedly remade by specific events: The Magna Carta, the deposition of Richard II, the break with Rome, the civil war, the Glorious Revolution, the Reform Acts, the slow contraction of royal political power across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Significance is harder but worth working through. Why are some monarchs taught and others not? Why do students learn about Henry VIII and not Henry III? The honest answer is partly historical (some reigns did more) and partly historiographical (some reigns have been told more often). Surfacing that distinction explicitly helps students understand that the curriculum itself is a set of choices, not a neutral record.

Interpretation is the lens that tends to land best with older students. How has the role of the monarchy been understood by different historians and by different generations of the public? The image of Elizabeth I as a strong, unifying figure was significantly constructed by Victorian historians who had their own reasons for celebrating English exceptionalism. The image of Charles I as a tragic figure or a tyrant has shifted with the political climate of each generation. Teaching this openly tends to make students sharper readers of history rather than passive consumers of a settled story.

When planning a monarchy unit, three lenses tend to do most of the heavy lifting. They overlap, and a well-built sequence of lessons usually pulls on all three at different points.

A KS3 monarchy unit does not have to cover every reign in detail. The more useful version usually picks four or five turning points and uses them to show how the institution changed. A workable sequence for Year 8 or Year 9 might look something like the table below. Each lesson is built around a central question rather than a name, which tends to push students towards structural thinking rather than character study.

The link between the monarchy and the British Empire is the part of the unit that tends to get either skipped or handled in ways that feel uncertain. The historiographical position is clearer than the political conversation sometimes suggests. From the seventeenth century onwards, the British monarchy was central to imperial expansion, through royal charters granted to companies like the East India Company and the Royal African Company, through the personal involvement of monarchs in the Slave Trade, and through the symbolic role of the Crown across the empire.

Teaching this honestly does not require taking a particular political view of the institution today. It does require getting the historical record right. The Royal African Company, of which the future James II was Governor (and a major investor), transported tens of thousands of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic in the late seventeenth century. Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1876, and the monarchy was used deliberately as a unifying symbol of imperial rule. These are documented in the National Archives and in the standard scholarly literature.

The sensible classroom move is to treat these as substantive content alongside the constitutional story. A KS3 lesson on Charles II can include the Restoration and the royal involvement in the slave trade. A Year 9 lesson on Victoria can include the constitutional monarchy and the empire she presided over. Picking one or the other tends to produce a curriculum that does not hold up when older students start asking questions.

Resources are widely available. The Runnymede Trust, the Black Curriculum Project, the Historical Association, and the National Archives all publish material aimed at secondary teachers. The work that remains in many schools is integrating the empire content into the monarchy unit rather than leaving it as a separate add-on.

The Coronation of King Charles III on 6 May 2023 is, for current secondary students, the most recent live event of constitutional importance they are likely to have direct memories of. That makes it useful as a hook and as an anchor for the present-day end of the unit.

A few angles tend to work well. The ceremony itself, with its blend of medieval ritual and modern broadcasting, makes for a strong opening activity: What does it tell you about how the monarchy presents itself? What has been kept from earlier coronations, and what has been changed? The 2023 ceremony included a multi-faith blessing for the first time, and the inclusion of representatives from across the Commonwealth alongside the historic Christian liturgy is itself an interesting interpretive question.

A second angle is the public debate around the Coronation. Costs, security, the role of the Commonwealth, the apologies and discussions about the monarchy's relationship with the legacies of slavery and empire. These are things students can read and form a view on, and they sit naturally alongside the substantive history.

A third angle is constitutional. The monarch is still head of state in fifteen Commonwealth realms. The ceremonial role in opening Parliament, granting royal assent, and appointing prime ministers is documented and relatively easy to teach. Students who can describe the practical functions of a modern constitutional monarchy, with reference to a ceremony they have themselves seen on screen, tend to understand the institution more deeply than students who can only narrate the dramas of the Tudors.

For GCSE history specifically, ready-made revision content covering Tudor, Stuart, and modern monarchy units is one of the things teachers tend to look for at the end of a topic. Cognito has video lessons and exam-style questions aligned to AQA and Edexcel GCSE History specifications, which some departments use as homework or retrieval practice after teaching the unit.