Ms Judith McCarthy:

I wanted to answer this question because I am very passionate about history. I feel the review is so important that we very much need to look at the decision that was taken to take history off the list of core subjects in the curriculum. I am going to say something very controversial. I think it was a really daft decision. I do not know where it came from. I speak a lot to schools and to young people, and a person could go to school and not study history at all because there are schools where, because of the subject choices that students are making even at junior level, the school will not allocate resources to history. A person can go through school and not learn anything more than what he or she learned in primary school, which as we all know we forget as we get older.