Everyone necessarily focusses their work in examination units on the specified assessment objectives but if you are new to planning and teaching exam courses you may feel hesitant about going beyond those AOs. However there is no reason to accept such a limitation. As described above, overall enquiry questions can help students whichever concepts they focus on. In addition looking at a wider range of concepts than specified AOs keeps them in students’ minds and helps them understand them more fully.

Perhaps most significantly it is always important to include in units work on evidence, whether or not evaluation of sources is assessed in the unit.  This is because the nature of the evidence has an impact on our ability to explain the causes and consequences of events, the motives of individuals or why interpretations differ. A good example is any unit studying the Norman Conquest. While AOs may not include work on the sources it is vital that students appreciate the limitations of the evidence in order to understand why explanations of why, for example, William was successful at Hastings, are necessarily hypothetical. This need not involve detailed exploration of what sources say about each aspect if the battle but can, as the attached example shows (Resource File, Page 5), focus on the more general problems likely to arise from the sources from the period.