As President of the Royal Historical Society (RHS), I have the privilege of meeting with many historians and learning about different kinds of historical practice. The RHS is the UK’s foremost learned society for history, and in my role I work with historians within higher education and beyond.
A vibrant discipline has traditionally indicated a flourishing profession. However, in recent years the society has witnessed a growing gap between the popularity of history – as a subject of study and public interest – and the security of historians within UK higher education.
From one perspective, history is in good health. It remains a major degree subject with strong student enrolment. History is likewise prominent in public life. We read history, watch programmes about the past, and visit sites of historical interest in greater numbers than ever.
A second, far less welcome picture is of history departments hit by cuts and closures. The RHS is the organisation to which historians turn when their capacity to teach, research and communicate is at risk. Since the early 2020s, we’ve seen an alarming increase in the number of departments facing cuts to staffing and degree options.
Concerns over cuts and closures
This summer the society surveyed its members to get a better sense of the scale and consequences of this disruption. The findings form part of our new briefing – The value of history in UK higher education and society – published this week. We received responses from two-thirds of UK history departments, and the results are deeply troubling.
Some 39 of the 66 departments taking part reported cuts to staffing levels since 2020. This equates to decreases in at least two in five of all UK history departments.
Cuts are hitting hardest in departments at post-92 universities. Here, nearly 90 per cent of history departments in our survey report a decrease in staffing since 2020, and nearly 60 per cent have seen cuts to degree programmes.
This has significant implications for history’s provision as a degree subject. As our briefing shows, post-92 departments provide opportunities for the greatest number of first-generation students, as well as a growing body of commuting students for whom relocation is simply not an option. As departmental opportunities shrink, we risk history becoming more concentrated in selected universities, and increasingly the preserve of students with greater mobility, wealth and family experience of higher education.
How do we explain these troubling developments? The Royal Historical Society identifies political decisions as a key factor in the current challenges facing history lecturers and students. The lifting of departmental caps on student intake in the mid-2010s, and the lack of competition between institutions over fee levels, has led to a dramatic shake up in the allocation of history students. A small number of departments are growing rapidly, while others are deprived of a previously healthy student population.
At the same time, historians – along with others in the humanities – are battling a culture of belittlement. Government engagement has, until recently, focused more on questioning the expected graduate outcomes for history. Unwelcome attacks on the merits of studying history undoubtedly deter some from taking the subject at university.
We sincerely hope this “talking down” of history ends with the new Labour government – not least because this message is based on a false premise. Here, the Royal Historical Society has a role to play in challenging spurious claims. Setting out and amplifying history’s many strengths within higher education is the second purpose of our latest briefing.
Appreciating the value of history
Despite fluctuations in student numbers, history has long been, and remains, a major subject in UK higher education. For over a decade, more than 40,000 students have annually enrolled on history undergraduate or postgraduate degree courses. History repeatedly appears in or around the top 10 of non-STEM subjects chosen by undergraduates, with enrolment figures similar to those for degrees in accounting, economics, finance and politics.
History is similarly a major, and growing, subject in schools and colleges. In 2024, it was the fifth most studied A level across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Enrolments at A level are up more than five per cent since 2020 while those for GCSE are 25 per cent higher than the late 2010s – far exceeding increases in GCSE students in the round.
For those studying history at university, the experience is positive. Responses to the UK’s National Student Survey consistently score history very highly in terms of intellectual challenge and the quality of teaching. Today’s history students work not just with texts and archives but also data sets and digital tools. In 2024, eight out of ten history graduates are confident these skills will serve them well in the workforce – a level higher than many more overtly vocational programmes.
And they’re right. Employers tell us that historians are prized for their literacy, facility to review information with a critical eye, and talent for absorbing and synthesising complex ideas. Rather than close down options, a history degree is a gateway to a wide range of professional outcomes.
Having entered the labour market, and contrary to popular rhetoric, history graduates perform strongly in terms of employability and earnings. Government data from June 2024 shows over 87 per cent of history graduates in “sustained employment, further study or both” five years after completing an undergraduate degree. This puts them ahead of graduates in subjects including politics, computing and economics, and just behind those in business, management and bioscience. The same data shows median earnings for history graduates are also strong: above those for students in psychology, social policy and education and close to those for law and politics.
Communicating history’s value to graduates
It’s important to set out the strengths of a history degree, especially at a time of negative rhetoric. But we also need to speak meaningfully to different audiences.
In particular, history’s many positives need to be better communicated to those presently wary of going on to undergraduate study. History’s growing popularity at GCSE and A level is very welcome. However, it’s not yet translated to an equivalent lift in undergraduate enrolments. This is clearly a vulnerable transition point, and one that can benefit from positive messaging. We need to show future undergraduates the benefits, and pleasures, of continuing with history.
By demonstrating the positives, we’ll encourage more students to pursue the subject they enjoy, confident that theirs is an informed choice, with clear rewards and opportunities for professional and personal development. Alongside students, these are arguments to hone and put to parents, teachers, politicians and policy makers, as well as the sizable audiences for “popular” and “public history” – so much of which starts with academic research in our universities. Such audiences remind us of history’s importance well beyond formal education.
Our briefing, The value of history, also begins the work of evaluating the intersections between academic and public historians, the public appetite for the past, and history’s contribution to civic and national life. In doing so, we look to close the gap between a historical profession fighting cuts and closures, and history’s strengths and value to education and society.
I don’t know enough to say for sure but the drop off from A Level to university mentioned above might in part be down to the way A-Level is examined (and thus taught?)
Also, much as I don’t think that the demographics fully overlap (as in, I don’t think most 18 year olds were watching Starkey or Schama back in the day), it is undoubtedly the case that history tv programmes were substantially more popular and prevalent ten or twenty years ago – they do seem to have slid out of the schedules and don’t really make up a big part of streaming (as in, non fiction tv seems to be more focused on true crime type stuff rather than eg the big history shows from back in the day like the Schama ones). What we tend to get is just Lucy Worsley and while I like her, her dominance is naturally going to narrow the audience. The main location for public History now is podcasts presented by reactionary blokes which again is for a mostly aging demographic. It’s also very distant, from my understanding, from the actual practice of history at uni (eg Tom Holland and Sandbrook seem to be almost openly opposed to contemporary historical practices, basically for ideological reasons).
It probably doesn’t help that the public intellectual historians (who are mostly from back in the 90s and 00s) all seem to have ended up as, or maybe have always been, reactionaries with almost no younger faces taking their place.
I’ve been dismayed by the dumbing down of popular history programmes on TV. It’s what I call a dress-up version of history, which Lucy Worsley is certainly guilty of. At the same time, period dramas are consistently popular – there’s a big opportunity there for historians to bridge that gap.
The demands of REF here, though, don’t help. Engaging in public history is necessarily extra to workload; and unless this can somehow be turned into an impact case study – which is doubtful and risky – likely won’t be captured in workload models.
I don’t necessarily mind a bit of dress up but it does seem that tv history is either Lucy Worsley dressing up or basically Royalist stuff on channel 5.
Yeh this is a solid point about REF not really rewarding this kind of public work. Interesting (to me at least) is that Brian Cox seemingly doesn’t have a web page at the University of Manchester and it’s unclear if the case study about his TV work was even 4* last time (it does seem a bit of a stretch) – I think it is a serious problem with REF across the board that it has disincentivised public engagement.
It’s good to see this defence of History from the RHS. One thing missing, though, is an explanation of how and why History develops key skills. This may be obvious to historians, but I don’t think it’s obvious to people – including commentators and policy makers – who haven’t studied History at university.
History equips graduates with critical perspectives in a unique way. By exposing students to the contingent and changing nature of the past, and the way it was shaped by societal forces, it facilitates the perspective that the present, too, might be different. It furthermore builds skills in criticality and argument.
Today’s students want to change the world. History can help them do that. But we as historians need to articulate how it can do so – and not rely on defending the profession in the instrumentalist terms of employment metrics etc.
Some good points made above, but on the whole ‘history’ is seen by many as a weapon to use against others, claims for slavery reparations fall into that category, to accusing political candidates of being Fascists. Society can learn from history, but it has to want to, and the rewriting of history, as it is presented, to suit political agendas doesn’t help.
I think this report is quite complacent. Yes, history is popular but why should that automatically translate to people studying it at university? I like the campaign ‘Maths Degrees for the Future’: https://www.campaignmathsci.uk/maths-degrees-for-the-future Maths is the most popular A level but university numbers have stayed flat, so they have lots of innovative solutions and are using data on employability and provision very creatively. Maths isn’t on TV/Film/media that much so they have to work much harder. There are no recommendations in the report and I am not sure what the RHS is actually doing. What will a history degree for the future look like? What does history have to contribute to the big challenges that face us today eg climate change, Generative AI, continuing conflict? It would be great to see a more progressive and action focused report.