AQA 7042 · C3.21 - What general teacher support is permitted?
Learn how teachers can explain requirements, provide research resources and teach general methods while preserving your ownership of a Historical Investigation. Fictional cases show where useful support must stop so that selection, evaluation, argument and writing remain your own.
Support without taking ownership
The Historical Investigation is independent work, but independent does not mean unsupported. A teacher must explain what the investigation requires, make the marking criteria clear, monitor progress and supervise the work closely enough to authenticate it. The centre marks the completed investigation; AQA moderates the centre's marking. That makes accurate teaching of the common rules essential.
The boundary is best understood by separating the conditions of the task from the student's response to it. A teacher may explain the requirements and the criteria by which work is judged. A teacher may also warn that a proposed task appears unsuitable, especially if it would not give the learner a fair opportunity to meet the criteria. The warning identifies a suitability or compliance problem; it must not turn into a supplied argument or candidate-specific answer. Approval discussions may test whether a question meets the rules, but the learner must engage individually with the issue and the final response.
For AQA History, this includes checking that the proposal uses an approximately 100-year context and does not duplicate the content of the learner's Component 1 and Component 2 options. The whole programme, including the investigation, must span at least 200 years; the examined pair alone need not do so. Those are qualification requirements, not optional historical judgements. The teacher can identify that a proposed task fails one of them, while the learner must still engage with the issue and develop an appropriate approach through the centre's and AQA's approval process. Completing these practice lessons does not grant that approval or authenticate a submitted investigation.
The same distinction applies to marking information. A centre may give learners the official criteria or a simplified, candidate-friendly version. The simplified version must remain general: it cannot be tailored to one learner, one group or the centre's particular set question. A bespoke mark scheme would show candidates how the criteria map onto their own content and would therefore transfer part of the assessed decision-making to the centre.
| A teacher may clarify | The learner must still decide and do |
|---|---|
| The task rules and what each Assessment Objective requires | How their own investigation will meet those requirements |
| Whether a proposal risks failing a formal or marking requirement | How to revise or replace the approach through the approved process |
| The common mark scheme or a genuinely general learner-friendly version | What argument, evidence, evaluation and organisation to use |
| The need for independent work and authentic supervision | The historical thinking and writing that will be submitted |
Resources and general methods
General support can make demanding historical research possible without making the research decisions for the learner. A centre may recommend places to search, including websites, books, journal articles and libraries. It may teach where primary or contemporary sources and historical interpretations can be found, and it may give an overview of the historiography of a broad period or topic.
A centre may also supply a pool of relevant source material or interpretations from which learners make their own selection. The word pool matters. It must preserve a real act of choice and must not become a compulsory, pre-evaluated set. The material must not be accompanied by labels or comments indicating which item is most valuable, useful, convincing or best suited to an argument. Locating material can be supported; choosing and evaluating the material used for AO2 and AO3 remains student-owned.
Teachers can also teach general historical methods. Permitted whole-group guidance can cover:
- how historians analyse and evaluate primary or contemporary sources and historical interpretations;
- how a sustained response can be organised in general terms;
- effective paragraphing and general essay-writing skills;
- general ways of integrating source material and interpretations into an argument; and
- how to construct a bibliography and use footnotes effectively.
These are transferable methods rather than instructions for a particular answer. A general demonstration might explain that a paragraph needs a claim, selected evidence and reasoning that addresses the question. It must not assign a candidate's claims to particular paragraphs, identify the evidence they should use or supply question-specific headings. Likewise, teaching how a footnote works is permitted; inventing or completing citations for material the learner has not personally checked is not.
Fictional resource case. Greyford College gives its class a catalogue of libraries and databases, followed by an unannotated practice pool containing several source types and contrasting interpretations. Learners must verify the material and make their own selections. That is general resource support. If the teacher adds stars beside the three sources that a particular learner should evaluate and notes what each one proves, the same pack has crossed the boundary because selection and evaluation have been supplied.
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