Subordinating Disciplinary Inquiry: Performativity and the Formative Assessment of Historical Thinking at Key Stage 3

This article investigates the ways in which historical thinking is formatively assessed in a sample of English secondary schools at Key Stage 3 within performative accountability regimes. Drawing on qualitative data from 12 history departments, the study highlights how GCSE examinations exert a significant washback effect on the epistemological foundations and pedagogical value of history education in secondary schools. Historical thinking, encompassing critical engagement with contested truth claims via disciplinary inquiry process, constitutes a distinctive mode of cognition with significant implications for intellectual autonomy. Yet the performative imperatives of schooling, operating through interlocking mechanisms of high-stakes accountability, institutional risk aversion, and normalised compliance, systematically subordinate disciplinary aims to the reductive demands of exam preparation. This article extends current debate by demonstrating how performativity functions as a constitutive rather than merely constraining force: it does not simply limit what teachers can do but actively reconstitutes what forms of knowledge are prioritised and how they are addressed in formative assessments. In doing so, performativity exerts authority over the ways in which disciplinary understanding is operationalised in classroom practice: not on the basis of epistemic foundations and the potential educational value of the discipline, but through a fundamental reconfiguration driven by performative compliance.