The short answer is: it depends entirely on the school, and for most pupils the treatment is superficial or patchy at best.
The legal position
The national curriculum for England (in force since 2014) makes the teaching of slavery non-statutory. Under Key Stage 3 history (ages 11 to 14), Britain’s transatlantic slave trade appears only as a non-statutory example under the topic “Ideas, political power, industry and empire: Britain 1745 to 1901.” The Department for Education confirmed in a Freedom of Information response that it does not collect or hold information on how many schools choose to teach British Atlantic slavery, which tells you most of what you need to know about how seriously the government has treated the question.
The only compulsory element of history at Key Stage 3 is the Holocaust. It is entirely possible for a school to teach no colonisation, no transatlantic slave trade, and no British Empire at all, and be fully compliant with the national curriculum.
What actually happens in classrooms
The evidence from surveys is stark. A survey found that 61% of respondents said the role of slavery in the British Empire was either “mentioned briefly” or not discussed at all, and fewer than 10% learned about the role of slavery in the British Industrial Revolution.
Only 11% of GCSE students in 2019 studied modules that referred to the contributions of Black people in British history, and only 9% studied modules that made significant reference to the British Empire.
The framing problem
Where slavery is taught, it is typically framed around two things: the conditions of enslaved people, and the abolition movement, with Wilberforce as the hero. Where it does appear, most British students are taught slavery as something that happened only in the Americas, independently of any British influence. Britain’s role as the dominant slave-trading nation in the mid-eighteenth century, the plantation economy of the Caribbean as a British enterprise, and the £20 million compensation paid at abolition to slave owners rather than to the enslaved, rarely feature.
The age range
Where slavery is taught, it falls almost entirely within Key Stage 3, meaning ages 11 to 14 in Years 7 to 9. History is no longer compulsory after Key Stage 3, when students may choose it as a GCSE option. This means that for the majority of English pupils, whatever they learn about slavery is learned between the ages of 11 and 14, and only if their school chooses to include it. After 14, only those who opt for GCSE history will encounter it again, and only if their school’s chosen GCSE modules include it.
What is consistently missing
Several things directly relevant to the reparations debate are almost never taught. The African kingdoms’ role in supplying enslaved people to the trade rarely appears. The Arab slave trade, which predated the Atlantic trade by centuries and continued long after British abolition, is essentially absent. The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron and its sustained campaign to suppress the trade after 1807, one of the most significant British moral and military commitments of the nineteenth century, is rarely if ever taught. The comparative scale of Portuguese and French involvement goes unmentioned.
The result is a generation taught just enough about slavery to feel that Britain was uniquely and primarily responsible, but not enough to understand the full historical picture.
Why this matters for the reparations debate
The picture above explains why the reparations campaign has found relatively unchallenged ground in British public discourse. A population taught a simplified guilt narrative as teenagers, with no counter-context, is ill-equipped to evaluate claims about historical liability. The reparations campaign depends on that gap.
An honest curriculum that taught the full picture, including the Arab and African dimensions, the abolition effort, and the actual scale of Britain’s contribution relative to other nations, would produce a public far better placed to engage seriously with the arguments rather than simply defaulting to a sense of collective guilt.
It is worth noting that the very incompleteness of what is taught is now being used to argue for more teaching, which is not in itself wrong. But the version of history that campaigners want taught is no more complete than the current one. It simply replaces one partial narrative with another, retaining the focus on British guilt while adding more detail to it. The answer is not a more guilt-focused curriculum. It is an honest one.
