Why I... think the history national curriculum would benefit from a little more colour

Deian Hopkin. Vice-chancellor, London South Bank University

When I was nine, long before the national curriculum was dreamt of, my primary schoolteachers told us about great inventors and pioneering nurses. Much of it passed over my head and for a long time I imagined Florence Nightingale carrying Humphrey Davy's lamp around a very dark Crimea. We knew something about Thomas Edison, Alfred Nobel, even Marie Curie. I sensed that all inventors were men, and the famous women were in the health business. What they all had in common, though I was oblivious to it, was that they were all white. No one else invented anything worth discussing except perhaps the Chinese, who admirably invented gunpowder.

In any case, the map of the world in our classroom was mostly coloured red to demonstrate Britain's generosity to less civilised countries. We even sang, with great gusto and enormous sympathy, a Welsh hymn that began " Draw, draw yn China a thiroedd Japan, plant bach melynion sy'n byw ". Roughly translated, it explained that the Far East was inhabited by poor yellow children who had never known anything but total deprivation, gunpowder apart obviously. Africa wasn't even mentioned. I'd never heard of Mary Seacole, let alone Lewis Latimer, the engineer, Charles Drew, who invented blood banks, or Granville Woods, the "black Edison".

One good thing emerging from the history national curriculum is greater inclusiveness. Seacole is gaining the recognition unfairly denied her until she wrote a bestselling account of her life. Key Stage 1 pupils know that she was a remarkable entrepreneur from Jamaica who sold her possessions, refused to take no for an answer from the British authorities and set up an innovative mobile hospital on the fringe of the Crimean battlefields in 1854. They will also realise she was a black nurse and that this may, in part, explain her historical obscurity.

The emphasis in the national curriculum, however, is on her original approach to nursing, including alternative medicine, in contrast to Nightingale's equally important emphasis on hygiene and hospital management. Recently my university joined Guy's and St Thomas' National Health Service Trust, the Florence Nightingale Museum and the Black Archives in celebrating Seacole's life. Our audience included nurses and practitioners from the Caribbean and Africa and they were enraptured by the remarks of powerful role models such as Trevor MacDonald and Baroness Howell.

The question they wanted answered was not so much why we have ignored Seacole, but what we are doing to ensure that history is no longer the preserve of white races. This remains the question. Shortly before the recent general election, Tim Collins, then Shadow Education Minister, suggested that we revisit the history national curriculum to emphasise the achievements of British men and women. It is not entirely clear where Seacole would have fitted into this revisionism. Does Jamaica, for example, count as British in this respect? Or for that matter India or Nigeria? We love commemorations and anniversaries, but we remain disturbingly selective in our choice. Once in a while, someone from the outside begins to be considered.

Thankfully there are now Mary Seacole Centres at De Montfort and Thames Valley universities, and the Florence Nightingale Museum has done as much as anywhere to acknowledge a significant contemporary. But it is a hard struggle to remind ourselves that for every iconic figure in history there are a large number of pioneers whose achievements, for a variety of reasons, are obscured. How many other Seacoles are there out there? If we are going to revise our approach to important historical figures, let's not make the same mistake as our predecessors.