To understand the present and navigate the future, it is necessary to know about the past. In Scotland, we have never had a greater need to know how we got to this point in our evolving sense of nationhood. Scottish history is an increasingly popular subject of study in our universities and, as the sudden burst of new books illustrates, is of growing general fascination, but it has been declining at school level. Two years ago the absence of a specifically Scottish question in the late modern history section of the Higher history exam for the first time in the Higher Still curriculum sparked a discussion about whether there should be a guaranteed Scottish question. The dilemma was that without Scottish history being a bankable topic, fewer schools would teach it, but that a guarantee would narrow the curriculum, resulting in questions being too predictable.

To understand the present and navigate the future, it is necessary to know about the past. In Scotland, we have never had a greater need to know how we got to this point in our evolving sense of nationhood. Scottish history is an increasingly popular subject of study in our universities and, as the sudden burst of new books illustrates, is of growing general fascination, but it has been declining at school level. Two years ago the absence of a specifically Scottish question in the late modern history section of the Higher history exam for the first time in the Higher Still curriculum sparked a discussion about whether there should be a guaranteed Scottish question. The dilemma was that without Scottish history being a bankable topic, fewer schools would teach it, but that a guarantee would narrow the curriculum, resulting in questions being too predictable.

There is an argument that we should be broadening the horizons of our teenagers in their final years at school rather than encouraging parochialism. Of course we should be encouraging young people to engage with the world as a whole, but the well-rounded individual starts with a clear understanding of their own history and, taught well, that leads naturally to an engagement with the history of others. The decision to scrap the current composition of the second paper in which pupils evaluate source materials on a topic they have studied, most often the Second World War or Ireland, and replace it with a completely Scottish paper is a radical solution that will change the nature of the history curriculum at Higher level, while continuing to cover British and European subjects in the first paper. This is a welcome and far-sighted solution to the problem by the Scottish Qualifications Authority. Tinkering at the margins would have prolonged the uncertainty, resulting in fewer schools teaching recent Scottish history in order to give their pupils the best chance of exam success.

As Professor Tom Devine, of the Sir William Fraser chair of Scottish History at Edinburgh University, writes in the preface to The Scottish Nation: "Scotland is entering a phase of historic cultural change when issues such as identity and culture are being reclaimed and contested both in the media and in public debate." We need young people to engage knowledgeably in that debate. However, our schoolchildren are taught history for an average of only one hour a week in the first two years of secondary school and fewer than one-third of them study history beyond S2. Those who take Higher history will gain an understanding of Scotland in relation to the UK and to the rest of the world, but all our young people should know something of their history before they leave school. Most children in Scotland know about Robert the Bruce and the Battle of Bannockburn, but quite how we got from there to here remains a mystery. That is not good enough in today's world.