| Summary: | “Teach colonial histories in schools” became a placard slogan in 2020 England. This vindicated history teachers who in the preceding years were early adopters of a new module on the British Empire: <i>Migration, Empires and the People</i>. A key feature of this General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) module for 14 to 16-year-olds is that it does not require teachers to teach the supposed ‘pros and cons’ of empire, known as ‘the balance sheet’ approach, which is common at Key Stage 3 (KS3) when students are 11 to 14 years old. This study of students’ reception of the module is a useful test case for the broader movement to expand the teaching of imperialism. Using classroom ethnographies, focus groups and surveys allowed for a multi-dimensional exploration of students’ changing discourses of empire over the course of the module. To analyse this data, I drew on critical socioculturalism from within the history education subfield of difficult histories and supplemented this framework with specific concepts from the work of Stuart Hall including his model of encoding and decoding. In terms of how messages about empire were encoded, some teachers and textbooks used balance sheet approaches during the module while others did not. However, these encoded messages to students did not in themselves determine whether students framed empire as a balance sheet of ‘pros and cons’. Classmates decoded the same messages in different ways, with some asserting the virtue of ‘balanced’ views of empire and others taking a more critical stance towards empire. I describe how these differences are related to students’ identities, contexts and agency. As well as analysing others’ critiques of the balance sheet approach, I identify within students’ discourses the specific ways in which this framework limits and distorts students’ understanding of the imperial past.
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