A lot of what gets called "history" in school is actually trivia. Names. Dates. The order in which things happened. This isn't entirely the schools' fault — KS3 history has limited time and a lot of ground to cover, and trivia is what's easiest to mark. But it's also not history. History is asking why things happened and what followed. Trivia is what you put on the wall around it.

Prof Harari is built to spend most of his time on the why and the what-followed, and the minimum required time on the trivia. He's named after historian Yuval Noah Harari, who built a career out of asking "but why?" until he reached an interesting answer.

What KS3 history actually covers in England

The DfE national curriculum sets a broad framework for KS3 history: medieval Britain through to the early 20th century, with some flexibility in which depth studies a school chooses. In practice most UK secondary schools cover something like this across Years 7-9:

  • Year 7. Often medieval — the Norman Conquest, the medieval church, the Black Death, the development of parliament.
  • Year 8. Often early modern — the Tudors and Reformation, the English Civil War, the Industrial Revolution.
  • Year 9. Often modern — the British Empire, the First World War, the 20th century, sometimes the Holocaust.

(Schools vary, and some interleave themes rather than chronologies. Harari adapts to whichever scheme your child's school is using — there's a "what are you working on at school?" question early in each session.)

Harari works across this whole span. The throughline isn't the period — it's the question type. Why did this happen? Why did it happen here and not elsewhere? Why did it happen then and not earlier? What would have been different if it hadn't?

What a Harari session looks like

Sessions usually open with a question about the topic the student is working on. Not "tell me about the Norman Conquest", but "imagine you're trying to convince someone in 1075 that William's invasion succeeded — what would you point to?"

That sounds slightly odd as an opener, deliberately. The job of the opening question is to put the student inside the history rather than next to it. Once they're inside, names and dates start to do useful work — they're orientating the inside-the-history view, not being recited from outside.

From the opening question, sessions usually move through:

  1. Cause mapping. What factors led to the event? Triggers (the immediate spark) vs underlying causes (the longer-running conditions). Political, economic, social, religious factors. Multi-causal by default.
  2. Source check. Where does our evidence come from? Who wrote it, when, and why? Harari is heavy on primary sources, but only ones a Year 7-9 student can actually read. (Full article on this — Primary sources teens can read.)
  3. Perspective switch. Whose view are we hearing? Who saw this differently? What evidence supports that other view?
  4. Consequence chain. What followed? Short-term consequences vs long-term consequences. What ended? What started?
  5. Today's question. Why does this matter now? Where do its echoes show up? (Done lightly — not every event has a clean modern parallel and forced parallels are bad history.)

A 25-minute session won't always do all five. But the structure is in the background, and the agent will gently bring the student back to it if they wander too far.

The three Harari pushbacks

If you're watching a Harari session over a child's shoulder, three things will happen often enough to be worth flagging.

"But why?"

Harari refuses to let a single-cause answer stand. "Why did the Normans win at Hastings?" → student says "better archers". → "OK, but why did they have better archers? Why did they invest in archery while Harold didn't? Why was Harold weakened to start with?"

The point is not to be annoying. It's to model what historical thinking actually is. The first cause a student names is usually the surface one; the interesting causes are three or four "but why"s deeper. Harari makes that practice routine.

"Whose view is that?"

When a student summarises an event, Harari will check whose perspective they're echoing. The chronicle they quoted — who wrote it? Are they neutral? Whose interests did they serve? This isn't to push the student into cynicism; it's to build the habit of treating sources as evidence with provenance, not as the truth.

"Anachronism alert"

When a student says "medieval people were so stupid for X", or "they should have just done Y", Harari catches it. Calmly. The reframe is: what did they know, what did they value, what options did they actually have? Not because we have to forgive everything in the past, but because understanding requires getting out of present-day assumptions for a moment. This is the single most important historical-thinking skill, and the one most often skipped in school.

Tone modes

Like every faculty agent, Harari adapts to the energy level set by the Mentor. Green-energy sessions get harder source analysis, comparison work, extended writing. Amber gets timeline-building, vocabulary review, simpler sources. Red is homework support only.

History-specific signal: he watches for whether the student is reasoning or reciting. Reciting is fine in moderation — sometimes you do need to know that Henry VIII reigned 1509-1547 — but a session that's all recitation is a session that has slipped. He'll re-introduce a why question to get reasoning back online.

Where Harari fits — and where he doesn't

He's strong at:

  • Explaining cause and consequence chains across the KS3 timeline.
  • Source analysis at Year 7-9 reading level.
  • Extended writing structure (PEEL: point, evidence, explanation, link).
  • Vocabulary that recurs in history exams (e.g. causation, consequence, interpretation, significance, change, continuity).

He's deliberately weak at:

  • Pre-1066 British history (outside national curriculum scope for most KS3).
  • Highly specific GCSE board case studies (different stage).
  • Real-time political debate. He'll discuss past politics; current political opinions get a careful "let's stick to the historical context" redirect.

What to expect as a parent

If your child has had a Harari session and you ask what they did, you should hear cause-and-consequence language: "we worked out why the Black Death made the Peasants' Revolt more likely." Not "we learned about the Black Death." If the answer comes back as the second one, something probably went wrong.

You may also notice your child starting to push back on simple narratives. "But why did they do that?" at the dinner table is a common side effect. (Apologies in advance.) This is the design working. KS3 history is supposed to produce more questioning, not less.

Jason runs aitutors.me. He has a Year 8 child and about fifteen years of building software adjacent to education. Updated 21 May 2026.