The most common KS3 history question is some variant of why did X happen? Why did the Normans win at Hastings. Why did the Black Death cause the Peasants' Revolt. Why did the Industrial Revolution start in Britain. Why did the First World War begin in 1914 and not earlier.

These questions are also the ones students most often answer badly. The bad answer names one cause and stops. The slightly better answer names a list of causes without arguing about them. The good answer — the one Harari is trying to get every KS3 student to write — names multiple causes, sorts them by type, weighs them against each other, and argues for which mattered most.

Here's the framework he uses to get there.

The three time-frames

Step one in any "why did this happen" question is to sort causes by time-frame.

Short-term causes (the trigger)

The immediate spark. The thing that happened just before the event, without which the event might not have happened at that moment. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. The introduction of the Poll Tax in 1381. Harold's army being tired and depleted from the Battle of Stamford Bridge before Hastings.

Triggers are interesting but rarely sufficient. Things that look like triggers usually require the underlying conditions to be already there. A spark in a dry forest causes a fire; the same spark in wet grass does nothing.

Long-term causes (the underlying conditions)

The slower-moving conditions that made the event possible or likely. Tensions that had been building. Structural pressures. Demographic shifts. Economic trends. For the Peasants' Revolt: declining feudal labour after the Black Death, longstanding resentment of poll-based taxation, the church's accumulated wealth and corruption, rising peasant expectations after labour shortages.

Long-term causes are usually where the real historical argument is. Two historians can agree on the trigger and still disagree wildly about which underlying conditions mattered.

Contingent factors

The "if this hadn't happened it might have gone the other way" pieces. The arrow that hit Harold at exactly the wrong moment. A specific decision by a specific leader. Weather. Disease. These remind us history wasn't inevitable.

Harari uses contingent factors carefully. Used too much they tip into counterfactual speculation. Used sparingly they make the analysis richer — the student understands that the outcome was possible, not predetermined.

The five cause types

Once causes are sorted by time-frame, they're also checked against a list of types to make sure no major dimension has been ignored. The KS3-standard list:

  • Political. Power struggles, succession disputes, government decisions, military strategy.
  • Economic. Trade, resources, wealth distribution, taxation, prices, employment.
  • Social. Class tensions, demographics, migration, family structures, community.
  • Religious. Doctrine, persecution, reform movements, church wealth.
  • Technological. Inventions, weapons, transport, agricultural techniques.

For some periods one dimension dominates (religious causes loom large in the Reformation; technological in the Industrial Revolution). But the check is mechanical: have we considered each? If a student's answer doesn't touch a dimension that should be there, Harari prompts.

A worked example: the Industrial Revolution

A Year 8 student writes: "The Industrial Revolution happened because of new machines."

Harari's checklist response, prompted gently:

  • Political? Stable government and property rights mattered. The 18th-century settlement enabled long-term investment. Worth a mention.
  • Economic? Capital accumulated from colonial trade and agricultural improvement. Demand for textiles in the empire. Worth a mention.
  • Social? Population growth meant labour was available. Urbanisation followed. Worth a mention.
  • Religious? Less central, but nonconformist Protestant networks were disproportionately represented among industrialists.
  • Technological? Yes, but ask why Britain and not somewhere else with the same technology potential. Other dimensions matter for the location.

The student now has five strands to weigh, not one. Their next draft might be twice as long and ten times stronger.

Weighing the causes

Multi-causal isn't a shopping list. The KS3 skill is weighing — arguing about which causes mattered most. Harari prompts:

  • "Which cause was the most important?"
  • "If one factor had been different, would the outcome have changed? Which one?"
  • "Could the long-term causes have produced this event without the trigger?"
  • "Could the trigger have produced the event without the long-term causes?"

These questions force the student to commit. A KS3 history answer that says "all five factors were important" is weak. An answer that says "all five contributed, but I think the economic factors were decisive because..." is strong. Even if the examiner would weight them differently, the student showed analytical work.

Writing it up: PEEL

The framework above is the thinking. PEEL is the writing structure that turns it into a paragraph.

  • P — Point. A specific claim. "The economic causes of the Industrial Revolution mattered more than the technological ones."
  • E — Evidence. Specific. Dates, figures, named events. "Capital accumulated through colonial trade rose from £X to £Y in the period 1700-1760."
  • E — Explanation. Why this evidence supports the point. "This capital was the precondition for the kind of investment that allowed technologies like the spinning jenny to be deployed at scale; without it, the technology alone would have remained niche."
  • L — Link. Connect to the next paragraph or back to the question. "This economic foundation was reinforced by the political stability of the period, which..."

Most KS3 history paragraphs that don't follow PEEL (or something like it) are missing one of these four. Usually the second E — the explanation. Students cite evidence without saying why it matters. Harari catches this constantly.

The framework's failure mode

The danger of any framework is that it becomes a checklist the student fills in without thinking. Harari is on guard against this. If a student writes "the long-term causes were X, Y, Z; the short-term causes were A, B; therefore the answer is..." in a robotic way, he'll push back: "OK, you've listed them. Which mattered most? Why? Convince me."

The framework is scaffolding. Good causation answers eventually drop the scaffolding and just think multi-causally, with weighting, by habit. Year 7 students benefit from the explicit structure. Year 9 students often don't need the labels any more.

Why this transfers

Causation thinking — multi-causal, weighted, time-framed — is one of the most transferable skills in school. It works in geography (why does flooding happen here?), in science (what caused the reaction to fail?), in real-life argument (why is the rent going up?). Students who learn it properly in KS3 history get a thinking tool they'll use for decades.

That's most of why Harari spends so much time on it.

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