It is highly desirable that the national curriculum should be subject to periodic review, and no one will quibble with the right of the coalition to conduct one.

For all the curriculum's proven virtues over the last two decades, the place of history within it has drawn criticisms in recent years from across the historical community. Gove's past pronouncements on history – his stated commitment to its role within the national curriculum, for example, and his wish to ensure that students have access to the big picture of historical change (not only flashpoints and isolated episodes) – plus his known personal enthusiasm for the subject are all encouraging signs.

Yet on the basis of today's pronouncement, it is unclear exactly where Gove now wants to drive things. He presents his approach as an enabling, non-prescriptive project. Yet the wish "to reduce unnecessary prescription … and central control" seems directly to contradict the greater focus advocated for subject content and the establishment in the curriculum of "essential knowledge that all children should acquire".

The original establishment of the national curriculum was a model in regard to wide and direct consultation right across the subject community. In carrying through reform now, it seems imperative that Gove should take inspiration from that, and seek to further and deepen the process of consultation.

It is the best means of ensuring that a good and durable job is done. It is also the best means of keeping politics out of the classroom, as is his explicit wish. As he suggests, no one wants the national curriculum becoming "a vehicle for imposing political fads on our children".

One final point. Gove's critique of the existing curriculum pinpoints Olaudah Equiano and William Wilberforce as the only names in the entire secondary history curriculum. The current syllabus deliberately eschews naming "great" individuals, on the understandable assumption that teachers already know about key figures. There is, one hopes, no assumption that in a revised, content-driven syllabus these two names will not be adjudged as worthy of inclusion as those of past Tory politicians?

• Professor Colin Jones is president of the Royal Historical Society.