With great sadness the Historical Association has learned of the death of our former President, Professor Justin Champion on 10th June after a long illness. Justin was President of the Historical Association from May 2014 until May 2017 and he was a very popular choice, partly because of his background...

We are delighted to announce that Professor Rana Mitter OBE FBA of Oxford University (St Cross College) will receive the 2020 Medlicott Medal for outstanding services and current contributions to History. Professor Mitter is a historian in late modern history, in particular on China, and is currently Director of the...

The Historical Association and the Institute of Physics have teamed up to deliver an exciting project for school and youth groups as part of the Royal Air Force centenary celebrations. The RAF100 Schools Project uniquely uses the professional understanding of historians and physicists working in education to create an active...

This month it will be the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy. That courageous and astounding action was one of the key turning points that led to the end of the Second World War and the defeat of Nazism. The further in time we move from that day...

Congratulations to Charlotte Lee who got married earlier this year and decided to remember her late father in the most incredible way. Stephen J Lee was Head of History at Bromsgrove School in Birmingham, UK. His publications include Russia and the USSR (Routledge, 2005) and Hitler and Nazi Germany, 2nd...

Yesterday, the Royal Historical Society (RHS) launched their research report which highlights racial and ethnic inequalities in the teaching and practice of history in the UK. Less than 1% of university academics are Black, according to the RHS’s report. The report draws attention to the fact that while history remains...

Twenty-three  people met in the comfortable Clayton Hotel in central Cardiff in June to attempt to assimilate two thousand years of Welsh history in a week. We were blessed with a heatwave, a bustling city environment, and a lot to see. We started on the eastern edge of South Wales...

This month Ofsted have issued a consultation on their new inspection framework entitled Education inspection framework 2019: inspecting the substance of education.  Over the past few years, the Historical Association’s surveys into history in English secondary schools have been showing how some schools have reduced opportunity and entitlement to study...

As we approach Remembrance Day and of course the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, schools across the country have been carrying out their own acts of remembrance in the form of special services, memorials, trips and drop down days among many other activities. Social media...

The Stephen Lawrence Trust was formed to provide a positive legacy to the senseless racially-motivated murder of Stephen Lawrence. This 22 April, the date of Stephen’s birthday, will be the inaugural national Stephen Lawrence Day. Every school in England has received a free information pack, including a personal letter from...

Congratulations to four students from Newport Girls' High School – Daniah, Romaisa, Hetavi and Saira – who created the winning poster for our Suffrage competition. The poster had a modern message while demonstrating research and inspiration from a local suffragist from the past. The judges at the HA were very...

For the past ten years, the Historical Association (HA) has worked with the University of Oxford and Reading University to carry out in-depth research on the state of history teaching in schools. These reports have informed decision-makers at the highest level, notably government, Ofsted and examination boards. The reports also...

Recent events in the UK and the USA have once more raised the issue of racism to the top of the news agenda, providing us all with an opportunity to reflect on the type of society we want to live in and that we want to create. Racism has deep...

Access Teaching History 169 here (Free to HA Secondary members) Editorial: A Time and a Place The relationship between history and geography in schools is often rather ambivalent. Recent curriculum changes in England have prompted the reconstruction of strong subject boundaries, although many history teachers continue to work alongside their geography...

Access Teaching History 170 (Free to HA Secondary Members) Editorial: Historians When we do history we are not alone. Even sitting in the most obscure corner of the top floor of the library, surrounded only by books, we are in the presence of other historians. We locate our arguments among theirs,...

Access Teaching History 171 here (Free to HA Secondary members) Editorial: Knowledge In recent years, lively debates about the role of knowledge and especially about pedagogies for ensuring its secure acquisition have raged across England’s educational landscape. Much of this has arisen from a new interest, by teachers, in the...

Access Teaching History 172 here (free to HA Secondary Members) Editorial: Cause and consequence While we suspect that few history teachers would accept EH Carr’s famous dictum that ‘the study of history is a study of causes’, causality is such a mainstay of school history that it seems surprising that...

Access Teaching History 173 here (free to HA Secondary Members) Opening Doors The theme for this edition of Teaching History draws part of its inspiration from calls for the school curriculum to give young people access to genuinely ‘powerful knowledge’: knowledge that will take them beyond the confines of their own...

Structure pervades our professional lives. From timetables to exam specs; from paragraph cohesion to causal mind maps; from boxing-match debates to formal moots, we spend a lot of time organising ourselves or our students into useful patterns. Even our lessons which exist on the edge of chaos require a lot...

Read Teaching History 176 Widening Vistas "History is like a palimpsest, a medieval parchment in which, as the ink of one set of writing faded, another document was written on top of it, until over the years several layers of writing accumulated, one on top of the other…" In this...