Local History

What constitutes local history can be a grey area. It includes, the history of your school, the history of the town or village in which you live, and the history of a particular county or region. Local history forms a key element of the history curriculum from Key Stages 1-3 and is a way of making links between the locality and national and international events.  The question for many schools is whether to teach a local history unit discretely or whether to incorporate it into another unit. There are a number of things that the teacher of local history needs to have in their toolkit, especially if you, as the teacher, are not particularly familiar with the local context of the school in which you teach. In this section you will find helpful articles, guides and resources to enable you to make local history meaningful.

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  • 'How our area used to be back then': An oral history project in an east London school

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. How can oral history enquiries engage students with the study of history and help them connect their learning about the past to their present lives? How can oral history engage and develop students' understanding of...

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  • A local history toolkit

    Article

    Produced by the Historical Association for the National Literacy Trust's "The Olden Times" newspaper resource, May 2011. For more recent resources on local history enquiries see: Local significant individuals Local history scheme of work: your local high street Local history scheme of work: transport Incorporating local history into a scheme...

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  • Bringing together students from Bradford and Peshawar

    Article

    Connecting Classrooms: bringing together Bradford and Peshawar, primary and secondary schools, history and English In this article, Dianne Excell shares her experience of a crossphase, collaborative project funded by the British Council that brought together teachers and pupils from three schools in Bradford and five schools in Peshawar, Pakistan. Although...

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  • Community engagement in local history

    Article

    This article, by Lynda Abbott and Richard Grayson, offers a fascinating example of collaboration between school and university, focused on the development of a community archive. The project - run as an extra-curricular activity - was originally inspired by a concern to preserve the personal stories of those whose lives...

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  • Cunning Plan 134: local history at KS3

    Article

    Question: How can we plan to integrate local history into Key Stage 3 schemes of work so that pupils are engaged by the relevance of the subject across different periods of time? Local history can come in all shapes and sizes, from a large-scale oral history project to the perusal...

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  • Dialogue, engagement and generative interaction in the history classroom

    Article

    Michael Bird has a long-standing interest in the power of classroom dialogue, not only as a means of elicting students’ prior knowledge or checking their understanding of new ideas and information, but also as a powerful tool for generating new knowledge through a collective process of meaning-making. In this article, he...

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  • English Heritage and Historical Association Local Heritage Project

    Article

    One year ago (2011), the south eastern branch of English Heritage and the Historical Association came together to see what we could do better in partnership. The outcome was the Local Heritage Partnership Project. The vision was to work together to provide access to and inspiration to carry out local...

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  • Exploring big overviews through local depth

    Article

    Exploring big overviews through local depth Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie's search for a more rigorous and interesting way of teaching Year 7 the Norman Conquest was initially driven by a desire to incorporate local history in a more meaningful way in their Key Stage 3 schemes of work. This...

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  • Exploring the importance of local visits in developing wider narratives of change and continuity

    Article

    The authors of this article take a well-known structural framework for students’ thinking about the Reformation and give it a twist. Their Tudor religious rollercoaster is informed by local visits in their setting in Guernsey – an area where the local picture was not quite the same as the national...

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  • From St Neots to Siberia: an HA Quality Mark Community Outreach Project

    Multipage Article

    Longsands Academy, a secondary school in Saint Neots, Cambridgeshire was awarded an HA Quality Mark Silver Award in 2016. The History Department at Longsands chose to build on this success by applying for a First World War Then and Now grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to run a community...

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  • Have we got the question right? Engaging future citizens in local history enquiry

    Article

    Gary Clemitshaw describes a five-lesson sequence integrating history, citizenship and ICT. He examines the varied rationales and problems underlying a citizenship-history link and then argues for the role of the local dimension in securing a connection that preserves the integrity of the discipline of history. He focuses upon causation as...

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  • Inverting the telescope: investigating sources from a different perspective

    Article

    As historians, we are dependent on evidence, which comes in many varieties. Rosalind Stirzaker here introduces a project which she ran two years ago to encourage her students to think about artefacts in a different way. They have examined randomly preserved artefacts such as those of Pompeii, and sets of...

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  • Investigating the Impact of WW1 on your Locality

    30th January 2019

    This teacher’s guide, student booklet and scheme of work for Key Stage 3 can be freely downloaded from the Canterbury Archaeological Trust website here.     The project involved Year 9 students using the names on their local war memorial as the starting point for an investigation which culminated in them writing biographies of...

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  • Local Community and History Month 2024: Students’ local history stories

    Multipage Article

    One of the strengths of the HA is our broad interest in all areas of history. So many history themes and narratives focus on the big issues, but for many of us, history starts in the local. That is why we introduced Local History and Community Month for each May...

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  • Making sense of the eighteenth century

    Article

    Making sense of the eighteenth century Pressures on curriculum time force us all to make difficult choices about curriculum content, but the eighteenth century seems to have suffered particular neglect. Inspired by the tercentenary of the accession of the first Georgian king and the interest in the Acts of Union prompted...

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  • Memorialisation and the First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme

    Podcast

    In this podcast Simon Bendry, Programme Director for the UCL Institute of Education’s First World War Centenary Battlefield Tours Programme, discusses the programme and its impact. This podcast was recorded as part of the Teacher Fellowship Programme on Conflict, Art and Remembrance.

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  • Newspaper Collection

    Article

    Richard Heaton's collection of newspapers consists of over 800 free searchable extracts and full transcripts of English and Irish, Georgian and early Victorian Regional newspapers. It is one the largest free collections on the web full of unique material bringing you one step closer to your ancestors and their world,...

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  • Polychronicon 130: Dental, transcendental, regimental: Making Mangal Pandey

    Article

    Have you stuggled to find an invigorating, exciting local enquiry to motivate your Year 9 class ? How do you engage students in lively debate? This was the challenge for one Norfolk school who wanted to develop a local study on the Poor Law and to create opportunities for students...

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  • Ralph Sadleir: Hackney's Local Hero or Villain: Examples of learning opportunities in museums and historic sites at Key Stage 3

    Article

    The benefits of learning in historical sites and museums are well documented. De Silva, Smith and Tranter wrote in Teaching History 102, Inspiration and Motivation Edition, about exploring identity through the biography of a house, suggesting the possibility of teaching from the local to capture the national picture. However, students...

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  • Relevant, rigorous and revisited: using local history to make meaning of historical significance

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. The idea of engaging pupils with the relevance of local memorials is becoming commonplace in the history classroom. In Teaching History 109, Examining History  Edition, Dale Banham's pupils used First World War memorials to assess...

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