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The Coronation of King Charles III
Resources for secondary schools
2023 will see the first coronation of a British monarch for 70 years. Only those now in their 70s or above will remember the last one. The UK is the only country in Europe still to carry out a coronation, a ceremony that has its roots in traditions over a...
The Coronation of King Charles III
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Triumphs Show 155: beyond trivial judgements of 'bias'
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Towards victory in that battle...
10A were nearly a term into their GCSE history course, working on an 1890-1918 British history ‘depth study'. They had already completed work on the Liberal welfare reforms and on the women's suffrage movement, and they had been practising a range of source evaluation approaches....
Triumphs Show 155: beyond trivial judgements of 'bias'
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Northamptonshire in a Global Context
Key Stages 2 and 3
Produced by the Northamptonshire Black History Association and originally published in 2008, this is one of a set of resources for schools offering a more inclusive map of the past that includes an appreciation of Black History within the local, national and global context. The resources provide a range of opportunities to promote diversity within the curriculum....
Northamptonshire in a Global Context
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Polychronicon 157: Reinterpreting police-public relations in modern England
Teaching History feature
The relationship between the police and the public has long been a key subject in English social history. The formative work in this field was conducted between the 1970s and 1990s, but the past few years have witnessed something of a revival of research in the area. By focusing on...
Polychronicon 157: Reinterpreting police-public relations in modern England
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Diversifying the curriculum: one department’s holistic approach
Teaching History article
In this article, Theo Woods shares the experience of one history department as they embarked on a substantial process of curriculum review and development. The department sought to address concerns that the range of history taught in their school, across the full seven years of students’ secondary experience, was too ‘traditional,...
Diversifying the curriculum: one department’s holistic approach
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Pride and delight: motivating pupils through poetic writing about the First World War
Teaching History article
This project emerged from team-teaching with history teachers in history lessons. Gill Minikin draws upon her expertise as an English teacher to help pupils become excited by the challenge of ‘squeezing language' into poems. History teachers often ask pupils to write poems but they do not necessarily draw upon all...
Pride and delight: motivating pupils through poetic writing about the First World War
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Triumphs Show: ‘The Strands of Memory’
Teaching History feature
In 2014, a group of French pupils from Lycée Léopold Sédar Senghor in Évreux was due to meet a British Second World War veteran, Eric Rackham, to hear him talk about his war experiences. Sadly, he passed away before the planned meeting. Paradoxically, this failed meeting led to the development...
Triumphs Show: ‘The Strands of Memory’
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Cunning Plan 100: teaching the First World War in Year 9
Teaching History feature
History teacher and head of department stand outside noisy Year 9 class. Bombs (paper ones) fly everywhere; in corner of room mutiny is being discussed ... many pupils are refusing to follow their leader's last minute orders - they will not be opting for history! The war of attrition (excessive...
Cunning Plan 100: teaching the First World War in Year 9
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The Great Charter: Then and now
Historian article
Magna Carta is a document not only of national but of international importance. Alexander Lock shows how its name still has power all over the world, especially in the United States.
Although today only three of its clauses remain on the statute book, Magna Carta still flourishes as a potent...
The Great Charter: Then and now
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Helping Year 9 explore the cultural legacies of WW1
Teaching History article
A world turned molten: helping Year 9 to explore the cultural legacies of the First World War
Rachel Foster shows how her own study of cultural history led to a new dimension in her planning. She wanted to show her students not only that historians are interested in many different...
Helping Year 9 explore the cultural legacies of WW1
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Recorded webinar: Queer beyond London
Article
London has tended to dominate accounts of LGBTQ Britain… but how did local contexts beyond the capital affect queer identities and communities? This talk by Professor Matt Cook looks at Brighton, Plymouth, Manchester and Leeds to illustrate the difference locality makes to queer lives.
* Please note: while this webinar...
Recorded webinar: Queer beyond London
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Modelling the discipline
Teaching History article
David Hibbert and Zaiba Patel decided to work together after becoming concerned that school history curricula might not enable students to interrogate popular British mythologising about World War II. Building on these pre-existing concerns, their collaboration with the historian Yasmin Khan yielded an Interpretations enquiry which asked students to consider...
Modelling the discipline
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Doing a Gombrich: Year 9 make connections by shaping big narratives
Article
Oliver Scott explains how he fused two goals: planning a new Year 9 history curriculum and finding a way to help Year 9 connect it all together. Inspired by the distinctive style of E.H. Gombrich, Scott decided to have his pupils write a grand narrative at mid- and end-year points. The narrative...
Doing a Gombrich: Year 9 make connections by shaping big narratives
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How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
Teaching History article
While history teachers (and examiners) regularly invite students to consider what cartoons or paintings reveal about contemporary attitudes to particular social or political developments, such sources are often difficult to interpret and to use appropriately. Drawing on a wealth of detailed research and a passion to support teachers and students with...
How visual evidence reflects change and continuity in attitudes to the police in the 19th and early 20th centuries
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... youth culture?
Teaching History feature
For such a boldly iconoclastic work, the Key Stage 3 textbook A New Focus on ... British Social History, c.1920–2000 (2023) provides a disarmingly conventional account of youth in the 1960s as ‘mostly better educated and informed than their parents had been at their age [and able] … to find...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... youth culture?
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Polychronicon 155: Interpreting the Origins of of the First World War
Teaching History feature
As I write this article I have before me my grandfather's Victory Medal from the First World War. It has inscribed on the reverse side, ‘The Great War for Civilisation 1914-1919'. The absolute certainty of such a justification for Britain's entry into the war seems somewhat hollow as we approach...
Polychronicon 155: Interpreting the Origins of of the First World War
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Polychronicon 119: The Second World War and popular culture
Teaching History feature
Polychronicon was a fourteenth-century chronicle that brought together much of the knowledge of its own age. Our Polychronicon in Teaching History is a regular feature helping school history teachers to update their subject knowledge, with special emphasis on recent historiography and changing interpretation. This edition of 'Polychronicon' investigates World War...
Polychronicon 119: The Second World War and popular culture
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Looking through the keyhole at Birkenhead from 1900 to 1950 with Year 7
Journal article
Matt Jones wanted to harness the power of local history to help his students understand the profound social changes experienced across Britain in the first half of the twentieth century.
While he hoped that the personal stories of six families in Birkenhead would help to humanise abstract concepts such as...
Looking through the keyhole at Birkenhead from 1900 to 1950 with Year 7
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Practical classroom approaches to the iconography of Irish history or: how far back do we really have to go?
Teaching History article
Ben Walsh presents a structured practical activity for teaching pupils about Northern Ireland through the use of murals. The activity can be carried out in Year 9 as part of a study on the twentieth-century world, or as part of a GCSE course. He stresses the importance of an informed...
Practical classroom approaches to the iconography of Irish history or: how far back do we really have to go?
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To historicise is to exercise: going back to the past to interpret the present
Teaching History article
Mila Bammens and Bjorn Wansink were concerned about young people’s reactions to recent nuclear threats. In the second part of this article they set out a series of approaches and resources, used with young people in the Netherlands, to teach about nuclear weapons. The first part of the article sets...
To historicise is to exercise: going back to the past to interpret the present
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Triumphs Show 193: Year 8 imagine the First World War trenches
Article
Deep into my PGCE year, I found myself discussing with my mentor how to pre-empt the barriers to understanding the past that students may face. One barrier we discussed was presentism: the tendency of students to interpret the past in light of their own modern knowledge, values and experiences. In particular, we considered...
Triumphs Show 193: Year 8 imagine the First World War trenches
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Newcastle and the General Strike 1926
Historian article
The nine-day General Strike of May 1926 retains a totemic place in the nation's history nearly 100 years later. The Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill was among those who attempted to characterise it as anarchy and revolution, but this was hyperbole and largely inaccurate for, as Ellen Wilkinson (then...
Newcastle and the General Strike 1926
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Film: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War
The Searchers
Historian Robert Sackville-West joined the HA Virtual Branch in November 2021 to talk about the topic of his book The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War. By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed...
Film: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War
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The Irish in Britain 1815-1914
Classic Pamphlet
Irish migration to Britain has a long and chequered history, yet only in recent years have historians examined this subject in depth, through a growing body of local, regional and national studies which have supplemented the earlier pioneering research of J. E. Handley and J. A. Jackson. These studies have...
The Irish in Britain 1815-1914
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Using Lesson Study to make microimprovements in teaching Year 8 how to use sources
Teaching History article
A highly distinctive and structured approach to teacher development, Lesson Study emerged in Japan but has since been adopted much more widely and now sees growing interest in the UK. Tony McConnell, Davinia Daley, Rebecca Levy, Lisa Waddell and Richard Waddington describe the process by which their school first investigated...
Using Lesson Study to make microimprovements in teaching Year 8 how to use sources
