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Teaching the Historic Environment
Guidance for teaching the Historic Environment in new GCSE courses
The GCSE History criteria specify that the courses should cover three geographical contexts: local, British and European/wider world. The requirement to include some local history has been developed into the study of a locality in its Historic Environment. This has been developed in four different ways by the Awarding bodies...
Teaching the Historic Environment
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History GCSE Specification Comparison Tool
GCSE Resource
This short guidance is designed to help you compare the 9-1 GCSE specifications. The first examinations of these new linear GCSEs was in the summer of 2018.
History GCSE Specification Comparison Tool
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'Victims of history': Challenging students’ perceptions of women in history
Teaching History article
As postgraduate historians with teaching responsibilities at the University of York, Bridget Lockyer and Abigail Tazzyman were concerned to tackle some of the challenges reported by their students who had generally only encountered women’s history in a disconnected way through stand-alone topics or modules. Their response was to create a...
'Victims of history': Challenging students’ perceptions of women in history
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The Great Charter
Classic Pamphlet
The following introduction to and translation of Magna Carta was made for the use of my pupils and is here published in response to a suggestion that it may be of use to others. The Charter bristles with technical legal terms and its Latin is often ambiguous since the language...
The Great Charter
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Move Me On 165: Capturing student interest vs. sense of period
Teaching History feature
This issue’s problem: In her concern to capture students’ interest Jennet Preston tends to present people in the past as weird and wonderful aliens...
Jennet Preston has come into teaching as a second career, following a break to look after her young children. She is enthusiastic and full of ideas for...
Move Me On 165: Capturing student interest vs. sense of period
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Recorded webinar series: The power of maps
Multipage Article
Historians use maps a lot – or at least they should. They help us to understand global relations, environmental and social change and they help to reveal how the world was understood and explored in the past. This webinar series is an opportunity to hear three world class academics explore different aspects...
Recorded webinar series: The power of maps
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Exploring the challenges involved in reading and writing historical narrative
Teaching History article
‘English king Frederick I won at Arsuf, then took Acre, then they all went home': exploring the challenges involved in reading and writing historical narrative
Paula Worth draws on three professional traditions in history education in order to build a lesson sequence on the Crusades for her Year 7s. First,...
Exploring the challenges involved in reading and writing historical narrative
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Tracking the health of history in England’s secondary schools
Teaching History article
In 2009 the Historical Association conducted the first of what has become an annual survey of history teachers in England. Its aim was to get beyond bare statistics relating to subject uptake and examination success to examine the reality of history teaching across all kinds of schools and to map...
Tracking the health of history in England’s secondary schools
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GCSE topics mapped against our resources
HA Resources and GCSE History
At the HA, we know it’s hard enough trying to grapple with new GCSE units of study, assessment and content without also having to research where you can find interesting or supportive resources, either for your own, or your students subject knowledge. Our secondary committee have pooled resources and helped...
GCSE topics mapped against our resources
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Teaching, learning and sharing medieval history for all
Teaching History article
Medieval history is on the rise. Among the many recent reforms in the history curriculum is a requirement for medieval themes at GCSE and across the country the new linear A-level offers fresh opportunities for teachers to look beyond the traditional diet of Tudors and modern history. The huge divide...
Teaching, learning and sharing medieval history for all
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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...
Bringing together students from Bradford and Peshawar
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Beyond tokenism: diverse history post-14
Teaching History Article
Nick Dennis shows how a ‘multidirectional memory’ approach to teaching history can move history teachers beyond seeing black history as separate or distracting from the history that must be aught at examination level. He gives examples of ways in which a diverse history can be built into examination courses, strengthening...
Beyond tokenism: diverse history post-14
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Nurturing aspirations for Oxbridge
Teaching History article
An exploration of the impact of university preparation classes on sixth-form historians
Frustrated by the low numbers of students from her comprehensive state school who expressed any interest in applying to Oxford or Cambridge to study history, Lucy Hemsley set out to explore ways in which she might both inspire...
Nurturing aspirations for Oxbridge
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Cunning Plan 165: Helping lower-attaining students
Teaching History feature
My GCSE students were about to embark on their controlled assessment, which asked them to weigh up conflicting views on the British military’s contribution to the D-Day landings. Students were asked to engage with a range of historians’ views and textbooks as well as some contemporary source material to assess...
Cunning Plan 165: Helping lower-attaining students
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Polychronicon 163: Europe: the longest debate
Teaching History feature
On 23 June, electors in the United Kingdom will vote on whether they wish to remain part of the European Union. The passionate debate around the question has seen the spectre of Hitler and the example of Churchill invoked, with varying plausibility, by both sides. It has also drawn on the...
Polychronicon 163: Europe: the longest debate
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New, Novice or Nervous? 165: Enabling progress - students who need more support
Teaching History feature
Students often find history ‘hard’; senior managers and pastoral managers perceive it as challenging and many, with the best of intentions, steer students away from taking it for GCSE. Indeed, in the most recent HA survey, 49% of respondents reported that some students are actively discouraged or prevented from continuing...
New, Novice or Nervous? 165: Enabling progress - students who need more support
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Cunning Plan 163.1: GCSE Thematic study
Teaching History feature
I started teaching ‘crime and punishment through time’ thematically a few years ago. I was teaching it as a Schools History Project ‘study in development’. We had moved from ‘medicine through time’ in order to keep things fresh. After six times through the content, much as I loved it, crime,...
Cunning Plan 163.1: GCSE Thematic study
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Does the grammatical ‘release the conceptual’?
Teaching History article
Jim Carroll noticed basic literacy errors in his Year 13s’ writing, but on closer examination decided that these were not best addressed purely as literacy issues. Through an intervention based on clauses, Carroll managed to enable his students to write better, but he did this by teasing out principles of...
Does the grammatical ‘release the conceptual’?
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The Great Debate 2026: Speeches
Multipage Article
The Great Debate concluded on 21 March 2026 in Central London following a thrilling day. The competition started in the autumn of 2025 with heats running across the UK and online until February 2026. The three semi-finals held online led to the 21 finalists who were invited to London for...
The Great Debate 2026: Speeches
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Teacher Fellowship programme: The Caribbean, Monarchy and Legacies of Empire
Teacher Fellowship programme 2025
Although twelve Caribbean colonies gained independence during Elizabeth II's reign, only four opted to become republics (most recently Barbados, in 2021) and eight retain the British monarch as head of state to this day. Emphasising Caribbean sources and perspectives, this Teacher Fellowship programme examines the role of the British monarchy in the...
Teacher Fellowship programme: The Caribbean, Monarchy and Legacies of Empire
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New, Novice or Nervous? 164: Constructing narrative
Teaching History feature: the quick guide to the no-quick-fix
Narrative is shedding its status as the ‘underrated skill’, re-emerging as a requirement of the new GCSE in England. As Counsell has argued, constructing a narrative is ‘no easy option’, however, and asking students to ‘Write an account…’ lacks the comfortable familiarity of ‘Explain why…’ or ‘How far…’. Fortunately, many...
New, Novice or Nervous? 164: Constructing narrative
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Making rigour a departmental reality
Teaching History article
Faced with the introduction of a two-year key stage and a new whole-school assessment policy, Rachel Arscott and Tom Hinks decided to make a virtue out of necessity and reconsider their whole approach to planning, teaching and assessment at Key Stage 3. In this article they give an account of...
Making rigour a departmental reality
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Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
Teaching History feature: celebrating and sharing success
Julia Huber and Katherine Turner found that their A-level students struggled to identify the line of argument in a passage of historical scholarship, an essential prerequisite for answering their coursework question. They devised an activity that helped students to unpick and visually contrast historians’ interpretations of the relative importance of...
Triumphs Show 164: interpretations at A Level
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The importance of subject specific training
HA Update
It is my passion for history and interest in young people that has sustained me both as a teacher and latterly as a PGCE history tutor.
Last term a number of seemingly unrelated issues began to coalesce in my mind. Over the summer I met a number of teachers that...
The importance of subject specific training
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The Great Debate 2025: Speeches
Multipage Article
The final was held at the Vicar’s Hall at Windsor Castle on 29 March 2025, and attended by 20 finalists from across the UK. This year, each finalist needed to have taken part in a regional competition and one of three semi-final stages.
The competition question for this year was: How...
The Great Debate 2025: Speeches
