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Primary Quality Mark: meet our assessors
Multipage Article
Being assessed can be scary – but inviting your QM assessor into school shouldn't feel like this! Our assessors, made up of carefully selected experienced history education professionals from across the primary and secondary sector, are keen to help schools celebrate what they do well and to share the good...
Primary Quality Mark: meet our assessors
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Story time? Investigating using stories about the French Revolution with Year 12
Teaching History article
Recognising a significant return to stories in the history classroom, Holliss and Carroll wanted to think carefully about what this meant for A-level history. While stories had always been present in their classrooms, they wanted to experiment with the methods of the ‘new storytellers’, building lessons, then sequences of lessons,...
Story time? Investigating using stories about the French Revolution with Year 12
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What Have Historians Been Arguing About... transnational history
Teaching History feature
Until the beginning of the twenty-first century, historians’ aversion to sweeping generalisations meant that they typically conducted their research within the boundaries of the nation state. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of globalisation and the birth of the internet, new political, intellectual, and practical developments began...
What Have Historians Been Arguing About... transnational history
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Films: Mikhail Gorbachev – Interpretations
Film series: Power and authority in Russia and the Soviet Union
How much of what Russia is today, how its people behave, and how they are perceived is dependent on its history and those that have led it? Was it the first melting pot of the world? Do its broad range of cultural traditions and diversity play a part in its...
Films: Mikhail Gorbachev – Interpretations
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Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement
Teaching History article
Inspired by reading the work of Stephen Tuck, Ellie Osborne set out to design a new sequence of lessons that would help her students adopt a longer lens on the American civil rights movement. At the same time, Osborne wanted to put more emphasis on the agency and campaigns of activists,...
Lengthening Year 9’s narrative of the American civil rights movement
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Maximising the power of storytelling in the history classroom
Teaching History article
James Hopkins’s Year 10 class had been excited by their course on medicine through time, but were less enthused about their new study of Norman England. They told him that the topic felt ‘distant’ and ‘not real’. Recalling his own experience as a student, Hopkins was interested in the ways...
Maximising the power of storytelling in the history classroom
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Move Me On 92: Having problems teaching causation
The problem page for history mentors
This Issue's Problem: Melville Miles, student history teacher, is in Term 3 of his PGCE year. Melville has taught a number of excellent lessons in which he enabled pupils to reach high levels of historical understanding. His diagnostic assessment of pupils' work is unusually sophisticated for a PGCE student. Melville's...
Move Me On 92: Having problems teaching causation
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Using Horrible History to develop primary literacy and history
Primary History article
When I started planning for my Key Stage 2 literacy lessons last year, I wanted to link them to my history topic, the Tudors, and I also needed them to cover a significant amount of non-fiction English objectives, having focused on fiction and poetry texts in the previous term. One...
Using Horrible History to develop primary literacy and history
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Archaeology – get involved
The Council for British Archaeology
Across the UK there are regional community groups undertaking practical field work; there are colleges and universities offering part-time courses – all of whom are keen to hear from you.
It doesn't matter where you live or what age you are, the archaeology of the UK is for everyone to...
Archaeology – get involved
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Archaeology - An approach to teaching history at Key Stage 2. Curriculum history
Primary History article
Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum.
Alongside modern University buildings, at Beckett Park, (part of Leeds Metropolitan University), there is evidence of a monastic grange, a seventeenth century farmhouse, and an eighteenth century mansion which was extended in Victorian Times. The Beckett Park Archaeology Project was established in...
Archaeology - An approach to teaching history at Key Stage 2. Curriculum history
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Recorded Webinar: Philip IV
Decline, decadence and the end of the Golden Age
Decline, decadence, crisis, stagnation, and adversity are terms powerfully associated with the reign of Spain’s Planet King; sombre tones that contrast sharply with the glittering cultural and artistic achievements (enhanced by his patronage) that led the period to be dubbed ‘the’ Golden Age, a label consciously competing with France’s later...
Recorded Webinar: Philip IV
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Primary History Articles for the School History Subject Leader
Multipage Article
The Historical Association has been producing its specialist primary journal Primary History since 1992. In that time there have been three editions per year and since 2017 an additional annual digital summer resource.
In 1992 a National Curriculum for history had recently emerged as had the Ofsted inspection process. Since...
Primary History Articles for the School History Subject Leader
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Recorded webinar: John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War
An enduring counterfactual
Would US President John F. Kennedy have avoided the catastrophe that became the Vietnam War if Lee Harvey Oswald had not assassinated him in Dallas on that fateful day of 22 November 1963? This question – or a version of it – has animated discussions of the Vietnam War for...
Recorded webinar: John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War
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Telling and suggesting in the Conwy Valley
Teaching History article
Thelma Wiltshire applies a ‘telling' and ‘suggesting' strategy to an enquiry involving an historical site. Getting beyond more simplistic approaches to ‘fact' and ‘opinion', she describes how a pack of curriculum materials was designed to give pupils a precise language to talk about layers of certainty and uncertainty in their...
Telling and suggesting in the Conwy Valley
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Resourcing sources
HA Primary Subject Leader Area
As a subject leader, are you often asked to provide historical objects and other documentary sources to support your colleagues with the teaching of history, but don’t know where to start looking? Well – read on!
Teachers need to give children experience of handling a range of sources of information....
Resourcing sources
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Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
Teaching History article
It seems that teapots really can talk. Eleanor Dimond took her undergraduate experience of studying material culture into the classroom, with startling results. Historians of material culture have developed distinctive evidential methods which, in stark contrast to typical GCSE and A-Level approaches, see a strong interplay between analysis of the physical attributes...
Using eighteenth-century material culture to develop evidential thinking in Year 8
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Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
Teaching History article
Jane Card’s previous work on the power of images in conveying particular interpretations and her advice about how to use visual material effectively in classrooms will be familiar to readers of Teaching History. In this article she focuses specifically on the capacity of visual representations to convey a compelling message about the...
Exploring the relationship between historical significance and historical interpretation
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Cunning Plan 190: Using art to make A-level history more accessible
Teaching History feature
Many pupils love the Horrible Histories books, television programmes and songs. Over the years a number of A-level pupils have proudly told me that it was Horrible Histories that sparked their love of the subject, and they are quick to recite the songs word for word! But it is also the...
Cunning Plan 190: Using art to make A-level history more accessible
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Looking through a Josephine-Butler shaped window: focusing pupils' thinking on historical significance
Teaching History article
Christine Counsell draws upon her recent work in developing definitions and practice concerning pupils' thinking about historical significance. Here she tries out those ideas in relation to the 19th century campaigner against the Contagious Diseases Acts, Josephine Butler. Counsell explains why she developed her own set of criteria for structuring...
Looking through a Josephine-Butler shaped window: focusing pupils' thinking on historical significance
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New X-ray technique sheds light on Syriac Galen Palimpsest
3rd April 2018
The Syriac Galen Palimpsest is a fascinating and (until now) frustrating historical manuscript. For several years it has been known to contain traces of a 6th-century translation of a treatise ‘On simple drugs’ by the renowned early physician Galen. However, this original text had been erased and overwritten with psalms in the 11th century, and despite...
New X-ray technique sheds light on Syriac Galen Palimpsest
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Ancient Athenian inscriptions in public and private UK collections
Historian article
Peter Liddel introduces us to a rich source of historical information and encourages us to make some purposeful visits to museums.
From the seventeenth to the mid nineteenth century, travellers from the UK explored the Mediterranean lands of ancient civilisations in search of trophies that demonstrated the achievements of the classical world. Highly...
Ancient Athenian inscriptions in public and private UK collections
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Information and Evidence In a Nutshell
Article
Nutshell, what's the National Curriculum Attainment Target on about when it contrasts "information" and "evidence"? Aren't they the same thing?
They aren't really things. The contrast is between ways of thinking about knowledge rather than between things.
Pardon me?
One way of talking about knowledge involves ‘looking things up': we...
Information and Evidence In a Nutshell
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What did ‘Mature Socialism’ mean for the Soviet Union?
Historian article
David Shipp analyses the state of socialism in the Soviet Union, from Brezhnev to Chernenko.
‘What is he thinking of? Reform, reform. Who needs it, and who can understand it? We need to work better, that is the only problem.’
These reported words of Leonid Brezhnev epitomise the view of the period...
What did ‘Mature Socialism’ mean for the Soviet Union?
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Happy and Glorious: exploring and celebrating the Platinum Jubilee
Primary History article
History is full of significant royals, yet few seem quite so remarkable as Her Majesty the Queen. Since her birth in 1926, she has witnessed the tragedy of a world war, the decline of the British Empire and the birth of the Commonwealth of Nations. Not only is she the...
Happy and Glorious: exploring and celebrating the Platinum Jubilee
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On-demand webinar: AI and Technology: enhancing primary history
Webinar series: AI in primary history
Webinar series: AI in primary history
Session 2: AI and Technology: enhancing primary historyPresenter: Chris Goodall, Beth Humphrey, Ryan Reece Moor, Zehra Fagan
Discover how Bourne Education Trust's comprehensive digital strategy is transforming history education through thoughtful AI integration. This webinar showcases Bourne’s Trust-wide approach to digital innovation, demonstrating how...
On-demand webinar: AI and Technology: enhancing primary history
