Secondary Programme
Navigate your way through our extensive secondary history education pathways. Throughout each day, you’ll find up to eight workshops tailored to meet your needs. Choose from subjects such as environmental history, women’s history, assessment and historical scholarship/working with historians. Engage with the latest historical research into many areas of history and history teaching. The mixed pathway bridges the gap between key stages, dealing with questions that concern teachers across the education sector and those interested in transition. Whether you are at the start of your teaching career or an established teacher or trainer, there is a varied range of CPD to meet your needs.
Curriculum architects: making the most of the freedom to design and build a high-quality curriculum
Geraint Brown
Consultant
Catherine Priggs
Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, Amersham
Much useful guidance has been written about the underpinning principles that help to inform our approach to curriculum architecture. Nevertheless, whether starting from scratch or regularly renewing, it remains a daunting task. While we have freedom to select content, emphasise substantive concepts or shape approaches to disciplinary knowledge, there is no doubt about the complexity of the task at hand. These planning challenges and opportunities go beyond Key Stage 3; planning within the context of a new GCSE specification can appear simpler, but freedom still exists, and arguably the constraints make the task of retaining coherence and rigour more challenging. In this session, we will consider the principles of curriculum architecture across the key stages, offering practical examples and pragmatic advice to support you in your own context.
Friday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16, teacher educators
Artificial intelligence (AI) and the history teacher: friend or foe?
Ben Walsh
David Ross Education Trust, Loughborough
AI has actually been around for a long time in various forms, but has gained greater prominence in recent times with the emergence of large language models, such as Chat GPT, which appear to demonstrate reasoning and intelligence. The development of AI has raised many concerns for history teachers, particularly concerning assignments and assessment. However, it has also brought remarkable developments in the study of history and has immense potential to help history teachers with workload. This session will examine the issues, try to put AI into a broader context and explore some of the ways in which it can be a friend, as well as guarding against it being a foe.
Friday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16, teacher educators, mentors
Teacher perceptions of teaching environmental history: a reflection on research
Verity Morgan
The Cotswold School, Bourton on the Water; University of Bristol
My PhD research has focused on investigating teacher perceptions of teaching environmental history. As part of this, I created classroom resources for five Key Stage 3 curriculum topics, which were shared with teachers participating in my research and at the 2023 HA Conference. In this session, I will draw upon reflections of my participant teachers, from a variety of secondary school contexts, on their experiences of adapting the focus of their curricula to include an environmental history lens, in order to discuss how and why environmental history should be included in the Key Stage 3 curriculum. This will include offering and justifying practical methods of bridging the gap between academic approaches to environmental history and various secondary school contexts, alongside a focus on achieving buy-in from teachers on the value of this adaptation in focus.
Friday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 3, teacher educators
Birmingham, broadcasting and the BBC: uncovering the complexity of British society in the 1960s
Holly Hiscox
HA Teacher Fellow
Drawing on work from the HA Teacher Fellowship on ‘Broadcasting and social change in sixties Britain’, this session explores how students can be encouraged to achieve a sophisticated understanding of British society in a number of ways: using a location as an ‘anchor’ point, where various social changes intersect in one place; seeing the value of a range of sources, including audio-visual material and oral histories; and, finally, considering how analytical frameworks from other disciplines, such as media studies, can enhance our understanding of the past. The resources are designed to enable students to avoid simplistic dichotomies of change/continuity, and to fully engage with the fascinating complexity and contradictions inherent in sixties society. While based on an A-level enquiry, material could be adapted for other key stages.
Friday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16
Teaching neurodivergent pupils to succeed in GCSE history
Gemma Hargraves
The Crypt School, Gloucester
Kate Hewson
King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham
Many pupils may find the content and concepts faced at GCSE history overwhelming. Gemma Hargraves (History Teacher and Deputy Headteacher overseeing SEND and inclusion) and Kate Hewson (SENDCo) will use their experience of teaching history and supporting neurodivergent pupils to share tips and strategies to engage and inspire pupils at GCSE. Using case studies from autistic pupils at academically selective schools, this workshop will discuss how to help pupils to gain confidence and make good progress at GCSE level. Covering ways in which to support pupils with organisation and focus in the classroom, along with stretching the most able beyond lessons, there will also be an opportunity for Q&As, for attendees to ask for advice on how best to support the pupils that they teach.
Friday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 4
Finding the fun in A-level history – an escape room experience
Maria Freeman
Rydal Penrhos, Colwyn Bay
I have found A-level lessons to be awfully stuffy sometimes, particularly revision lessons, and as a result I have spent a few years developing fun, competitive-type lessons and escape room lessons, e.g. ‘Save the Bayeux Tapestry from incineration’. Pupils love it and it allows them to recall and revise vast amounts of the huge content that they are required to cover in a way that reminds them why they chose history and which demonstrates the teacher’s passion for teaching and for the subject too. It puts some of the fun that teachers have time to include at Key Stage 3 back into the Key Stage 5 curriculum. I would love to share some ideas and give a group of teachers the chance to experience a session, hoping that they will then go away and plan their own. These types of lessons could work at Key Stage 4 too.
Friday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 4, Post-16
Teaching a shared colonial heritage through UNESCO’s Memory of the World archive
Natasha Robinson
University of Oxford
Annika Roes
UNESCO, Paris, France
The ‘Memory of the World’ (MoW) is a digital register hosted by UNESCO that contains world-significant historical records. This session will first introduce approaches for using the MoW register in the classroom and introduce teachers to the pedagogical resources developed around selected historical records. The session will then report on a UNESCO pilot project, which has used the MoW to develop approaches to teaching colonial history, thus empowering students to become global citizens. This project involved supporting teacher pairs from formerly colonised and colonising countries (Ghana/UK and Indonesia/Netherlands) to develop a shared scheme of work around a specific colonial-era document. The opportunities and challenges for UK schools to pair with schools in former British colonies when they teach colonial history will be explored.
Friday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16
From Punjab to Birmingham: teaching British South Asian history at Key Stage 3 with a local flavour
Andrew Wrenn
Consultant
This practical workshop will show how British South Asian history can be given local flavour and relevance by rooting it in the experience of migrants to particular localities, in this case Birmingham. It will feature fresh content and resources created for teaching in Birmingham schools to coincide with the 2022 Commonwealth Games on the theme of ‘Empire, Commonwealth and industry’, but with planning approaches that can be used anywhere. Disseminated resources will include stained glass windows from a pub, depicting images of early Punjabi migration to Birmingham; ways of looking at the tangled history of South Asia, Britain and Birmingham between 1600 and 1947; and a dramatic true story about partition, seen through the eyes of a child.
Friday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 3
Exploring historical significance at Key Stage 3: the nature of knowledge claims in history
Niamh Jennings and William Mason
Cottenham Village College, Cambridge
This session will explore approaches to the teaching of historical significance in the classroom. One approach will consider how historical scholarship can be used to teach students about historiographical significance and the nature of knowledge claims in history. This includes showing students that while historical silences can be created and sustained, they can also be challenged by historians. Another approach will consider how historical significance can be explored through memory, myth and unofficial knowledge.
In the session, we will draw on practical examples of taught enquiries to show how these themes can be explored in the Key Stage 3 classroom, as well as providing recommendations for practitioners to consider when approaching the planning and teaching of historical significance themselves.
Friday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, teacher educators, post-16
Terms and conditions: using metaphor to help students characterise the roles of causes
Jim Carroll
University of Oxford
Jim Carroll noticed his students failing to write causal arguments that fully engaged with the wording of examination questions. He judged that the issue was, in part, due to the fact that his students had only the faintest grasp of the words in the questions that related to the different roles of causes, such as ‘conditions’. Consequently, he modelled for his students one way in which academic historians think and write about the different roles of causes: metaphor. This workshop will include examples of the scholarship that inspired the lessons and that the students read in class. There will also be resources from the lessons that exemplify the linguistic scaffolding that underpinned the students’ disciplinary thinking. Finally, there will be examples of the students’ written work, including feedback from academic historians on what they valued about the students’ essays.
Friday: 12.00–13.00
Post-16, Key Stage 4, Key Stage 3
Unwell women: an exploration of the changing perception of women’s mental health
Jessica Charles
St Francis’ College, Letchworth
Richard Kerridge
HA Fellow
This session will focus on an enquiry that has been created and implemented, concentrating on the lens of diversity. The enquiry includes a set of ready-made resources that have been used in the classroom with Key Stage 3 and which will be adapted into a second scheme of work with older students this year.
This enquiry explores how the perception of women’s mental health changed over time, and whether these changing perceptions were because of medicine or myth. The enquiry uses Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women to explore the difficulties that women faced throughout history, with a focus on medical misdiagnosis and the changing societal perception of ‘unwell women’ throughout history. The session will explain the curricular benefits and difficulties of discussing mental health, and offer a way for schools to implement EDI content in history.
Friday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Post-16, teacher educators, mentors
Jewish–Muslim relations in Britain: history, implications and educational opportunities
Rob Kanter
Manchester Metropolitan University
In contemporary society, Jewish–Muslim relations are often viewed through a political lens, most often in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The first part of the session will provide an overview of key themes in the complex but important histories of Jewish–Muslim relations in Britain since 1900, including the impact of Jewish life under Islamic rule since the medieval period, as well as the joint front against fascism and Nazism in the 1930s. This historical overview will be followed by a consideration of the resonance of these histories today, as well as identifying opportunities for integrating aspects of Jewish–Muslim relations into wider schemes of learning.
Friday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, Post-16, Teacher educators
Fascism: ancient and modern
Gráinne Cassidy
The Classical Association
Anthony Smart
York St John University
Twentieth-century fascist states saw within the classical world models to support their social and political ambitions. For nascent nationalism, the ancient past offered an artificial sense of history and pretexts for political action. Both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy misappropriated the ancient past, selecting elements from Greece and Rome to mimic or idealise. When teaching these states, you’ll find classical ideas and motifs, sometimes explicit and sometimes subliminal. We will reflect on how ancient history was used in developing national programmes to justify revolution. We’ll start with Mussolini’s development of romanità, before looking at how the Nazis drew upon aspects of the ancient world to justify their ideology. This will give teachers a new appreciation of how the ancient past became a propaganda mine for both fascist nations.
Friday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16
Everything is language: working out the message no matter what the text
Caroline Chattaway and Michelle Wohlschlegel
King Edward VI College, Nuneaton
This session has developed from a close working relationship between the English and history departments at a sixth form college. Realising that many of our best students studied subjects from both, we began to investigate the skills and methods that were common across the subjects. Both English and history tell stories from which the students need to remember detailed knowledge, and both look at authors’ viewpoints and analysis of text and language.
In this session, we will present a range of activities and practical methods dealing with looking at extensive texts, which is a key requirement of English literature, history and ancient history A-levels. How do we break these down for our students? How do we teach analysis skills? How do we deal with interpretations?
Friday: 12.00–13.00
Post-16, teacher educators
Pearson Edexcel GCSE history: improving the student experience
Mark Battye
Pearson Edexcel
Following the feedback that we received from both teachers and students about the summer 2023 series, we undertook a comprehensive review of our assessment model in order to identify ways in which to improve the student experience. This workshop will outline the improvements that we are making for future exam series, from summer 2024, 2025 and beyond.
Friday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 4
Bringing local, global history into the classroom
Deborah Hayden
Trinity Catholic School, Leamington Spa
This workshop will cover examples of how to diversify your curriculum using local case studies. It will include strategies for uncovering local links to global events and the importance of working with local community groups to develop your curriculum. It will also share examples of the projects in which our students have been involved, including narrating historical documentaries, delivering talks to local community groups, working with our local county records office, and taking part in Oxford University’s national archive project – ‘Their Finest Hour’ – and ‘The Holocaust, Their Family, Me and Us’ research project, as well as being a UCL Beacon School for Holocaust Education.
Friday: 14.00–15.00
Cross-phase/transition, teacher educators, mentors, Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
No more mark schemes: doing assessment differently
Elizabeth Carr
Avanti Grange Secondary School, Bishop’s Stortford
Drawing on assessment research and design principles from within and beyond the history teaching community, this workshop will explore ways in which to assess pupils’ work without recourse to mark schemes or grade descriptors. Practical activities will exemplify how one department has reimagined assessment and feedback, generating more specific, meaningful and useful information for teachers and pupils. Participants will be equipped to make better and more efficient judgements about pupils’ substantive and disciplinary knowledge and understanding, and to improve the reliability of summative assessment across a team, working within whole-school assessment frameworks. Assessment can be enjoyable – this session will show you how!
Friday: 14.00–15.00
Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, cross-phase/transition, Key Stage 1, Key Stage 4, post-16
The River Between: using a novel to teach the history of colonisation in East Africa
Mike Hill
Ark Soane Academy, London
In 1961, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (then known as James Ngugi) was a second-year university student in Uganda. Eager to win the 1,000-shilling prize of a writing competition, he set out to pen a story about the history of colonisation in East Africa – a history that he felt the British colonial rulers had tried to bury. This story became The River Between, Ngũgĩ’s gripping novel about Christian missionaries, White settlers and the Gikuyu people, who lived in the highlands near Mount Kenya.
In this workshop, we will unpick a six-lesson enquiry that explores the history of colonisation in East Africa through Ngũgĩ’s novel. We will consider how studying a fictional interpretation can bring out the complexity and human experience of the past, and how teachers can use this to blend substantive and disciplinary knowledge in powerful ways.
Friday: 14.00–15.00
Key Stage 3, teacher educators
Teaching transatlantic slavery better: principles and resources from the Balliol TAST Institute
Roz Ablett
Nicholas Breakspear Catholic School, St Albans
Siân Robbins
Mulberry Academy Woodside, London
How can we humanise the enslaved with students? How can we use material culture to make the transatlantic slave trade feel more concrete? How can we read sources about slavery ‘against the grain’ to reveal powerful human stories? What can interdisciplinary lenses bring to the study of slavery? What implications does all this have for your history curriculum and your students’ development as informed, reflective and empathetic human beings? This workshop will share best practice from the Teaching the Transatlantic Slave Trade Institute – a collective of teachers, historians and museum professionals from the UK and USA, organised by Balliol College Oxford and the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, who have come together over the last two years to discuss best practice in the teaching of transatlantic slavery.
Friday: 14.00–15.00
Cross-phase/transition, Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16, teacher educators, mentors
Climate justice in the history classroom: a case-study – the British Empire and India at Key Stage 3
Kathryn Jones
Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School, Sutton Coldfield
History teachers, good at handling complex and controversial topics within the classroom, can bring something important to the field of climate justice education. This session explores how shifting the focus of an established Key Stage 3 topic – the British Empire and India – can open the way for students to think critically about what ‘climate justice’ might mean today. It also presents a range of strategies for creating activities and resources within the history classroom, which can help young people to develop the knowledge and skills that they need to respond to the challenges of the 21st century.
Friday: 14.00–15.00
Key Stage 3, teacher educators
Enriching your GCSE migration unit
Liberty Melly and Tia Shah
Migration Museum
Join the learning team from the Migration Museum to enrich your teaching about migration. This session will cover the museum’s tried and tested classroom-applicable approaches to engage students with this important topic. We will explore how to enrich these GCSE units and further bring them to life through trips to historical sites of migration significance that feature in the specifications. There will also be the opportunity to share your good practice – ideas, resources and teacher subject knowledge tips – to come and learn from the Migration Museum and to network with others in this growing community.
This workshop is most relevant for those teaching the migration units at GCSE and those whose schools are hoping to make the switch and are looking for support to make the case. It will also be useful for those teaching migration at Key Stage 3 level.
Friday: 14.00–15.00
Key Stage 4, Key Stage 3, teacher educators
Planning a new exam unit from scratch: the early British Empire
Sally Thorne
Montpelier High School, Bristol
There is diversity to be had among the current exam specifications, both at GCSE and at A-level, but, like penguins on an iceberg, it can be overwhelming to take the plunge when it seems like nobody else is teaching it. During this session, Sally will use her preparation and teaching of the British Empire 1558–1783 unit at A-level to model how to prepare, plan and teach a unit from scratch. It will include tips on manageable reading around the topic, creating medium-term plans and resourcing when there are few published resources. There will also be ideas about how to include this fascinating and undertaught period of history at other junctures in your curriculum.
Friday: 14.00–15.00
Key Stage 4, Post-16
GCSE history: planning for historic environment in 2025
Katie Hall and Emma Roberts
AQA
This session will look at the historic environment sessions for AQA GCSE history in 2025. It will cover ideas about how to introduce your site to students, ways of making sense of the historic environment, and teaching and learning ideas. This is an ideal session for those who are new to AQA or are wanting to refresh their ideas for teaching the historic environment, as well as being a great chance to meet the AQA history team.
Friday: 14.00–15.00
Key Stage 4
Dawson Lecture
Penelope Harnett
The Dawson Award amplifies the ethos of inspiration, collaboration and continuous learning in the field of education. This award celebrates an individual who has supported and nurtured history teachers and teaching. We are delighted that this year’s recipient is Penelope Harnett.
Penelope is a distinguished figure in the field of history and citizenship education. Her notable contributions extend to various Council of Europe projects focused on history teaching. Penelope is recognised for her extensive research and published widely within the broader sphere of learning and teaching in history.
Having served as the former editor of Primary History and been an active member of our Primary Committee for many years, Penelope’s commitment to educational advancement remains evident as she continues to be an important voice in primary history education. Her dedication to shaping the landscape of history education is a testament to her enduring impact on the field and one of the many reasons why she has been awarded the Dawson Award.
Friday: 15.15–16.15
Visiting historical sites: placing the Cold War in context
Alana Britton
NST
This session will explore the value of historic locations as a means for establishing context. Visting a historic site is more than seeing the sites; it is best utilised when placed in a narrative. We will be focusing on Berlin during the Cold War and how to approach the narrative of the key developments of the city as a central point throughout the conflict, helping to establish the barometer of superpower relations. The session will include practical exercises to complement the various places of historical significance.
Friday: 15.15–16.15
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16, teacher educators
Writing in the women that have been written out: a new focus on the Middle Ages for Year 7
Toby Dove
Bartholomew School, Eynsham
Verity Morgan
The Cotswold School, Bourton-on-the-Water; University of Bristol
Working in schools where Year 8 and 9 curricula have been diversified more effectively, we felt that medieval history needed similar work to include more varied stories and voices. Inspired by Janina Ramirez’s book Femina, this session will reflect on adaptations to Year 7 curricula, in two different school contexts, to include greater focus on medieval women. We will outline and reflect upon resources that we have used in three stages of adaptation: first, focusing on individual women like Hildegard of Bingen to consider events through alternative lenses; second, adapting a scheme of work to focus on ‘How did women fight the Wars of the Roses?’; and third, developing a lesson entitled ‘Why have historians started writing about medieval women?’, focusing on how and why a previously ‘silent’ past has come to be seen as historiographically significant.
Friday: 16.45–17.45
Key Stage 3
How can we ensure that disability history is not still ‘hidden in plain sight’?
Alex Fairlamb
Kings Priory School, Newcastle; HA Secondary Committee
Ruth Lingard
University of York
The rich, diverse history of disabled people should be woven throughout curricula so that children can explore their experiences, opportunities, challenges and fight for rights throughout the past. This session will explore a broad range of narratives that can form part of the golden thread of disability in your history curricula, as well as discussing the practicalities of framing this history, including language and changing attitudes towards disability.
According to government records, 24% of the UK population have some form of disability. Without doubt, history teachers will teach students with some form of disability and some of the students whom they currently teach will go on to develop a disability in later life. How can the history that we teach in school reflect their experiences?
In 2018, Ruth Lingard and Helen Snelson wrote an article for Teaching History about their attempts to ‘slot in’ the history of the disabled within their regular teaching. Here they advised teachers that saying something was better than saying nothing, and that sometimes all that was needed was a fresh perspective. In this follow-up session, Ruth Lingard will be joined by Alex Fairlamb to explore more opportunities to weave the experiences of people with disabilities throughout history into the content that you will already teach in school, stretching from medieval pilgrimage to civil rights protests. It will also provide you as a teacher with the relevant language and advice needed for discussing this issue in the classroom.
Friday: 16.45–17.45
What can trees reveal about how humans terraformed the Earth? Environmental history in Key Stage 3
Barbara Trapani
Orleans Park School, London
The session will share examples of the possibilities of teaching environmental histories through a focus on early modern and colonial history in Key Stage 3. We will retrace the steps of an enquiry on the human and environmental impact of the arrival of Europeans in Madeira and the Banda Islands and of sheep farming in England. The session will explore the teaching of history with a particular focus on trees: those of Madeira (the Isle of Wood) being replaced by sugar cane and grapes, the nutmeg trees of the Banda Islands being burned down to control the price of the spice, and the rainforest of England being destroyed by sheep farming. The workshop will demonstrate the use of the scholarship of David Abulafia and Amitav Ghosh with Key Stage 3 students, and it will enable participants to explore how to incorporate environmental history in their existing curriculum.
Friday: 16.45–17.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
Indigenising the curriculum: engaging with indigenous histories
Joy Porter
University of Hull; Treatied Spaces Research Group
Nicole Ridley
Malet Lambert, Hull
The purpose of the session is to identify topics in Key Stage 3 and 4 curricula where indigenous voices are muted; it begins with the challenges of diversifying GCSE American West specifications, but recognises the vast amount of American history taught without reference to the indigenous peoples. Therefore, the session expands backwards (before expansion) and forwards (to the World Wars, civil rights and the Cold War). It aims to highlight the role of indigenous people and continue to correct the misconception that indigenous cultures disappeared. We will present an academic study of indigenous histories and the challenges of engaging with deeply ingrained histories of colonialism, including resources with which for teachers to adapt existing schemes of work and a clarification of the most appropriate language to use.
Friday: 16.45–17.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, teacher educators
Reframing the learning: history trips for a sustainable future
Adrian Gonzalez
University of York
Helen Snelson
University of York; HA Secondary Committee
Learning history outside the classroom is an important part of history education. Lots of schools have favourite trips and visits. How should we be approaching these in an age of climate crisis? What disquieting, difficult and different questions should we be asking? Join us to share ideas about how we can centre environmental history for a sustainable future in our planning and teaching related to history trips and visits, from the local to the international. We will take a positive approach, while suggesting that we need to rethink some of what we do. We will suggest ways in which you can adapt what you already do, in relation to both the practicalities of organising trips and the history education that you nurture out of the classroom. We will share some ‘quick wins’ and hope to open up a discussion that will lead to further action.
Friday: 16.45–17.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16, teacher educators
From past to history: what does it mean to get better at interpretations?
Sarah Jackson-Buckley and Jessica Phillips
Sawston Village College, Cambridge
Do your pupils know the difference between ‘history’ and the past? Do they wonder why historians can’t just agree? Do they struggle with interpretations questions at GCSE? The recent Ofsted subject report highlighted misconceptions present in the teaching of interpretations. Unlike other disciplinary concepts, where pupils make their own ‘interpretations’ of the past, interpretations enquiries present a unique opportunity for pupils to explore how history is made for its own sake.
In this session, we will provide a model of how we build progression in thinking about interpretations. We will show how we move pupils from seeing historians as neutral storytellers and the past as set in stone, by using tested enquiries and activities. These will explore how the sources, questions and perspectives that historians use affect the way in which they present the past.
Friday: 16.45–17.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, teacher educators, mentors
The power of stories: more than just initial stimulus material
Dale Banham
Northgate High School, Ipswich
Engaging stories are often used to ‘hook’ students into a new topic. However, stories can also be used to build strong substantive and disciplinary knowledge in an engaging and creative way. This workshop will provide examples of how stories can be used at Key Stage 3, GCSE and A-level to:
• shine a light on the key themes within a specification, and build rich contextual understanding and a real sense of period
• create parallel timelines that strengthen chronological understanding
• challenge misconceptions, avoid narrow representations of history and give agency to the victims of conflict
• provide opportunities for meaningful retrieval practice, strengthen memory and create hooks on which to hang new knowledge
• encourage reading for pleasure, reading for understanding and the development of reading routines.
• shine a light on the key themes within a specification, and build rich contextual understanding and a real sense of period
• create parallel timelines that strengthen chronological understanding
• challenge misconceptions, avoid narrow representations of history and give agency to the victims of conflict
• provide opportunities for meaningful retrieval practice, strengthen memory and create hooks on which to hang new knowledge
• encourage reading for pleasure, reading for understanding and the development of reading routines.
Friday: 16.45–17.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16
Creating purposeful learning: the place of history within Curriculum for Wales
Lloyd Hopkin and Yvonne Roberts-Ablett
Welsh Government
Wales is in the process of significant curriculum reform. As Curriculum for Wales is taught in all schools from September 2023, the role of the history teacher is changing. Curriculum for Wales is asking the teaching profession to think differently about curriculum design, moving from a model of lesson planning and delivery to a more sophisticated approach to designing learning with purpose. Through our pioneer process, this is a curriculum for teachers, written by teachers. This workshop aims to support an understanding of the process of curriculum reform, what it means to design learning with purpose and how history is supporting a practical understanding of how to do this. The aim of this workshop is to demonstrate the place of history in shaping purposeful learning that ignites future passions and learning.
Saturday: 10.45–11.45
Early Years, Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2, cross-phase/transition, Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16, teacher educators, mentors
But what do we even mean when we say ‘decolonisation’?
Teni Gogo
Ark Pioneer Academy, London
History educators in various contexts have been attempting to both broaden the geographical scope of their history curriculum and reconsider the lens(es) through which we teach historical narratives – all under the banner of ‘decolonisation’. But what this actually means has become a Pandora’s box of its own! And so, in this session, I hope to show how – through the amazing work of my department and many within the history teaching community – we have attempted to use the Year 9 curriculum to allow students to encounter decolonisation and migration as central, interlinked processes that shaped the twentieth century. In doing so, we can allow them to develop an understanding of the relationship between the two that continues to shape both the present day and how we interact with the discipline of history.
Saturday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 3
No mouldy turnips: telling tales of women, protest and climate change in the Agricultural Revolution
Paula Lobo Worth and Tamsin Yates
Bristol Grammar School
Paula’s pupils were not interested in traditional litanies of seed drills and crop rotations. But when she began to tell a new story about the Agricultural Revolution, Paula’s pupils began to listen. They began to care: about widowed Elizabeth and her farming experiments; about Richard in Northamptonshire, who could no longer collect firewood to heat his home; and about fishermen in the Fens of East Anglia, who lost their wild wetland livelihoods. Pupils began to care too about the loss of woodland and its impact on the climate. In this practical session, Paula will share her story and the scholarship of historians who shaped that story. Tamsin, a geography teacher, will then lead a discussion of the place that teaching climate change holds in geography and history curricula. How can the two subject disciplines draw strength from each other?
Saturday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 3
Being intentional about what pupils remember: crafting and using curriculum takeaways
Jonathan Grande
Ark Pioneer Academy, London
In history, our curriculum resources are often full of vivid details and fascinating stories that bring our subject to life. These details are vital for building period knowledge, giving meaning to abstract concepts and enabling pupils to construct arguments. And yet we do not expect pupils to remember them all for ever. So how can we define what we do intend for all pupils to take away from the curriculum, long after they’ve left our classroom?
In this workshop, we will explore how Ian Dawson’s idea of curriculum takeaways can help us to be more intentional about this residue knowledge. Using a range of examples, we will consider how curriculum takeaways might be constructed, how they can be used to build shared understanding in a department, and how they might inform teaching and assessment.
Saturday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16
Embracing messiness: providing authentic disciplinary experiences of history
Richard Kennett
Excalibur Academies Trust, Bristol
Hugh Richards
Huntington School, York
In the last few years, many history teams have grappled with coherent curriculums in terms of substantive knowledge. Our aim should be to engage students with both rich substantive and disciplinary knowledge. But often in UK schools, disciplinary knowledge is either ignored or oversimplified. To achieve this, we need to provide authentic disciplinary experiences of all second-order concepts. We need to make the historical process explicit and show the ways in which historians at all levels think about and present the past. It is only through rich immersion in our discipline that students will truly start to think like historians.
In this workshop, Hugh and Rich will explain their thinking about this and show how they have been adding authentic experiences to Key Stages 3, 4 and 5.
Saturday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16
Facilitating knowledge exchange between schools and academia: the Teaching Medieval Women project
Vicky Brock
North London Collegiate School
Natasha Hodgson
Nottingham Trent University
Sam Jones
Bolder Academy, Isleworth
Jonathan Phillips
Royal Holloway, University of London
Ellie Woodacre
Winchester University; WOMED
The Teaching Medieval Women project is a collaboration between teachers and academics to bring the experiences of medieval women into the teaching of medieval history at school. This project was borne out of a shared realisation that women are still substantially under-represented in many of the medieval history classes taught at school in the UK, at Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4 and A-level. The group aims to bring together teachers and academics to exchange our respective knowledge and expertise, to learn about the challenges involved in driving change forward and to develop solutions, as well as producing a variety of co-created materials with teachers, academics and students that are attractive, innovative, engaging and based on recent historical scholarship and educational pedagogy. The women and themes that we highlight derive from a diverse geographical, religious and ethnic spread, emphasising a fresh and, in part, non-European perspective to the study of the medieval period in schools and colleges.
This discussion panel incorporates the core team of the Teaching Medieval Women project, and we will reflect on and invite discussion on teaching experiences, the delivery of CPD for teachers, co-creating materials and how to a develop a sustainable future for the teaching of medieval women in UK schools and across the globe.
Saturday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16
Teaching the Second World War: through the eyes of the unknown
Philip Arkinstall
Hardenhuish School, Chippenham
Find out why Hitler replaced the Hungarian leader in 1944, what Japanese civilians were doing about the invasion of their home islands, and the scale of resistance in occupied France. This workshop will introduce a different perspective to the Second World War and offer a more diverse set of stories, linked to how the conflict was viewed by the different peoples of Europe and Asia – occupied, collaborators and resistors. It aims to balance the narrative usually associated with the Second World War and give attendees a range of case studies and activities that they can deposit into existing schemes of learning or use to enhance their subject knowledge of this period.
Saturday: 10.45–11.45
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
Source savvy: strengthening students’ source skills in A-level history
Heather Sherman
York College
Developing advanced source analysis and evaluation skills is crucial in A-level history. In this session, we will explore how we can support students to develop a robust set of source analysis and evaluation skills through exploring the spectrum of value that sources have, both individually and collectively. We will look at how we can support students in making nuanced and substantiated judgements through developing meaningful inferences and utilising effective, precise contextual knowledge.
Saturday: 10.45–11.45
Post-16
Creating curiosity
Michael Riley
UCL Institute of Education
Creating curiosity about the past is the starting point for all successful learning in history. Using intriguing historical sources is an excellent way in which to generate interest in historical people, events and situations. What are the characteristics of these sources? How can we combine individual sources with powerful pedagogies? In what ways can we deploy these sources and pedagogies in the context of an historical enquiry? Michael’s workshop will explore these questions using some case studies of sources, learning activities and enquiries that can be used to create curiosity and build deep historical understanding with pupils in Key Stages 2 and 3. The workshop will focus on some neglected sources and histories, but the strategies will be transferrable to a range of contexts.
Saturday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3
Assessment as genuine professional enquiry: making Key Stage 3 assessment purposeful
Ben Bowles
Yate Academy
Ed Durbin
Yate Academy; Greenshaw Learning Trust
In most English schools, students’ learning in history is not being properly assessed. In around half of schools, assessment at Key Stage 3 is based on GCSE-style questions. These are the conclusions of Ofsted’s 2023 History Subject Report. This is not a rosy picture. But it is not a surprising one. Key Stage 3 assessment lies at the intersection of numerous fraught and contested issues in schools: curriculum; knowledge; progression; subject autonomy; student mental health; staff workload.
This workshop will attempt to make sense of some of these issues and invite a discussion of ways forward in assessing students’ learning at Key Stage 3. We will consider what effective principles for Key Stage 3 assessment might look like, before sharing how this has informed our approach to assessment in our context.
Saturday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 3, teacher educators, mentors
Beyond the British Empire: using John Darwin’s scholarship on global empires at Key Stage 3
Laura Howey and Freya Townley
Skegness Grammar School
Inspired by the seminal work of historian John Darwin in his study of empires, After Tamerlane, we move beyond the British Empire in our teaching with Key Stage 3 students by asking the question: ‘What drove empire-building c.1600–1750?’ Incorporating a variety of source material, we study empires such as the Mughals, Safavids, Qing and Asante to bring a world view and differing perspectives on empires to our students in Skegness. The case studies investigate the role of key factors in securing global empires: leadership, military, trade and religion. Inspired by Ben Walsh’s ‘knowledge wardrobe’ concept, we support students with their final write-up to embrace the difficulty of constructing a causal argument. The unit has success in broadening the horizons of students’ perception of the early modern world.
Saturday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 3
Weaving modern marginalised histories into your Key Stage 3 curriculum
Aaron Wilkes
University of Warwick; Oxford University Press
Drawing on the latest historical scholarship and on the work of practising teachers at the forefront of inclusive pedagogy, Aaron will share his journey of incorporating inclusive stories in Key Stage 3 lessons, through the lens of women’s rights, disability rights, LGBTQ+ rights and Black British civil rights. The focus will be on twentieth-century Britain.
Saturday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 3, teacher educators
What did the Chartists want to change? Teaching the nineteenth century ‘from the inside’
Jacob Olivey
Ark Soane Academy, London
What mattered to ordinary men, women and children in Victorian Britain? What did they make of the social and political inequalities that surrounded them? And what did they want to change about their world?
In this session, I will use an enquiry that I have spent the last four years planning, teaching and replanning to explore what it means to teach history ‘from the inside’. Along the way, we will look at some surprising characters, strange sources and small stories from the enquiry. This session will be of interest to anyone who teaches nineteenth-century Britain. But the broader principal of teaching history ‘from the inside’ can be applied to any topic or time period. If you want to help your pupils to better understand the perspectives of people from the past, this is the session for you!
Saturday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16, teacher educators, mentors
Medieval queenship? Searching for alternative models to demonstrate the nature of medieval power
Sam Jones
Bolder Academy, Isleworth; WOMED
Ellie Woodacre
Winchester University; WOMED
Secondary schools up and down the land teach enquiries exploring the nature of power in the medieval world. Henry II and Becket, John I’s clashes with his barons, the Peasant’s Revolt… all can lead to powerful understanding. However, where are the women? Eleanor of Aquitaine might, of course, feature, but beyond her, where are they? Could there be another way? Could other medieval queens prove equally or, perhaps, even more effective examples of the nature of medieval power?
In this workshop, Dr Ellie Woodacre will discuss the credentials of Joan of Navarre, wife of Henry IV and Queen (or Dowager Queen) of England from 1403 to 1437. Following this, Sam Jones will discuss how he and Ellie developed a Year 7 enquiry exploring Joan’s coronation, landholdings, imprisonment and release, which led to powerful understanding of the nature of medieval power.
Saturday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 3
From conflict to peace: the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement – 25 years on
Andrew Payne
The National Archives
How do you bring about peace in a society where conflict has deep historical roots? What does it take to end the violence that is born from long-term distrust? How exactly does a peace process work? And how can we understand it from the inside? The National Archives has developed a range of resources that allow students to investigate the process of making peace and to assess the factors that enabled it to happen in Northern Ireland after 30 years of conflict, by providing access to original documents from the government archives of the UK and Ireland. With resources for Key Stage 3, GCSE and A-level, this workshop will provide teachers and students with an unrivalled insight into the peace process that brought about the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement in 1998.
Saturday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16, teacher educators
Objects of empire: research-informed teaching of the themes and breadth of the British Empire
Sasha Smith
Sir Robert Pattinson Academy, Lincoln
This workshop will present new research-informed teaching strategies for enhancing how you teach the history of empire. Our collaborative work has proven the enriching possibilities of incorporating objects and academic research and methodologies into teaching imperial history. In this session, we will launch our new website, showcase the range of teaching resources and discuss the rationale and research that underpins them. We will present a range of objects from across periods and places. We will also be sharing practice and knowledge from the Historical Association course in spring 2024, where teachers are developing their own object-based resources. Participants will have the opportunity to practise building a curriculum using the new resources, alongside practical advice on advancing these ideas beyond the Conference.
Saturday: 12.00–13.00
Key Stage 2, Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16, teacher educators
‘How should young people “feel” and “do” history? How may this shape their world?’ One year on!
Michael Maddison and Martin Spafford
Consultants
At the end of his thought-provoking Dawson Lecture at the 2023 HA Conference, Martin Spafford set the history teaching community eight specific challenges. They were: train students to be historians of their own world; give students practice in using history to understand contemporary issues; help students to see how historical consciousness can help them to deal with their own lives; locate history across the curriculum; design the content around the needs of students; generate respect for people in other periods and cultures; pay careful attention to the full inclusion of working-class histories; and celebrate the storytelling power of history but prioritise history that offers hope. This workshop looks at how teachers across the country are already addressing some of these challenges, and explores practical ways of taking this further…
Saturday: 14.00–15.00
Early Years, Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2, cross-phase/transition, Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4, post-16, teacher educators, mentors
Providing access to the challenge: reflections on how all GCSE students can build their understanding
Kath Goudie
Cottenham Village College
This workshop will reflect on how to support all students to engage with their entitlement to rigorous history, while making it accessible for students with a wide range of prior attainment. The principle behind the workshop is how to ensure that all students can engage with genuine historical questions in an accessible way, while avoiding the dangers of oversimplification. Practical strategies for students to build, retain and revise different forms of historical knowledge will be shared, along with a consideration of how to support all students to write notes that will be worth returning to for revision. We will also consider the role of homework in supporting students with revision.
Saturday: 14.00–15.00
Key Stage 4
‘Discovering hidden stories’: how to embed local history into your Key Stage 3 curriculum
Pete Jackson and Jacqueline Ramsden
Ryedale School, Nawton
Local history is interesting and engaging, and helps students to understand the heritage that exists within their local communities. Within this session, we will explore the following work that has embedded local history as a thread that runs all the way through our curriculum. We will focus on the following:
• How to make local history a golden thread in your curriculum
• Starting Key Stage 3 locally, using a broad sweep of local history to introduce big concepts
• Hidden stories – connecting with the community’s past and engaging with a local historian
• Historic site study – using a local site to teach a national story (dissolution of monasteries)
• The Industrial Revolution – using the local to add nuance to the standard narrative
• Using local stories to teach global events (Second World War)
• Learning outside the classroom and local history
• How to make local history a golden thread in your curriculum
• Starting Key Stage 3 locally, using a broad sweep of local history to introduce big concepts
• Hidden stories – connecting with the community’s past and engaging with a local historian
• Historic site study – using a local site to teach a national story (dissolution of monasteries)
• The Industrial Revolution – using the local to add nuance to the standard narrative
• Using local stories to teach global events (Second World War)
• Learning outside the classroom and local history
Saturday: 14.00–15.00
Key Stage 3
Big picture history: how can we help students to grasp the coherence of the history curriculum?
Mark Kauntze and Sam Leigh
Redland Green School, Bristol
What is the point of a history curriculum? What substantive and disciplinary knowledge should we teach our students and how should we ensure that they remember it? The purpose of this workshop is to explain, demonstrate and critique an approach to these questions developed in one Bristol secondary school. We shall focus on a debating activity that all our classes take part in at the end of Years 8 and 9. It is an activity that has students recall and analyse material from across the Key Stage 3 curriculum, and attempt to develop big-picture mastery of several hundred years of history. In this session, we shall explore the rationale behind this approach, model a similar debate with workshop participants and discuss alternative ways of helping students to grasp the coherence of their history curriculum.
Saturday: 14.00–15.00
Key Stage 3, teacher educators
What might ‘permacrisis’ have felt like in 1938?
Sarah Davis
King Edward VII School, Sheffield
Julie Gottlieb
The University of Sheffield
Teachers at King Edward VII School, Sheffield were inspired by the work of Professor Julie Gottlieb and playwright Nicola Baldwin, who used FL Lucas’s Journal Under the Terror to explore history from within during the Munich Crisis. They wrote an enquiry for Key Stage 3 students, who explored the turbulent political and social atmosphere of 1938 through primary sources. By examining this period through the lens of emotion history, students had the opportunity to develop their disciplinary understanding of the work of historians and draw links between ‘permacrisis’ in the past and the present. They also had the opportunity to think about how the voices of the previously marginalised are reconstructed and heard today. Delegates will have the opportunity to explore the resources and reflect more broadly on fresh approaches to teaching appeasement.
Saturday: 14.00–15.00
Key Stage 3, Key Stage 4
The demands of the question: a disciplinary approach to teaching the structure of A-level essays
Morgan Robinson
The University of Sheffield
Despite the generic (and generally helpful) advice that we offer our A-level students when writing essays, the experience of preparing for, planning and executing one successful essay depends on the second-order concept on which that question focuses – and so it ought to feel different from one with a different focus. For example, essays on causation demand an approach distinct from those on change and continuity, or any other disciplinary focus. This session aims to equip teachers to better support their students to succeed in essay writing at A-level by approaching them in a manner bespoke to their disciplinary demands. By doing so, we can reveal to students the differences in written structure hidden within the conventions of generic essay writing, and potentially transform the essays that they write and the way in which we assess them.
Saturday: 14.00–15.00
Post-16, teacher educators, Key Stage 4
The powers of story in Key Stage 3 history
Christine Counsell
Consultant
So many challenges of history teaching can be addressed through story. How do we cover all this content? How do we help pupils to remember things? How do we prepare pupils to analyse and evaluate effectively? How can we keep pupils attentive and enthralled? How do we find time for rich diversity in our curriculum? How do we foster a sense of period and tackle anachronism? How do we blend narrative journeys with the analytic journey of an enquiry? How do we stay close to scholarship? And even how should this lesson be structured? This session will show how well-crafted stories can help us with everything from crafting a coherent curriculum to shaping the learning flow to improving practical delivery.
Saturday: 14.00–15.00
Key Stage 3
