All parts of this site have been written or quality assured by Neil Thompson, who has vast experience of history teaching whether as OFSTED history inspector, the county history adviser to Hampshire primary and secondary schools or consultant and author for the BBC, DCSF and QCA. Neil continues to support teachers by running national courses and works with teachers in schools. He also runs school-based INSET and acts as ‘virtual adviser’ offering crucial support to new subject leaders.
The downloadable six page document on answering source-based GCSE questions: matching learning strategies to question type, summarises the best advice from the examination boards all in one place. It gives you the sort of hints you should be passing on to your history students,...
You recognise the problem. No sooner have you set a piece of open-ended enquiry work with you initially as facilitator, than the hands go up. Please Sir/Miss, “How do I start?” “I don’t get this.” etc.
One department I...
It is really hard to find quality examples of assessment tasks at Key Stage 1 that actually work in the classroom with children of all abilities, especially the youngest children. New to the site is one such task...
If life was so hard for families in the towns why did so many leave the countryside and move to the towns in Victorian times? - a history mystery
Starting a lesson with an apparent contradiction is a good way of engaging pupils interest....
This is the first lesson on an enquiry into Grace Darling: what she did, and why she was famous. The kernel of the lesson is a slow reveal activity which works really well on an Interactive White Board. The key image comes from the...
This section of the site contains four different types of advice. There is general advice, outlining factors that usually explain success at GCSE and a short paper entitled 'Smoking Out Underachievement'. Then there are five really interesting case studies of best practice. Each has...
