"But what really IS the value of a source?" Getting A-Level Students to Approach Sources Like Historians

Some parts of teaching History can feel a bit soulless.

This has been my impression of teaching primary sources for some time. At best, it can feel like a rather run-of-the-mill exercise in identifying relevant features in order to have students write something of merit for their exam. At worst, it can feel like having students blindly groping around for anything they can attach at least a bit of coherent knowledge to.

Recently, I've started to worry that some of our A-Level students really have no idea what a primary source is to a historian or why a historian even bothers with them. Asked in their exams to identify content, provenance, and tone, they approach the exercise in a tick-box manner, dutifully plodding through often lively and fascinating documents in order to tell us who wrote them and what they did, what that kind of source might focus on, a contemporary event or two, and what bits of their contextual knowledge they know about the main points raised.

Part of my concern here is stylistic. Writing about sources like this seems stilted and lifeless. But mostly, my concern is methodological. I just don't think that any historian would begin to approach sources that way.

There's loads of great writing on approaching sources, which I don't want to simply summarise here. Instead, I'd like to briefly sketch out a general approach to sources which is hopefully both methodologically valid (i.e. mirrors the kind of thinking historians actually engage in) and practically deliverable (i.e. can be used in the classroom).

In broad terms, my proposed approach hinges on two questions:

• Why do historians actually use sources?
• What language allows them to analyse sources?

I doubt much if any of this is very original, but it might provoke some thought and discussion (and I'd love to know your thoughts on it, too!).

A-Level History Coursework: 8 Traps Students Fall Into (and 8 Ways to Avoid Them)

Writing an extended piece of coursework, or non-examined assessment (NEA) as part of A-Level History is no easy task. In fact, it's probably the trickiest single thing A-Level History students have to do. If students are to succeed, they need to know what to look out for. So do we, as their teachers!

Here are 8 of the most common traps that I've seen our students fall into over the past few years and 8 ways to avoid them.

                        

(The accompanying examples are all hypothetical and are meant to illustrate good practice to students only. They are not directly relevant in context to our NEA topic of the Crusades.)

This post is available as a downloadable document here.

Holocaust Memorial Day Trust Prohibits Discussion of Gaza (Again): One Teacher’s Response

Over the past two years, a number of teachers and educators have watched with alarm and frustration as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (HMDT) has sought to quash discussion of atrocities in Israel and Gaza as part of Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD).

The HMDT has now reiterated its guidance that it “does not recommend” any discussion of Israel and Gaza. Its guidance, which can be found in full here, raises several arguments in support of this position, including that:

• “There are many diverse and strongly felt opinions on current conflicts taking place around the world, and it is important to be clear that HMD is neither a time for commenting on current conflicts, nor for decisiveness.”
• The purpose of HMD is, rather “to commemorate the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and the millions more murdered under Nazi persecution. It is also a day to recognise that prejudice still exists within our communities and to learn and commemorate where persecution led in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.”
• “Opening a discussion or making statements on the conflict [in Israel and Gaza] at an HMD event will be almost certain to divide and upset the audience – whereas HMD seeks to bring people together with a shared purpose. Further, it will take the event further from its central purpose of commemoration of the Holocaust.”
• “Focusing on the situation in Gaza at an HMD event while making no reference to other global conflicts risks appearing one-sided.”

I’ve written twice to the HMDT this year, ahead of HMDT 2025 and again ahead of HMDT 2026 to raise a number of concerns and objections. These have not been in any way addressed by the HMDT’s reissued guidance.

Instead of revisiting old letters, here I’ll offer a critique of the reissued HMDT guidance.

I hope this might offer some constructive thoughts from the perspective of a teacher with an interest in commemorating the Holocaust and other instances of genocide since 1945.

This post is not designed to be any kind of definitive “final word” on the matter, but instead a working through of some of my ongoing thoughts.

In particular, I hope it might be of use to other teachers and educators in a similar position when considering options for commemorating HMD 2026 with young people.

Telling Stories at A-Level: Chekhov, the Cholera, and the Contempt

Stories, it seems, are in vogue in the History classroom.

And for good reason. Telling a gripping tale, as Christine Counsell has recently advocated, can grip students’ imagination, revealing through memorable examples key parts of the bigger picture in a way which can inspire and enthuse.

Yet, as Claire Holliss and Jim Carroll (2025) have also noted, the use and purpose of story telling does require some careful thought, and can – despite our best intentions – lead to some surprising and frustrating outcomes.

I hadn’t been aware of Claire and Jim’s work on story telling at KS5 until this past summer, when Claire presented it at a brilliant session of the Schools History Project (SHP) conference. But by that point, I and colleagues had also been starting to think about how and why to tell stories at KS5 to students.

The Soviet Union at War: Contested Chronologies of World War Two

Dates of events might be considered objective facts, open to neither debate nor contestation.

Yet periodisation – that is, setting the start and end dates of a particular time period in history – is very much a matter of interpretation. Indeed, where the historian (or history teacher) chooses to begin or end a historical period can determine not just the length of the period in question, but also its meaning and significance.

This is made clear in the case of the Soviet Union’s Second World War by Mark Edele’s excellent 2021 overview, Stalinism at War.