Responding to SHP 2025: Part 2, Claire Holliss on Stories at A-Level

The 2025 Schools History Project (SHP) conference was, as ever, a highlight of the teaching year and a stimulus for all sorts of thoughts.

Inevitably, the best workshops at such an event are those that leave you with more (interesting) questions than answers.

In these two posts (including my last one, on Arthur Chapman’s presentation on stories and narratives), I’m going to try to formulate some coherent thoughts in relation to two really excellent sessions in particular, both of which sent me away with a number of very interesting questions. The second post, here, discusses Claire Holliss’ workshop on stories at KS5.

 

Sometimes, new directions in pedagogy develop their own momentum and give rise to new orthodoxies and (near-)universally accepted wisdom. When this happens, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate the evidence to establish how sound that wisdom actually is.

This is what I understood Claire Holliss’ fantastic SHP 2025 workshop to be honing in on.

In her very clear-minded, critical, but open discussion of using stories at KS5, Claire gave a well-deserved nod towards some very interesting and valuable work done on integrating stories into classroom teaching. She then asked how far doing so would actually benefit teaching History at KS5.

Claire’s work links to an ongoing research project, involving the selection and use of specific stories in her own teaching. This was also of interest to me, as our department has also been starting to develop stories in our own KS5 teaching of Russian and Soviet History (I’ll explore this a bit below).

Like Arthur Chapman’s workshop, I left with a number of very interesting questions which I’d not clearly had in my head before.

1. Do stories help students remember important things about the past, and are these actually the things we want them to remember?
2. Can we accurately predict what students will take away from the past, and if not, where does that leave us in our teaching?
3. How important is it for stories to be enjoyable and interesting, and if it is important, why?

 

Claire’s own stories were excellent examples of evidence-based, engaging narratives. It was very clear that, in composing these, she had a focus on particular “takeaways” for students and on how these linked to her overarching enquiries on the French Revolution. Nevertheless, she noted that students so far had sometimes found it difficult to identify the important information within the stories, which made it “hard work” in the classroom, at least at first. This also got me thinking about something Arthur Chapman went on to talk about: a story is, at least in part, constructed by the audience; the author cannot ultimately know what they will make of and take away from it.

I’ve recently composed a series of stories, in somewhat similar vein to Claire’s, to introduce our KS5 Russia enquiries. Each enquiry question now opens with a different story, the purpose of which is to both introduce a critical issue to be investigated by the enquiry and to familiarise them with a significant episode they will encounter in that enquiry again. Claire’s talk has given me some much-needed pause for thought before we begin teaching these next year.

Our stories are underpinned by some (very SHP-inspired) principles. They all revolve around one character (all but one of them a verifiably real person from the past; the one exception is a hypothetical “provincial visitor” whose experience is imagined using Orlando Figes’ account of the 1913 Romanov Tercentenary and my own doctoral research on the Siberian city of Krasnoiarsk). They all link explicitly to the enquiry question to be studied, and are used to help students initially unpack the enquiry question and make preliminary predictions as to possible answers to it. However, it’s also important to note that, like Claire’s stories, they make no attempt to “tell the whole story” of the enquiry; they only serve to reveal a few glimpses to introduce it. Diversity is built in, through exploring people of different backgrounds, and each story is linked to a specific “historic environment”, i.e. a location of specific historical significance.

Outline of stories to introduce the first 5 enquiry questions of our course on Tsarist and Communist Russia, 1855-1964, at Year 12.

 

All the stories can be accessed here (any errors and mistypes are, as ever, my own), but to give a flavour, here’s an excerpt from the story from the first enquiry, telling the imprisonment and execution of Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin’s older brother, for his part in a failed assassination attempt against Tsar Alexander III in 1887. My intention for this was to grab students’ attention and engage them from the off with (what I think is) an exciting and true tale, introducing to them not only an episode that revealed the challenges faced by the Tsars up to 1894, but also some of their responses to those challenges. Students will, in fact, “bump into” Alexander Ulyanov’s story again in the subsequent enquiry, although I’ve never felt up to this point that they’ve appreciated it for what it really signifies. Hopefully, having seen it once before, they’ll be in a better position to do so now.

The first part of story 1, to introduce the first Enquiry Question.

 

On the other hand, having not yet used this, and the other enquiry question-introducing stories in our teaching, there’s a lot of guesswork going on as to how they might pan out. Time will tell.

But there are some thoughts which have sharpened somewhat since Claire’s workshop.

I think stories can help students remember important details, especially if they are told in engaging ways. On the other hand, we need to be very focused on what we want students to get from them. In the case of these stories, I’ve tried to focus them on the enquiry questions, asking students to consider what they might reveal as possible answers to those questions before they begin to find out more in future lessons.

However, I think it’s still an open question as to exactly what students will really take from these stories. Probing questioning and a focus on the enquiry question itself should, I hope, draw them onto what I think is “the right path”, but I’m now also more prepared than before to be surprised.

Alongside all this, the question of how important it is for stories to be interesting and enjoyable remains. In a very useful CPD session I was lucky enough to be part of at the end of this year, Christine Counsell argued passionately that telling good stories can engage students’ attention better than any other approach. In her words, “stories make promises”. Students’ heightened attention is secured by the prospect of finding out more from the very beginning.

I’m sure, on one level, that Christine Counsell is right about this. But while it’s now rather commonplace to argue that stories should be given centre stage in good History teaching, there is also the thorny question of getting students at KS5 (and indeed KS4) to pass exams. Having good stories at KS3 is all well and good, but will the same methods work if we have the pressure of securing grades for our students further down the line? There’s a tension here, regardless of what advocates of storytelling might argue. I do hope, though, that good stories should help motivate and engage students in learning course content, even if they can’t fill in for the relatively dull but ultimately essential work of exam skills. I don't think they can replace the important things we're already doing at KS5, but they might well be able to complement and augment them.

At the same time, I’ve also found myself wondering whether part of the enjoyment of good stories in History is us, the teachers. Writing these stories was a very interesting challenge. Telling engaging stories in lessons has always been good fun. It seems to make me more relaxed and inquisitive as a teacher. It seems to make me a better teacher. Might that, by itself, be reason enough to do it?

Thanks to Claire, especially, for forcing me back to thinking on these big questions with her wonderful session!