Thanks to Sally Burnham for this blogpost. Sally is a history teacher at Carres Grammar School, history tutor at the University of Nottingham and incoming chair of the HA Secondary Committee. Here she shares her depth of experience of supporting A Level students to successfully complete the NEA.

I love the History NEA! To me, the NEA is the part of the A Level course where students can really begin to learn in the way that they learn at university. An opportunity for them to read widely around a question, engage with the scholarship, find primary sources that they can evaluate and write up their argument in an extended essay. They can do this without the time pressure of the 45 minute essays that are the other way that they get to show off their skills as a historian to the examiner. Many of my students who return to visit after the first term at university say just how useful the NEA was in preparing them for the work that they are expected to do in their History degree.
On the other hand, many of my students really do not like the NEA. They need to read widely, they need to find their own sources and interpretations, rather than use the ones the examiner gives them, and then they have to write it up – 4500 words seems incredibly daunting to many. They also face the problem that many of them have never done ‘coursework’ before – GCSE History and Geography have no element of coursework so, unlike my students in the past who had already completed coursework, my Year 12s have nothing to build on.

So what to do?
While I was in a workshop with Jim Carroll on teaching A level history an idea came to me and a colleague from Bristol – did we need to model the NEA for our students? How could we do this? As we talked it became clearer and clearer that we could make this work. What if we did a practice run NEA on one of our taught units? I teach AQA 2N Russia (depth study) so began thinking about how we could do a practice NEA on Russia. I decided that as I finish the first half of the taught course for 2N at Easter in Year 12, I could then set an NEA on Russia 1917-1929. It doesn’t have the 100 year requirement of the NEA but I could devise a practice NEA where students could select a question, research the topic in more depth (always useful for the depth paper!) practise finding suitable sources and interpretations and writing up their question. I made slight adjustments – only 2 sources and a word limit of 3500.

So how does it work in practice?
As I launch the practice NEA we spend time looking at what shapes historians views – we use an extract of Yasmin Khan talking about why she chose to write The Raj at War, we use a clip of Miranda Kaufmann explaining why she began her research into Black Tudors. We then read reviews of Black Tudors to help students begin to look at how historians critique each other’s work. I introduce them to E.H Carr and his analogy of the historian as a fisherman and we look at how we could use this idea as a way to critique a historian’s interpretation in terms of how convincing it is. ‘Burnham’s focus upon X makes it seem to be the key argument …yet, by leaving the facts of Y and Z outside of her net, it could be argued that her interpretation is too unbalanced.’
Once students are more confident in the idea that history is a construct, we then move to look at our building blocks – the sources. After they have selected the NEA title they are going to research we spend a constructive hour searching for interesting primary sources for Russia 1917-1929. After a few protests that this is too difficult/there are too many sources/there aren’t any sources, the room goes quiet as they begin to sift through material that they could select for their NEA. The concentration broken by the occasional ‘Miss, have you seen this?’
From this point on, their Russia NEA is their work for their independent study time each week. I build in regular check in points – which sources are they using and why? Which two historians are they using and why? How do their arguments differ? What has shaped their argument? These check ins can happen during a lesson when students are doing a task related to our new topic area, they take a couple of minutes per student but ensure that they are using their time effectively and are not floundering. Once they have started working independently, we have half a lesson on how to reference, how to write a bibliography and what to include in an appendix – again building blocks for university. There is also a reminder about the use of AI. And so the Russia NEA takes shape. They hand in their practice NEA just after May half term (when my Yr 11 and Yr 13 students have finished their exams so my mad marking of practice questions is over) and I can then mark their Russia NEA and get it back to them with lots of feedback – how well they have analysed the sources and interpretations, written the essay etc. Have they done enough wider reading? They tell me whether they used their time effectively. I can give lots of feedback as this isn’t the real NEA (where I can only give very brief and generic feedback on a draft) and by the time students are ready to start their reading and source/interpretation finding for the real NEA they have had full feedback on the whole process.
One key thing to be aware of is that using the depth study doesn’t allow the students to practise the 100 year coverage, but this can be easily overcome by adapting the mark scheme and reminding students when they begin their real NEA that it must cover the 100 years and show understanding of change and continuity.
Although not all students build on their Russia NEA experience when it comes to the real NEA, I would argue that more benefit than don’t. I asked my current Year 13 students as they handed in their real NEAs in early March whether doing the Russia NEA had been useful and without exception they said ‘Yes!’ It had made them much more confident when finding historians’ interpretations for the real NEA, they knew how to go about looking for primary sources, they knew how to find a peer review of a historian’s work. They also said that it consolidated their understanding of the Russia course and helped with revision as they swapped Russia NEAs so that they had a whole range of in-depth essays to use when revising.
Based on this feedback, my current Year 12 are just embarking on their practice Russia NEA. My Year 13 have detailed 3500 word essays to help them revise for their final exams and I hope that they will go on to university with the confidence that their two NEAs have given them in terms of independent history research and writing.