By Dr. Helen Carrel, Director of Humanities at Tormead School, Guildford

In January 2025, I was delighted to be offered a place on the Historical Association Teacher Fellowship programme, working with the Henry on Tour project, which has been outlined in a recent blog by Geraint Brown, History Teacher CPD: Historical Association Teacher Fellowship Programme – OBHD .  One of the most exciting elements of this programme has been that it explicitly encouraged teachers to use the latest historical research in the classroom. This is valuable for all age groups, but particularly for A level students who may be pursuing History for further study. As I found out more about the Henry on Tour project, three key elements particularly stood out for me regarding the project:

1. The academic project focused explicitly on Henry’s progresses, i.e. the journeys taken by Henry VIII and his court as he moved around the country. These journeys allowed a unique opportunity for local connections and history to be explored and provide a great opportunity for classroom world-building. This idea of a geographic and historical narrative was a potentially powerful tool for teaching.
2. The range of primary sources utilized by the academic team and the creative ways they were analysed was inspiring. In the classroom setting, this offered the opportunity for students to move away from a ‘gobbet’ approach, and instead to consider primary evidence from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is much more aligned with the methodology of current historical research.
3. An interdisciplinary approach necessitates a team of scholars with different skill sets – and the range of careers that were showcased by the project provide an exciting aspect of this work. The focus the project placed on legacy and working with heritage organisations also provided an opportunity to showcase to students the wide range of career options available in the fields of academic and public history.

My fellowship project:

The profile of the Henry on Tour project gave a unique opportunity to create after-school workshops for a range of educational providers in the area. Oracy and outreach had been prioritised in Teaching and Learning development at Tormead School, where I work, and so I saw this as an opportunity to combine a variety of approaches for my project.

I wished to address three challenges I had noted in the classroom:

1. Our Sixth Form students are usually engaged and confident about expressing their ideas in the classroom setting by the end of Lower Sixth but were often much less so when speaking to people, especially adults, they do not know. However, engaging in academic discussion appropriately and with confidence is not only a crucial life-skill, but is vital for learning. Creating the opportunity to work with ‘new’ adults in an academic setting was key.
2. Working with unseen primary sources is often an element students find particularly challenging in A level courses, and the perceived difficulty, plus the examination focus of source work, often detracts from the excitement and joy which ‘real’ primary source work can bring. I wanted to recapture this by using a much broader range of materials and media.
3. Many students regard History as ‘interesting’, but not as a viable career option.  This project gave the opportunity to showcase a wide range of history-related career opportunities.

The sessions:

I organised three after-school workshops which were advertised to History A level students, teachers, and heritage professionals in the Surrey and Hampshire area via Tormead, the West Surrey Schools Partnership, the Historical Association, Henry on Tour and my own professional network. This resulted in an audience that was a mixture of students and adults with an interest or expertise in History.  To support the oracy aim, I organised seating plans to ensure that the students worked with adults they did not know for the group tasks. The workshops ran as a ‘mini-enquiry’ under the umbrella question of ‘How can we explore the progresses of Henry VIII in the twenty-first century?’ and individual sessions were as follows:

• What does the Field of the Cloth of Gold tell us about the monarchy of Henry VIII? Focusing on a key staple of the exam curriculum, this session introduced the idea of Tudor royal travel. Participants were required to work in groups to explore a range of primary sources, including objects from the ‘Tudor World’ exhibition at Hampton Court, the ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’ painting, financial accounts of the expenditure, chronicle and eyewitness accounts of the events in question. Initially, groups were encouraged to explore sources ‘free-style’, and gradually more structured questioning was introduced, including a carefully designed ‘source frame’, to help participants complete an inference diagram through discussion.

• How can studying buildings help us to understand the impact of religious change in Tudor society?  This session focused on the impact of Henry VIII’s reign on St. Mary’s Abbey in York, through the eyes of Edward Lee, Archbishop of York, including evidence from the pre-Reformation visitation, archaeological finds, evidence of the Reformation visitation, sources related to the Pilgrimage of Grace, and Henry VIII’s progress North to stay in the former abbey, during his visit with Catherine Howard in 1541.  It showcased how AI and storytelling could be used to explore complex histories in the classroom, as well as discussion of archaeological and written evidence.

• How can we explore the progresses of Henry VIII in the twenty-first century? This session was a collaboration with the project’s heritage partners and had a careers focus, allowing students to explore the new range of employment open to those who wish to work in fields such as heritage, conservation, curating, historical fiction, and archaeology. The students heard from Clare Clinton, Arts, Heritage and Learning Manager at West Horsley Place, about the ‘Hosting Henry’ event this site had run and then from James Brown, Archaeologist for the National Trust, who had worked on the Petworth House ‘Lost Tudor Palace’ dig with Henry on Tour in the summer of 2024.  They then worked in groups to design their own ‘public history’ event, using sources relating to Petworth.  At the end of the session, there were panel discussions and Q&A with a range of professionals from institutions including the National Trust, West Horsley Place, Greenwich Museums and the National Archives, as well as a current History postdoctoral researcher at Oxford, and an historical novelist. 

Conclusions:

Feedback from the sessions was overwhelmingly positive.  The ‘source frame’ resource in the first session, and the use of AI and storytelling in the second session, were particular highlights, according to the feedback. The third session, owing to the presence of ‘big names’ and the use of our schools’ careers network, received a particularly strong turnout, with 65 in attendance, and almost all students attending noted that it had provided them with much greater knowledge of the career opportunities available in History, which they had not previously considered. The next challenge will be to take these T&L ideas and resources and translate them into the classroom, but the success of the final session in particular highlights that making History a viable career path is important in engagement and ensuring that the subject has a future and is not just seen as an interesting excursion into the past.