Why do History Departments struggle? What can you do about it? Part 2 — Resources
Lesson plans, powerpoints, textbooks, stationery, online subscriptions, memberships, capitation. Resource management is a big part of the life of a Head of History. One of the biggest challenges to face, therefore, is managing a situation where resources are highly limited. This can be because of a number of factors:
· The school has no money and so your budget is lamentably small.
· Your predecessor has squandered your department budget and you have no money.
· Your predecessor has been fairly miserly but you find that you have no spare exercise books, gluesticks and every lesson requires various pages of the textbook photocopying no doubt in hideous violation of copyright as there are only ‘staff copies’ of the various core texts.
· Resource sharing in the department isn’t something that happens.
Another grenade into the mix is that, as far as I am aware, you as Head of Department will almost certainly receive no training whatsoever in budget management. It is something you’ll just be expected to ‘get on with’ or it’ll be assumed you know what you’re doing. And lots of it is common sense but you might find there to be some disconnect between the finance team in your school who will have different priorities from you. Budget management is also, let’s be honest, a bit boring and not really why we got into the job in the first place I dare say!
Anyway, resources are an absolutely critical part of any History Department. Particularly for you, the incoming Head of Department, dealing with an ‘empty cupboard’ is something you may encounter and it will prove to be a time consuming and frustrating part of the job.
Some specific issues you might face include:
· No textbooks. Or at least, no ‘good’ textbooks. Or no textbooks that don’t have some, ah, graphic imagery added to them that you don’t feel too comfortable putting in front of your new Year 7 class. You might be relying on the textbook from two specs ago that covers the wrong dates for GCSE, or some of the more ‘knowledge-lite’ KS3 textbooks from the past (although there are some tremendous older textbooks out there). Personally, I think good textbooks are essential for History Departments. They are massive workload savers for staff and especially for new teachers coming in to a department. What will add to workload is time spent at the photocopier printing out 32 lots of each double page spread in the morning. Textbooks are a big up front cost but if you’re a new head of department you need to get in there early with your headteacher insisting on getting extra money as a necessity for this purpose.
o As an addendum — KS3 textbooks I really like include the Robert Peal, Knowing History series (very simple, good content, great value for money), the Pearson KS3 series (Monarchs, Monks and Migrants etc) and any of the older SHP stuff is great (nothing beats good ol’ Peace and War). I’m also partial to the Aaron Wilkes series although I know these are a bit controversial amongst the ‘trad’ History community (OK — I don’t do Henry VII — Gangster King anymore — but the visuals are great and there are some great tasks you can lift off the shelf very easily, for example the Emily Davison source enquiry section). Alex Ford from Leeds Trinity has a great set of posts evaluating different textbooks which I highly recommend — http://www.andallthat.co.uk/blog/knowing-history-how-to-choose-a-history-textbook-series
· No shared resources. This is such a key priority for any new head of department. Having no resources is an absolute workload ‘hornet’ (to use Joe Kirby’s phrase) for any new member of staff joining a team. As I’ve said before, I’m not necessarily 100% in favour of entirely centralised resourcing for lessons (although have moved in that direction in recent years) but when you’ve got nothing to go on it’s just such a nightmare. Ensuring you’ve got centralised folders for each lesson that every teacher in the department can access — making sure they drag and drop their own stuff in there in case it might benefit somebody else — is so very important to help reduce workload for everyone. Shared resources does also lead to greater consistency and therefore probably a higher standard of input going into the classroom.
· Limited access to wider reading. Regrettably one area where I’ve felt compelled to invest my own money is in the use of wider reading. Abebooks and Amazon Marketplace have been my friend to try to get hold of single copies of decent history books to help inform planning. In some schools it can be a real bureaucratic faff to get purchases like this approved by finance which doesn’t help. It’s probably an issue acutely felt by history teachers moreso than other subjects because of the huge curriculum variety that’s out there.
· Limited access to professional memberships and subscriptions. The HA provides some of the best CPD out there and it’s a bit disgraceful that some teachers are having to pay for subscriptions out of their own money. Corporate memberships of these organisations ought to be a priority for schools especially in light of the new accountability framework.
Of course the biggest resource of all is time, and this is often in the shortest supply, especially if your time is being taken up with meaningless data analysis and ineffective ‘interventions’ rather than high quality curriculum development which surely provides a greater ‘bang for your buck’.
Being resource poor also has other curious side effects. One is that it inhibits your curriculum development massively. It means that any decisions you might want to make over your GCSE specification are constrained. For example, I’d like to move away from teaching Anglo-Saxons and Normans to Elizabethans on the Paper 2. I have a full set of Powerpoints to go with, but can I justify the cost of new textbooks on the back of changing A-level options last year. In the end, are we better off keeping going with the Saxons and trying to make it better even though in my view the course content is much drier.
If you want to be bold and develop your A-level curriculum by teaching less popular options like ‘African Kingdoms’, ‘Russia in the Age of Enlightenment’ or a medieval British option, not only are you constrained by starting from scratch in terms of basic lesson resources but you also have limited options in terms of textbooks, revision guides and so on. I’m setting up Lancastrians, Yorkists and Henry VII for the Edexcel A-level Paper 3 which has been really interesting, but a huge slog in terms of resourcing and presents challenges for the students as there are few other revision resources out there unless I make them myself (and I’m in a small department so I’m teaching it on my own). Collaborative working like the various Facebook groups for different exam boards help a bit, but surely it should be easier and cheaper? Hence why the curse of the ‘Hitler and the Henrys’ curriculum still plagues a lot of History Departments around the country.
Hopefully before the next round of new specifications (which I hear, and I dread the thought, are already being thought about — could make an interesting blog actually) we could come up with some way of ensuring that good textbooks are ready well in advance for all content options before first teaching begins! That would really help a lot. What’s been especially frustrating this time is how long it’s taken for the publishers to develop foundation editions of their textbooks — which are actually what I would probably have ordered first up had they been available alongside the main editions as they are better presented and more accessible for the students that need this the most. Unfortunately some of my students have very limited capacity to even read the core textbooks for the Edexcel GCSE course which is really inhibiting!
In terms of possible solutions for the resource poor Head of History — what can you do?
1. Remember the key priorities for your budget in my view have to be photocopying, exercise books and textbooks. Those three things really matter and cause the most headaches to have to deal with overall for your team.
2. Get your demands in early of your new Headteacher — that’s when you’re most likely to get what you want.
3. Rather than chopping and changing units as you think they might get you better results — as resources might make this difficult you are probably better off trying to make what options your team does already even better.
4. One copy of a good piece of scholarship might be more impactful in helping develop resources than a set of textbooks — although time implications matter here as well.
5. Don’t be afraid to ask about financial position of the department and capacity for investing in resources on interview or in your pre-application visit/phone-call if you do that. You might get a bit of a vague answer here but worth asking all the same.
6. We definitely need to move towards a simpler mode of teaching in terms of resourcing and pedagogy — I’ve been really inspired by reading Jo Facer’s (https://readingallthebooks.com/) work on this in her book Simplicity Rules and this is something I’m going to look to develop moving forward within my department. I’ve not got into booklets but am increasingly persuaded this is the way forward. However it takes a bit of bottle to do it if you’re in a school where students aren’t used to a really consistent or ‘samey’ approach to lesson design.
