Royal Holloway launches £1.5 million project to chart struggle for rights and representation from Magna Carta to present day

Royal Holloway, University of London has launched a £1.5 million project to support teachers with more inclusive UK political history resources.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) backed project will also support the AQA GCSE History specification, ‘Britain: Power and the People c1170 to the present day’.

This ‘Inclusive Histories’ project, to which AHRC are contributing £1.2m, will chart the struggle for rights and representation from Magna Carta to the present. Royal Holloway, AQA and seven archive and museum partners will lead the collaborative research and schools' engagement project over three years.

In contrast to earlier interventions seeking to support more inclusive teaching, this project focuses on the challenges associated with Key Stage 4 and adopts a highly collaborative approach to its underlying research.

It aims to:

• Support the more inclusive teaching of UK history through the co-production of 200 high-quality, research-driven teaching resources.
• Develop, model, and evaluate innovative research and co-production methodology by, for example, embedding Research Associates in museums and archives where they can work with archivists and other specialists.
• Examine the impact of the research on students' understanding and perception, and teachers' confidence.

The grant will enable Royal Holloway to embed five postdoctoral researchers with its partners over two years to research case studies that centre around the voice, agency, and contribution of traditionally marginalised groups to the struggle for rights and representation.

Working with teachers, these stories will then be turned into a wide suite of free digital resources for schools.

In the third year, AQA will then assess the impact of these resources on student perceptions of history, engagement with the subject, and teacher confidence in teaching more diverse histories.

The project will partner up with AQA, an independent educational charity which sets and marks over half of all GCSEs and A-levels taken in the UK every year, the Bishopsgate Institute, British Film Institute, Black Cultural Archives, Glasgow Women’s Library, the History of Parliament Trust, The London Archives, People’s History Museum, and the Working Class Movement Library. It will also be supported by the Historical Association.

Dr Matthew Smith, from the School of Humanities at Royal Holloway said: “This project, which responds directly to calls from teachers and students for resources to support the more inclusive teaching of history, has been a collaborative endeavour from its inception.

“The project team is incredibly grateful to all the teachers and specialists within our partners who have helped make this award and the work it will enable possible. We look forward to continuing in this same spirit to collaboratively research and co-produce resources that shine a light on how ordinary people, across the centuries, have struggled and sacrificed for the rights we all enjoy today.”

Dr Ayshah Johnston, Learning and Engagement Manager at Black Cultural Archives and Project Co-Lead, added: “I am very excited by this project’s capacity to draw together and build upon the knowledge, expertise and good practice of the project partners, in order to amplify and make widely available the histories of historically marginalised communities which are so integral to a comprehensive understanding of British history and society.”

Other Project Co-Leads include Dr Amy Tooth Murphy, Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, and Professor Edward Vallance, Department of History, University of Roehampton.

Dr Victoria Armstrong, Research and Development Manager at AQA, said: “We work closely with History teachers and know they want to deliver more inclusive lessons to their students.

“I’m delighted that AQA can bring its research expertise and understanding of History teachers’ needs to this very exciting and collaborative project. We’re looking forward to working with other project partners to help create valuable and much needed teaching resources.”