Harrow Way history department is putting Andover on the historical map as part of a refreshed approach to the school’s history curriculum. By embedding and bringing local history to life in lessons, students are learning that history happened and was made in their own hometown of Andover.
Lead History Teacher at Harrow Way Neil Bates explains further: “When you are a young secondary school student, it’s easy to think that history is something that happened elsewhere. So to change this thinking we have introduced a new element to our Year 7 curriculum called ‘Why should we care about the history of our local area?’. The focus of this is The Harrow Way, the ancient Neolithic trackway from Dover to Dorset. Our aim as a department is for students to understand that history didn’t happen elsewhere, it happened here in Andover and their school bears the same name as a track which has probably been in existence since the stone age.”
The school’s History department has also been working with local educational charity Cotswold Archaeology, developing a lesson which focuses on the Weyhill execution site. This was discovered when the supermarket chain Aldi were developing a new store for the town. This collaboration has formed the basis for a number of articles. Teacher Mr Bates has already had a piece published on a History teaching website advising his history peers the value of reaching out to local archaeology units and, along with colleague Mr Bowry, has also submitted a piece to the History Association, the UK’s national charity for history.
The article for Practical Histories can be found here.