The Medlicott Medal 2025 will be awarded to Dr Christine Counsell

The Historical Association is delighted to announce that the Medlicott Medal 2025 will be awarded to Dr Christine Counsell.

The award seeks to recognise individuals from a diversity of backgrounds in their service to history.

Christine will be known to many at the HA, as throughout her career she has been a champion for history as a discipline and as a way for all people to understand the world around them.

She started her career as a history teacher, before moving on to education management and consultancy. She has been involved with all the curriculum reviews since the 1990s and has helped to embed new and innovative approaches to young people’s learning. She spent 20 years as a lecturer at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education, helping to shape not just curriculum thinking but also the teachers who would deliver it.

Her ground-breaking 1997 text Analytical and Discursive Writing remains key to the development of literacy and higher-order thinking among young people, ensuring that history teaching in schools is never just about dates and timelines.

In 2006, she was awarded the University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize, for excellence in teaching. That same year, she was made a Centenary Fellow by the Historical Association, for outstanding services to the promotion of the study of history.

Christine is currently an editor of the renowned Teaching History journal and has been on its board at a number of stages in her career, supporting contributors and guiding other editors, as well as being a contributor herself.

In addition to working with a succession of UK education departments to support the history curriculum and other areas of the humanities, she has also worked with the Council of Europe and is an advisor and consultant to other countries, including for the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research in Cyprus, the Alliance for Curriculum and Professional Development in World History at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Australian Curriculum and Assessment and Reporting Authority and the Singapore Ministry of Education.

In the last 12 months, Christine was one of the commissioners on the Oracy Education Commission, whose latest report has laid the foundation for new ways in which to approach oracy across the curriculum for all pupils and students in England’s schools.

Christine was nominated for the award by many HA branches, as well as by the Committees and Trustees of the HA, all of whom recognise that her contribution to historical study and her advocacy for historical study at all ages and for all abilities is without equal in the UK and beyond.

“I was delighted that so many members of the HA were keen that Dr Christine Counsell be honoured with this award. She brings together so many of the threads that are important to the HA – scholarship, expertise, dedication and passion – all in the name of history and history education. Christine embodies so much of what the HA stands for and I am pleased that she is to be recognised with the Medlicott Medal for history.” (Rebecca Sullivan, CEO of the HA)

As is the custom, Dr Christine Counsell will receive her award and present her lecture at the HA annual awards evening, which will be held on 2 July in central London. HA Members can register interest to attend the Medlicott lecture, subject to availability. Please email ceo@history.org.uk quoting your HA Membership number.