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Can you hear the music or see the birds (Liver ones of course)? Then we must be in Liverpool – or at least we will be in May 2025 for the HA conference.

We have brought together lots of specialist CPD for teachers and educators at all levels and gathered a collection of outstanding academics in the region, all to deliver history talks that will appeal to any general history enthusiast as well as those who work in it professionally.

Set over two days the conference presents delegates with a choice of keynote lectures, workshops, local visits and academic talks all to stretch the mind, skills units and knowledge base but not the bank balance.

There is the opportunity to attend seven workshops or talks, plus four keynote lectures, over the two days – that adds up to years’ worth of CPD for many teachers and two terms’ worth of lectures for anyone with a general interest in history!

We do this by providing full days of lectures, talks, workshops, and visits (all of which you get to choose which to go to or not), all delivered in strands to help guide you through your choices. We have a general strand for those not needing specialist CPD as well as primary education strands, secondary strands and an ITE strand.

Conference programme highlights

This year the keynotes have the type of subject headings and speakers that you usually only find at university or at the big history festivals:

• HA President and Cambridge don Professor Alexandra Walsham is speaking on ‘Heirlooms: family, ancestry and memory in early modern England’;
• Medlicott medal awardee and broadcast historian Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch might raise a few eyebrows with ‘Unsettling many settled facts: pleasures and responsibilities for the historian of Christian views on sex’;
• Addressing some of the key issues facing current history research and issues in the classroom will be Oxford University Professor Matt Cook’s keynote on ‘Portable closets: secrets and lives in queer Britain since gay liberation’.

Among the workshops there are sessions on improving teaching, pedagogical approaches to specific subjects and developing disciplinary thinking, as well as how to create and deliver lessons on subjects such as: Empire and colonial studies, the Holocaust, Northern Ireland, health, AI and local history. Many of the big names and ‘rock stars’ of history education are presenting – so do check whether your favourite will be there.

For the general history enthusiast there are talks from academics drawn from the universities of Liverpool and nearby who will be talking on subjects including Ireland; the Slave Trade; Beyond cotton: a history of modern Central Asia in three plants; Killing Lenin; and medieval history.

There are also opportunities to see more of Liverpool itself through guided walks, a specialist visit to the history central library and archives, and interactive workshops arranged for us at the Museum of Liverpool covering wartime Liverpool – very apt for the VE Day weekend.

It is the first time that we have had the HA national conference in Liverpool, and we are very excited to be there. So excited that we may have got a bit carried away and stuffed the conference so full of excellent things that the big decision will be what to attend and what to miss – to help we will be recording some of the sessions which will be available in some of the conference packages.

Of course, like all good conferences there are also lots of opportunities to chat, meet new friends or catch up with old ones. How you spend the two days is up to you but what you will not be stuck for is something to do.

HA members can take exclusive advantage of Early Bird rates until 20 March.

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