Chelmsford County High School for Girls

Subjects

History - About the History Department

Resources

The Department is fully equipped with all necessary textbooks and videos, and increasingly with DVDs, and also with a number of electronic resources. More importantly, we enjoy an excellent relationship with the school library; all lower school topics are well supported by library collections, and we have recently embarked on an ambitious program of developing our academic and scholarly collections, to allow our sixth form students to pursue the independent reading which is so vital to their intellectual development and to their academic success.

Trips

The Department runs a one-day trip to Belgium for Year 9 students, to enable them to see at first hand the battlefields of the First World War; we are assisted in this by Ian Hook, Director of the Chelmsford Museum and Essex Regiment Museum. We also hope to run a trip to Canterbury for Year 7. For Year 8 we run a 'Parliament Day' in school, where students learn about the process of the government of Britain, research party policies, and debate them in a mock House of Commons. Sixth Form students regularly take part in Study Days in London, where they hear lectures by leading scholars of the topics which they are studying.

History Society

In early 2004 the inaugural meeting of the CCHS History Society was addressed by the renowned constitutional historian and author Professor Peter Hennessy, of the University of London. Further speakers this academic year will include the nation's leading writer on History education, Christine Counsell of the School of Education in the University of Cambridge, Professor Caroline Barron of Royal Holloway College, and Dr Clive Holmes of the University of Oxford.

University Entrance

The Department has a strong record of placing students in leading universities to continue their historical studies. We use our strong links with Peterhouse, Cambridge, and with other colleges, to help those of our students who wish to apply to Oxford or Cambridge. These universities are keen to help schools in any way they can to ensure that they have the strongest possible pool of applicants. CCHS history is in a strong position to benefit from the help on offer, and in 2004 six former students will take up places to read History or a cognate subject at Oxford or Cambridge.