Helena Graham

About Me

I have been employed in my current school for nineteen years primarily as the Head of History, but I have since combined this role with many other positions: Assistant Head of Sixth Form, Head of Charity and Student Leadership and AST.  My position at the moment is Humanities Faculty Leader, with further leadership responsibility for History, Politics, Citizenship and Internationalism.

I currently teach the following courses:

• Politics A Level – Edexcel, focusing on The USA in Year 13
• History GCSE – AQA – Conflict and Tension: the inter-war years 1918-1939; Russia, 1894-1945: tsardom and communism; Britain: Power and the people: c.1170-to the present day; Elizabethan England, c.1568-1603.
• History A Level – AQA – 2H – France in revolution, 1774-1815; 1C – The Tudors: England, 1485-1603; NEA on African American Civil Rights in The USA, 1865-1974.

Chelmsford County High School for Girls is a highly selective state grammar school, which caters for the very academically able.  I have developed an extremely successful department, which is highly regarded by the very top universities, and have been at the forefront in my own school at developing academic rigour amongst staff and students.  I can offer advice and guidance regarding Cambridge interviews for History, Law and Classics, and how to best prepare students from Year 9 onwards for these.

I am a most creative, enthusiastic and reflective individual who has a proven track record of delivering successful new initiatives, bringing others on board in the process.  I run many effective enrichment activities for students and staff within my own school and the local community.  My collaboration with other teachers in my AST role was highly commended and did have a huge impact on the departments I worked with.  One teacher, for example, who was rated unsatisfactory at the start of my mentoring, gained a good-to-outstanding by the end of two terms’ worth of support.  I also helped prepare resources and assessment activities for students at pupil referral unit, which were very valuable for identifying how well they understood chronology, change and continuity.

I am extremely experienced in running and leading on cross-curricular events with other departments.  I have organised whole day events with the German, Art and English departments at school.  I have also worked closely with the Latin department in running a lunchtime murder mystery for year 7s – which is very popular.

Over the past six years I have introduced across the whole school an Internationalism programme, a significant part of which is a Model United Nations role play which Years 9, 10 and 12 take part in at different times of the academic year.  The MUN is embedded in the school curriculum and has proved to be a fantastic way of developing students’ social and public speaking skills, as well as their understanding of the world around them.