I founded Parallel Histories in 2016, having taught history for nearly 20 years, and now I head a small team which promotes a new way to study conflict. The problem I started to address in my Fellowship in the summer of 2014 was the disappearance of controversial history from the classroom and what I felt was a silencing of debate and an unwillingness to engage with the other side. The rise of ethnic nationalism, distrust of experts and the media, and the polarisation of politics since then have all made our work even more important.

We encourage secondary school teachers to teach emotive and controversial history such as the history of the conflicts in Israel and Palestine and in Northern Ireland. We support these teachers by supplying free educational materials in the form of interactive videos, and we run teacher training and inter-school debating. Our programmes are open to any school but we specifically target schools with high levels of pupils on free school meals and with high numbers of pupils for whom English is an additional language. We work with hundreds of schools, mainly in the UK but also in France, Belgium, Ireland, Canada and the USA.