Sean Lang: Reflections from a Former Head of History

I came to Hills Road in 1992 having taught at Netherhall and lectured in Education at Exeter University, and Hills Road felt like a similar combination of school and university. I took over a highly regarded department which had been led with great distinction by Charles Malyon; I had an HMI Inspection in my first term which judged the department Outstanding, but that was a tribute to Charles rather than to my couple of months in post!

“Hills Road was fairly formal in style but very flexible in its outlook: if you wanted to experiment, you could – and I did!” 

I had already started writing and sometimes reporting for the Times Educational Supplement and I carried on doing that at Hills Road – everything I wrote credited the college, which was very good PR.  I was also high up in the Historical Association, which involved talking with ministers and civil servants, even the Privy Council at one point, as well as doing a lot of broadcasting, and I quickly found that being Head of History at Hills Road gave you a certain weight and esteem in the public eye.

I learned a huge amount about teaching and students and so on – and choral singing! – but also a lot of history. 

"I taught whole periods I had never studied before, which I found tremendously stimulating, and when later I became a lecturer at Anglia Ruskin, my Hills Road experience gave me a breadth of historical knowledge that was far greater than you usually find in university lecturers."

I was delighted to encounter quite a few of my old Hills Road students at ARU, though whether they were as delighted to see me again I don’t know!

Three things particularly stand out. I got money from the Council of Europe to run an international simulation exercise based on the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles. We had students from seven different European countries: I remember my students being taken aback by the ultra-nationalist views of the Bulgarians: no doubt they were equally surprised by my students’ views! I recently followed that up with an international exercise based on the Nuremberg Trial, and again Hills Road took part.  Then there were the foreign trips, to Rome and Sorrento and especially a wonderful exchange we had with a school in Parma.

Finally, it was at Hills Road that I really started writing seriously for the theatre: a number of my scripts were staged, including an epic piece set in the American Revolution and an adaptation of Hermann Melville’s Billy Budd.

"In many ways, Hills Road set my career up just as much as it did for my students."

Sean Lang