Starting this year, 2026, my wife Pat and I are delighted to be sponsoring two HA bursaries, each enabling a trainee or new teacher to attend the HA’s Annual Conference. I am very grateful to the Historical Association for taking up this idea so positively.

For full details of these bursaries …

… their value; criteria for entry; how to apply; see the HA website HERE …

These bursaries are my ‘thank you’ to Jim and Bob in recognition of their contributions to my development as a student and as a teacher. I could not have experienced the profound enjoyment and satisfaction that I’ve had in history teaching without their support and, above all, without the confidence they gave me and the respect they showed me. However this isn’t simply about their impact on myself – in sponsoring these bursaries I’m representing the thanks of the very many other people who were taught, trained and mentored by Jim and Bob across their careers.

What was it about Jim and Bob that felt so special? If you’d like to find my answer to that questions just continue reading below!

Ian Dawson, 2026

A tribute to Jim and Bob:

A tale of two phone calls

Firstly, It feels a real honour to sponsor these bursaries in memory of Jim and Bob and so support the development of two teachers early in their careers. It’s also particularly satisfying that these bursaries honour two different kinds of contribution – Jim was a career classroom teacher, Bob’s influence was on a regional and national scale – but both these roles are so vitally important, each feeding off the other.

Most importantly for me as, Jim and Bob contributed immeasurably to my development as a student and trainee teacher and also modelled what I could aspire to in time as an experienced teacher and teacher-trainer.

Let me tell you what made each of them so special, using my memories of two phone calls!

A phone call to Jim Shields (August 1970)

I was standing in a queue of deeply anxious students, waiting our turn to go into the Headteacher’s office and be told our A level results individually. I was standing with Barbara, the one other student in our year who wanted to study History at university and, happily, we soon had the news we hoped for – we would be undergraduate History students in just a few weeks’ time. So what did we do next?

As this was 1970, we went to find a phone box!

We first gave our parents the good news and then we made a third call. We looked up the number in the phone book, made sure we had enough pennies and maybe a sixpence (this was pre-decimalisation too), dialled the number and pressed Button A.

‘Hello, is that Mr Shields?’

We were phoning our History teacher, Jim Shields, to say ‘thank you’ for all his help. Our calling call Jim straightaway says a huge amount about him as a teacher.

Yes, he’d helped us pick our way through the complexities of European History from the Reformation to the French Revolution, taught us how to write essays (and we had the grades to prove it!), kept us motivated and run extra sessions so we could take the S (Scholarship) level exam in case that boosted our chances of a university place – but he’d also given us something more, qualities that, in retrospect, were at the root of our exam success and our future development.

For two years Jim had shown us that he had confidence in our ability to do well at A level but also in classes, when handing back our work or when seeing one or other of us in the corridor, he’d somehow communicated that he was enjoying having us in his class, that he respected us as students and as people. None of this was explicit but it had a profoundly beneficial impact – otherwise we wouldn’t have been in that phone box to say ‘thank you’ to Jim.

That ability to communicate his confidence and respect for his students was what made Jim the gold standard to aim at when I became a teacher myself,. I could be in control of my classes, deliver excellent results, be up-to-date with the latest developments but what I also wanted was to give my students what Jim had given me and so many other students over his career at Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool (later re-named Calderstones School) the belief that I was a person well-worth the time he spent helping and supporting me.

It’s that word ‘respect’ again – I felt that Jim respected me and that was the greatest gift he could have given me.

A phone call to Bob Unwin (June 1975)

I’d just returned from spending ten months as a VSO teacher in Aswan when I picked up the phone to ask Bob for advice. I needed a job, ideally in or around Leeds where my wife-to-be had just started work, but the Times Ed had little to offer. All the jobs had been snapped up by that year’s cohort of bright, newly-qualified PGCE trainees – all except one in Wakefield that seemed to be a re-advertisement – which wasn’t a good sign!

Did nobody want that job? Hence my phone call – did Bob know anything about the school? Should I apply or hold on for a better option? I suspect I was more than half-hoping he’d advise me to wait.

No chance! Bob’s words went roughly like this:

“It’ll be tough. It’s a difficult school but you’ll learn more there in a year than you would in many other schools.” And then he went on to enthuse about the possibilities – it was a small department, scope for me to try out new ideas, be inventive – and to remind me how well I’d done in my PGCE, boosting my confidence that I could be a success in a tough situation.

And he was right.

I had a horrendous first year but five years later, when I did move on, I hated leaving. I’d come to really like the students and yes, I had learned far, far more than I could have imagined, become head of department and, along with new colleagues, had trebled the number of students opting for History at the end of Y9.

That one memory encapsulates what I owe Bob – his support for and confidence in me as a teacher, together with his immense enthusiasm and inspiration

Meeting Bob as a PGCE trainee in 1973 had been revelatory. Until then, my experience of teaching was being on the receiving end of years of dictated notes and, sitting waiting for my first PGCE History session, I was expecting yet another lecture. Instead, into the room surged Bob brandishing a chunk of raw wool. How, he wanted to know, would we use this wool to start a sequence of lessons on the Industrial Revolution? Until then, my classroom experiences had been the equivalent of a village cricket – the pace of Bob’s presentation and thought propelled me into the middle of a test match. No more mental jogging. I had to start sprinting.

During that year, Bob’s mentoring was positive, encouraging, practical and challenging.  He gave us confidence, offering incisive ideas to transform our lessons: sharpening a question, suggesting ways to build a relationship with a challenging student or to think more deeply about the knowledge required to appreciate the nuance of a historical source – rigorous professional thinking modelled for us by Bob. 

Bob was a firecracker, the epitome of human energy – I never met anyone else in History teaching with more energy. His conversation raced along, seeking out the next idea, always accompanied by what I can only describe as a continuing conversational chuckle. He was an innovator, passionate about developing teaching methods that would challenge and enthuse pupils, a champion of fieldwork, local history and the use of sources, especially visual sources, and he espoused computers at an early stage. As trainees we were in awe.

How could anyone be so energetic? How could he create so many resources? Did he ever sleep?

That was my personal experience of Bob but he also had a much wider involvement in teaching – he was a leading figure in the HA, wrote and edited many textbooks and articles, organised and provided CPD sessions and conferences and much more – having been involved in history teaching since 1973, I have no hesitation in saying that Bob was one of the most significant contributors to history education during the last fifty years but for me, as one of his trainees, it was his ability to boost my confidence, stimulate my thinking and his respect for me as an individual that had such a long-lasting impact.