ESTA: Into our 60th Year

Our History: From a dinner queue at Sheffield to a national association

ESTA began with a question asked quietly in a queue.

At the Geographical Association conference in Sheffield in 1966, a young teacher named Peter Kennett was approached by a stranger who leaned in and asked, "Psst... do you teach geology?" The stranger was Alun Thomas of the National Museum of Wales, and he was sounding out opinion on behalf of a small committee that had begun to wonder whether teachers of geology needed an association of their own.

They did. Within eighteen months the Association of Teachers of Geology had been formed. It has met every year since, becoming the Earth Science Teachers' Association in 1988.

The idea takes shape, 1965 to 1967

The first recorded mention of a teachers' association appears in the minutes of the Sub-Committee on the Teaching of Geology in Schools, part of Section C of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. At a meeting held in Cambridge on 3 September 1965, during the British Association's visit, Professor Leslie R. Moore of Sheffield University asked whether the committee might do anything to bring a national association into being. In the chair was Professor T. Neville George of Glasgow University. Also present were George Askey, a Staff Inspector of Schools from Cardiff, D. Emlyn Evans of the National Museum of Wales, who acted as secretary, John Myers, a retired teacher from Newcastle-under-Lyme, and Dr Mabel Tomlinson, a retired teacher from Solihull.

Nothing could be done immediately, but the item returned to the agenda a year later at Nottingham on 2 September 1966. This time the committee resolved to do everything in its power to promote the formation of an association. Emlyn Evans was asked to circulate a questionnaire and to test the level of interest.

The response settled the matter. Names and addresses of more than a thousand teachers were gathered, and letters went out before the end of 1966. By early February 1967 over 550 favourable replies had come back. A founding conference was arranged for September that year at the University of Keele, a venue suggested by John Myers, who lived nearby and took on much of the preparatory work.

Professor Neville George set one important condition. He insisted that the conference be hosted by an Education Department, working alongside a Geology Department rather than being run by geologists alone. Teaching and learning were to be at the centre of the new society from the outset. It is a principle the Association has kept.

Keele, 22 to 24 September 1967

One hundred and forty people assembled at Keele. Most taught geology at secondary level, with others from primary schools, colleges of education, universities and museums.

Professor F. Wolverson Cope of Keele opened with an address of welcome, followed by Professor Neville George. The Saturday sessions covered teaching method, fieldwork, and specimens, models and equipment, then split into parallel strands on A and O level geology and on CSE and primary school geology. Speakers included Caroline Evans of Crewe College of Education, Iain Williamson of Wigan and District Mining and Technical College, Brian Simpson of University College Swansea, and Arthur Bray, recently retired from HM Inspectorate of Schools.

On the Saturday afternoon, delegates chose between field excursions and exhibitions. The excursions were led by Professor Cope, Dr Robert Roach and John Myers of Keele, and Dr Frank Moseley of Birmingham. The tradition of the conference field trip was established on that first afternoon and has been maintained ever since.

Around twenty stalls filled the Chancellor's Building, run by museum school services from Aylesbury to Plymouth, by the Field Studies Council, the Geologists' Association, the Institute of Geological Sciences and the Nature Conservancy, and by suppliers including Hilary Corke and Cutrock Engineering. Teachers swapped specimens and field excursion notes between sessions.

The business of the weekend came on the Saturday evening, when Dr Douglas A. Bassett of the National Museum of Wales spoke on how the proposed association might help the teacher. On the Sunday morning the conference discussed a draft set of rules and regulations prepared by Dr John R. Harpum of Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Penrith. At a second meeting it was agreed unanimously that an association be formed, with subscriptions set at £1 for ordinary membership and ten shillings for students.

A Steering Committee was elected to take the legal and constitutional work forward: Dr Douglas Bassett as chairman, John Myers as treasurer, Arthur Bray, Tony Dunk, Dr John Harpum and Professor Leslie Moore.

Immediately after the meeting, ninety-six people paid their subscriptions to the treasurer. A pound was close to an afternoon's pay for a teacher in 1967, a not insubstantial amount, yet 96 people paid there and then. By the end of that September the Association had ninety-eight members.

Neville George offered one note of caution. Starting an association was one thing, he said, but keeping it going once the initial enthusiasm faded was another. Sixty years on, that warning has been well heeded.

The first Annual Conference, Keele 1968

By September 1968 membership had grown from ninety-eight to over three hundred. The Association returned to Keele from 20 to 22 September, with 108 members and 24 non-members attending. More than a third of the entire membership turned up, which says something about the appetite for what had been started.

The 1968 meeting was designated the First Annual Conference. That was not an oversight of the previous year. Keele 1967 was a founding meeting, called by the British Association sub-committee to decide whether an Association should exist at all, and the counting of annual conferences then properly began with the first one held by an Association that did. Whether by design or good fortune, it also leaves things arithmetically tidy: every anniversary of the Association falls in the same year as the conference bearing the same number.

The draft rules were accepted in spirit, subject to further scrutiny by Council, and the meeting elected its first officers:

• President: Professor Leslie R. Moore

• Vice-President: Dr Douglas A. Bassett

• Secretary: Dr John R. Harpum

• Treasurer: John Myers

• Editor: Denis Hart

Nine Council members were elected alongside them: Peter J. Perkins, Gordon F. Margretts, Ronald H. Roberts, Charles Halfyard, Joyce M. Taylor, Thomas Shipp, David M. Sampson, John A. G. Thomas, and David B. Thompson, a geology teacher whose name would become almost synonymous with the Association over the following decades.

Closing the conference, the President announced that Alun J. Thomas, Schools Service Officer in Geology at the National Museum of Wales, had agreed to coordinate the exchange of specimens between members. Specimen swapping was taken seriously. Peter Kennett recalled several eminent geologists on their hands and knees on the floor of the gents' cloakroom, examining lumps of rock through hand lenses.

A journal of its own

The founders agreed from the start that the Association needed to publish. Tom Shipp, who ran a geological journal in Cumbria, shared his experience at the conference, and the first volume of Geology: Journal of the Association of Teachers of Geology appeared in 1969, edited by Denis Hart. Shell and British Petroleum helped fund the first issue.

Leslie Moore's preface caught the moment well. He doubted that any geological journal had ever been launched at a more exciting time. At Keele in 1968 Professor Sutton had spoken of the revolution then running through the subject, a shift Moore ranked alongside the work of Werner, Hutton and Smith in the heroic age of geology. He was writing as plate tectonics was reshaping the discipline. By the time the journal went to press, Apollo 11 had returned two boxes of rock from the surface of the Moon and the world was watching. Geology, Moore wrote, had found itself an enormous new audience.

That journal continues today as Teaching Earth Sciences.

A new name, 1987 to 1988

By the 1980s the subject had outgrown the label on the tin. Members were teaching earth science within general science, environmental science and geography as often as they were teaching geology as a named subject, and the Association's title no longer described who it served.

The question was put to an Open Forum debate at the 1987 conference at the University of Hull, after which Council recommended that the name be changed. An Extraordinary General Meeting at the following year's conference, held at the College of St Paul and St Mary in Cheltenham in September 1988, settled it. Counting valid postal votes, members approved the change by 112 votes to 38. The December 1988 issue of the journal carried the announcement, and the Association of Teachers of Geology became the Earth Science Teachers' Association.

The initials changed. The remit, as the founders had set it in 1967, did not.

What has not changed

 Much has held steady since Keele:

•  An association for teachers at every level, from primary through to university and museum education

• An annual conference with field excursions at its heart

• A journal written by and for teachers

• A focus on teaching and learning first, set there deliberately by the founders

The conference has gone ahead in every year since 1968. When Covid closed the venues, members met online instead, and even then the field trip survived. The 54th conference ran virtually from the University of the West of England in September 2021, with fieldwork the following day split north and south so that members could get to it locally.

Into our 60th year

Our 59th Annual Conference was held at the University of Leeds from 11 to 13 September 2026. The next one is a milestone. The Association was founded at Keele in September 1967, which makes 2027 its sixtieth year, and the 60th ESTA Annual Conference will be held at the University of Plymouth.