The Education Service provides free online resources and taught sessions, supporting the National Curriculum for history from key stage 1 up to A-level. Visit our website to access the full range of our resources, from Domesday to Britain in the 1960s, and find out about more about our schools programme, including new professional development opportunities for teachers.
The Education Service provides free online resources and taught sessions, supporting the National Curriculum for history from key stage 1 up to A-level. Visit our website to access the full range of our resources, from Domesday to Britain in the 1960s, and find out about more about our schools programme, including new professional development opportunities for teachers.
This lesson focuses on a Scottish First World War soldier, Donald Campbell. The main task requires pupils decide what constitutes a ‘good soldier’ and whether Donald Campbell was a ‘good soldier’.
This lesson shows that attacks on civilians from the air began in the First World War and were quite serious. The focus of the tasks is on the drama and damage, the impact on civilians and British inability to deal with the raid.
A lesson focusing on why school dinners were introduced as a way of improving public health.
Around the year 1900 there was a lot of concern about the physical state of the people of Britain. Even though there had been tremendous efforts in the late 19th century to provide better public health, housing and education, many children were still no more healthy than they had been back in the 1840s.
The new Liberal government elected in 1906 passed various measures to try to deal with this problem. They were particularly concerned to try to improve the health of children. They passed laws to ensure midwives were notified of each new-born baby, they introduced School Medical Examinations and, in 1906, they gave permission for schools to offer meals to their pupils. But what kind of meals?
These documents show how one city, Bradford, carried out an experiment to see how the system might operate.
This lesson provides material for examining photographs as evidence. It can also be used as stimulus material for looking at the history of education and can also be useful for pupils to investigate the history of their own school.
This lesson is based on the story of the sinking of the Titanic. Using the sources pupils can find out about the passengers on the Titanic to find out about those who drowned and also the survivors.
This lesson and its sources can be used to look at how evidence over time can change leading to new conclusions. The lesson focuses on the sinking of the Indefatigable was one of heroic loss and then it became clear it was a mistake.
A lesson based on the World Cup 1966, which may be of particular interest to some students. The lesson refers to the South American protesters who claimed that England, also the hosts, had rigged the whole tournament, with the help of West Germany.
This lesson consists of a large amount of background information on the treaties and the League. The lesson helps to explain why the Second World War broke out when and how it did.
This lesson could be used as part of a teaching programme for any of the main GCSE modern world history courses for key stage 4 relating to the study of appeasement. The sources allow students to explore some of the main issues in British foreign policy and the importance of not accepting sources at face value.
This lesson is designed to learn about what happened at the Trimdon Grange Mining Disaster. The lesson has an inquiry led approach to consider the possible causes of deaths in Victorian Britain.
This lesson looks at Queen Victoria and her relationship with her family. The lesson could be extended to work with decoding other photographs or portraits.
Victorians were worried about the rising crime rate: offences went up from about 5,000 per year in 1800 to about 20,000 per year in 1840. They were firm believers in punishment for criminals but faced a problem: what should the punishment be?
There were prisons, but they were mostly small, old and badly-run. Common punishments included transportation – sending the offender to America, Australia or Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) – or execution: hundreds of offences carried the death penalty.
By the 1830s people were having doubts about both these punishments. The answer was prison: lots of new prisons were built and old ones extended.
The Victorians also had clear ideas about what these prisons should be like. They should be unpleasant places, to deter people from committing crimes. Once inside, prisoners had to be made to face up to their own faults, by keeping them in silence and making them do hard, boring work. Walking a treadwheel or picking oakum (separating strands of rope) were the most common forms of hard labour.