In this post Centre Director, Dr Andy Pearce, considers the current levels of knowledge of the Holocaust among UK secondary school students.
UCL studies, in 2016 and 2026, reveal a troubling and enduring divergence between popular understandings of the persecution and murder of Jews in Europe, in the 1930s and 1940s, and the findings of scholarly historical research.
27 January 2026 marks the 25th anniversary of Holocaust Memorial Day in Britain. As Andy argues, prevalent and popular misperceptions risk being sustained if the Holocaust becomes a subject for remembrance and memory, rather than of history and historical scholarship. It is only though ‘more history’, shared widely and publicly, that we may seek to redress error, distortion and denial.
‘There is a yawning gulf between popular understanding of this history and current scholarship on the subject,’ wrote the late David Cesarani ten years ago, in the opening lines of his final book. Published posthumously, the subject Cesarani was referring to and writing about was what happened to the Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.
Tellingly, in titling his book, Cesarani elected not to call it ‘The Holocaust’; instead, he chose Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-1949 (2016). This reflected Cesarani’s belief that ‘The Holocaust’ had come to ‘signify the cultural construction rather than the historical events,’ and was thus ‘arguably […] well past its sell-by date.’ For Cesarani, whilst ‘the Holocaust has never been so ubiquitous’ it was not history that was prevalent; rather, it was ‘a standardized version’ of it – one which had ‘created a received wisdom about what it was’ profoundly out of step with what had actually taken place.
Cesarani’s critique was withering. As one of the world’s pre-eminent historians of the Holocaust, you might presume his words would have galvanised change. Sadly, in the decade that has since passed, that has not occurred.
Importantly, this assessment is not mere conjecture.
In the months before his death, Cesarani was aware of research that was taking place at University College London’s Centre for Holocaust Education. There, researchers were undertaking a major national study into what secondary school students in England knew and understood about the Holocaust. Still the largest study of its kind conducted anywhere in the world, Cesarani was a historical consultant to the project and abreast of the emerging findings.
Critically, these were revelatory and damning in equal measure.
Research showed that … the majority of students had troubling gaps in their substantive knowledge of the Holocaust and possessed many problematic misunderstandings and misconceptions.
[This] raised serious questions: not just about teaching and learning, but more widely about how the Holocaust was framed, understood, and represented in British culture and society.
The research showed that despite the Holocaust being a mandatory part of the National Curriculum since 1991, the majority of students had troubling gaps in their substantive knowledge of the Holocaust and possessed many problematic misunderstandings and misconceptions. These related to knowledge and understanding of who Jewish people were; what happened to the different victim groups targeted by the Nazis and their collaborators; erroneous assumptions that the same thing happened to all victim groups for the same reasons; where and when mass killing took place; who was responsible; and what action the British government took when it knew what was taking place. These issues duly raised serious questions: not just about teaching and learning, but more widely about how the Holocaust was framed, understood, and represented in British culture and society.
At the time, early access to these revelations made a significant imprint on a group of people who had been charged with carrying out the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission. The Commission’s report placed great store on this research, drawing on it to legitimise its calls for the construction of a new national memorial and learning centre that, as yet, remains unbuilt and has since become the object of much controversy. Beyond the Commission, the research impacted staff at the Imperial War Museums (IWM), who would go on to use its findings to inform the construction of their new and highly impressive Holocaust Galleries, opened in 2021.
In the field of Holocaust education, however, the research’s impact was more muted. The most significant development was the creation of a research-informed textbook for history classrooms by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, published in 2020. Rooted in the latest historical scholarship, the textbook followed the principles of excellent history teaching by aligning substantive knowledge with developing disciplinary understandings. Universally well-received by teachers, since 2020 more than 100,000 copies of the textbook have entered 3,371 secondary schools in England.
Aside from this and other work at the Centre, little changed in the rest of the sector. Despite national and international Holocaust historians highlighting the need to heed these warnings, the tranche of recommendations made by the Centre and Cesarani’s damning words, fell largely on deaf ears. There was no meaningful change at the level of curriculum policy. There was no national discussion about the aims of Holocaust education, or how more teachers could be supported in their teaching. And there was no paradigm-shift away from the problematic notion of the there being ‘lessons’ from the Holocaust that could be simply learnt and remembered, towards a more robust understanding of what history is and what it is for. On the contrary, in political discourse, this lexicon of lessons only intensified.
The result was Cesarani’s ‘yawning gulf’ went unaddressed. And today, a decade on, we have new evidence that shows the consequences of this.
The latest research by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education is again illuminating the condition of students’ knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust. It shows that whilst overall there has been a general improvement, the very same issues remain. These include knowledge gaps and misconceptions around key topics such as perpetration, who the victims were and what happened to them, chronological development, and how Britain responded. Emerging findings also suggest that previous misconceptions about what happened to the different groups targeted by the regime, and why, may also still persist.
For example, the majority of students still assign sole responsibility for the Holocaust to Hitler, and most continue to believe that people committed murder because they feared for their own lives. Elsewhere, just 10% of students knew the Jewish population in Germany in 1933 was less than 1%, with many grossly overestimating its size. Whilst three quarters of students surveyed knew that 6 million Jewish men, women and children were killed, a quarter of students did not know this. And although 83% correctly identified the Holocaust as taking place in the 1940s, only 30% were aware that mass murder as policy commenced after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
Given that for 35 years it has been a mandatory requirement for students to learn about the Holocaust in English schools, these findings are highly troubling. All the more so when this year marks the 25th anniversary since Britain’s first Holocaust Memorial Day. That such omissions and misperceptions persist among the most captive audience in society – our teenagers, who are legally meant to study this history in their formal schooling – indicates there are several elemental problems that need to be addressed.
The ‘yawning gulf’ between what happened to Europe’s Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, and the storified versions that we now tell ourselves in broader culture and politics, do not originate in our classrooms.
The ‘yawning gulf’ between what happened to Europe’s Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, and the storified versions that we now tell ourselves in broader culture and politics, do not originate in our classrooms.
It would be wrong, however, to presume this is just an issue for teachers and schools. After all, neither of these are isolated from broader culture and society. Teachers and schools may help to shape and reshape the world, but they are also reflections of it. The ‘yawning gulf’ between what happened to Europe’s Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, and the storified versions that we now tell ourselves in broader culture and politics, do not originate in our classrooms.
This means that meaningful change has to happen at a societal level. We know that teachers in schools are grappling with multiple challenges when teaching the Holocaust. We know from the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education’s new research that many young people are stumbling across information about the Holocaust on social media, even when they are not looking for it, and evidence shows much of this content is liable to deal in misinformation, distortion or even Holocaust denial.
These are not issues that can be simply fixed in a classroom.
Information overload and a dissolving of truth, we have to argue the case for, and help to create, rigorous public history.
Those of us who know and understand the nature of history and its value, have a crucial role to play. At a time when society needs more critical thinking and cultural literacy, we need to explain the contribution that history and the historical method can make. In a world of soundbites and short-attention spans, we must ensure we are communicating efficiently and effectively. And at a time when there is both information overload and a dissolving of truth, we have to argue the case for, and help to create, rigorous public history.
Of course, we cannot bridge the chasms alone. Our students’ misunderstandings and misconceptions are deeply embedded, because society holds onto them. We must forensically examine why this is so. And from there, we must strategise how we enable our peers to confront hard questions about history and memory, the past and the present, and what we as a society are choosing to omit from the stories we tell ourselves.
There is, understandably, much anxiety that we face the increasing risk that the Holocaust will, in time, be forgotten. However, if the memories that we claim to have of it bear little to no relation to the history that occurred, then that spectre does not exist in the future. Rather, it is a real and present danger. It is one that can only begin to be rectified by a turn not to more memory, to more remembering. But instead to more history.
