Since 2009, the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education has transformed the teaching of over 12,000 teachers across England; in turn positively impacting on millions of students.
Every year, Key Stage 3 students whose teachers have participated in the Centre’s CPD courses, take part in a survey to explore their knowledge after using the Centre’s resources. Their answers are compared to the answers of students who took part in the Centre’s 2016 national survey and were in schools that had not worked with the Centre or delivered the Centre’s educational programme. As shown in Figure 1, across all questions, students in schools the Centre has worked with were far more likely than the students in the national sample to identify the correct answer.
Students have also told us:
“91% of students who participated in the Centre’s programme knew what antisemitism referred to.”
“Learning about the Holocaust affects you personally, like my morals have changed I think. When you learn about the stories it affects you personally that I would never want to be that prejudiced against anyone in our community.”
“I liked that the lessons were in-depth and made me think, instead of just giving the answer. It also gave me a better understanding of the Holocaust.”
“I thought it was really emotional but amazing to hear about legacy, surviving survival and a note from Leon and to find out about personal stories. As when talking about the holocaust it becomes easy to group Jews and you sometimes forget that the 6 million murdered was 6 million individual lives all with family and all with a future and all with souls and its touching to hear about their personal experience.”
“I enjoyed the interactivity of the scheme of work, it was not just the teacher speaking from a PowerPoint we did most of the discoveries ourselves. I found the individual stories most interesting because it gave you a sense of what actually happened not just figures and statistics.”
“I now understand about antisemitism and how it could lead to bad things. I definitely think this will change my attitudes towards future things.”
“I think these Holocaust lessons have definitely had an impact because not only has it broadened my knowledge of the subject; it has made me think about what the consequences are of extreme racism and how we should help prevent an atrocity ever happening again.”
“The Timeline activity was really enjoyable; it was probably my favourite lesson…to have this visual picture all across the wall and… it was really interesting to read case studies about people who had died and some who had survived, and we had to place them on the timeline as well… I felt really privileged because, yeah, you got to look at these people’s lives.”
