What do young people know and understand about the Holocaust?

Our recently published research What do students know and understand about the Holocaust? Evidence from English secondary schools, draws on contributions from more than 8,000 11-18 year olds, making it the world’s largest ever study of its kind.

The research included a comprehensive survey and a series of in-depth interviews with more than 200 young people to build the most detailed and authoritative national portrait ever created of students’ knowledge and understanding of an important historial event.

Click here to find out more and to download a PDF of the full report.  You can also access a summary of our key findings online.

Understanding teachers’ needs

Before designing our support for schools, we wanted to find out more about what was already happening in classrooms across the country and to listen to teachers about their experiences, needs and challenges.  Subsequently, we published our report ‘Teaching about the Holocaust in English Secondary Schools: An empirical study of national trends, perspectives and practice’ in 2009.  This landmark study explores when, where how and why the Holocaust is taught in state-maintained secondary schools in England. The researchers employed a mixed methodology with an online survey completed by 2,108 teachers and follow-up qualitative interviews with 68 teachers in 24 schools.

Click here to find out more and download a PDF of the report.

Beacon Schools Evaluation

A central feature of the Centre’s Beacon School programme is to more closely understand how teachers and schools develop schemes of work and lesson plans focused on the Holocaust.  The programme is designed to provide teachers with the space and support to critically evaluate, discuss and reflect upon key issues.

Since its inception the Centre has been conducting a detailed evaluation of the programme to find out more about the experiences of teachers and how their participation has contributed to them developing expertise in teaching about the Holocaust.

Click here to find out more about this important piece of evaluation work.

Impact

Following on from the recent launch of our major piece of research into what young people think and know about the Holocaust, which draws on contributions from more than 8,000 11-18 year olds, our next step is to further explore how we can support teachers to improve their students’ knowledge and understanding of this important historical event.

Click here to find out more about the Centre’s plans to assess the impact of its professional development programmes for teachers.