What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

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Considerations and recommendations
anything meaningful about the Holocaust.
As the number of students who study history
narrows in the final years of compulsory education
(in 2014 it was 6 per cent of the total entry for all
subjects), so too do the opportunities for studying
the Holocaust, and there are some key issues of
concern regarding the history curriculum in the final
two years of secondary education, at Advanced
Level (A level) or Advanced Subsidiary Level (AS level):
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As with the new GCSEs, A level students (typically
aged 16 to 18) are expected to devote a large
amount of time to the study of British history,
which does not include the Holocaust.
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None of the new A level and AS level
specifications intended for study from September
2015 specifically mentions ‘the Holocaust’ in any
of the optional course units (OCR 2014a, 2014b;
Pearson/Edexcel no date; AQA 2014).
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Students are offered a vast array of choice when
selecting which units to study, for example
the OCR (2014a: 7) specifications provide 24
units that could possibly be studied as part of
non-British history and these range from ‘The
Rise of Islam c. 550–750’ to ‘Apartheid and
Reconciliation in South Africa 1948–1999’. Given
the vast amount of choice available, it is very
unlikely that large numbers of students will select
units focusing on German history or other histories
in which the Holocaust might feature.
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Where attention is paid to the study of Nazi
Germany, issues related to Nazi racial policy and
the murder and persecution of Jews is often
included as part of a broader examination of
German history. In this respect, the OCR (2014a)
and Pearson/Edexcel (no date) specifications
are very similar. Both include attention to ‘racial
policies’ and the ‘Final Solution’ but these are
subsumed under a broader study of ‘the impact
of war and defeat on Germany, 1939–1949’
(OCR) and ‘Aspects of life in Germany and East
Germany, 1918–1989’ (Pearson/Edexcel).
Analysis of the specifications for A level study reveals
that it is very unlikely that secondary school students
aged 16 to 18 studying history will focus on the
Holocaust in any detailed way. Indeed, in contrast
to many of their peers in other European and North
American countries, only a very small percentage of
students who leave school at 18 will have studied
the Holocaust in any detail during their final years of
secondary education.
2. Progression in students’ learning
and the ‘spiral curriculum’
Evidence from both this study and the 2009 teacher
study revealed that teaching and learning about the
Holocaust often occurs in ad hoc and uncoordinated
ways in schools across the country. As mentioned
above, if teaching and learning about the Holocaust
is to be significantly improved, the issue of
progression in students’ learning deserves critical
attention. A powerful way to address this issue and
to ensure that learning is coherent, age-appropriate
and developmental is for schools, or networks
of primary and secondary schools, to consider
adopting a ‘spiral curriculum’ in Holocaust education.
The notion of a spiral curriculum is attributed to
the acclaimed US educator and psychologist
Jerome Bruner, who reasoned in his classic work The
Process of Education (1960: 33) that ‘any subject
can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest
form to any child at any stage of development’.
Fundamental to Bruner’s theory was the idea that,
if teaching is structured appropriately, any student
can understand any subject at any age and that it
is possible to return to that subject in ever-deeper
ways, building on prior knowledge and layering in
more complexity as students progress through the
school system.
Based on analysis of the findings in this research
and from ongoing engagements with schools across
the country, the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education
has already begun to develop a framework for a
meaningful national spiral curriculum in Holocaust
education. The curriculum is founded upon a
coherent and developmental approach to curriculum
design in which considerations of aims, content,
pedagogy, assessment and the contributions of
different subject specialisms are central.
Significantly, the Prime Minister’s Holocaust
Commission recently endorsed the need for a spiral
curriculum in its key recommendations and noted
that such a curriculum would ‘enable teachers to
plan lessons and outcomes for each stage with an
understanding of progression and a framework for
teachers to assess impact’ (Cabinet Office 2015: 47).
In addition, the Commission views the establishment
of the spiral curriculum as a central feature of its
recommendations to establish ‘a world-class
learning centre’ that drives ‘national educational
activity.’
This emphasis on an intelligently designed spiral
curriculum is undoubtedly welcome as, together
with a carefully aligned national programme of
professional development for teachers, it promises to
dramatically improve teaching and learning about the
Holocaust across the country. However, the potential
for this exciting development to impact on the field in
positive ways has to be tempered by the problematic
curriculum and examination realities outlined above.
Accordingly, ways must be found to incentivise and
support schools that wish to undertake such a bold
curriculum initiative.