What do students know and understand about the Holocaust?

Encountering representations of the Holocaust
75
Figure 4.2 Student responses to survey question 70, ‘Can you remember what year group you were in
when you first learned about the Holocaust in school?’ (percentage of students)
Percentage of students
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
28.5
Before year 7
16.8
Year 7
21.9
Year 8
23.2
Year 9
3.5 Year 10 or 11
0.6 Year 12 or 13
5.5 Don’t know
Figure 4.3 Student responses to survey question 71, ‘If you have learned about the Holocaust in
school, which subjects have you learned about it in?’ (percentage of students)
Percentage of students
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
History
Religious
education
English
School
assembly
Citizenship
or PSHE
Drama
Subject
However, as was emphasised in Chapter 3,
schools are not the only places in which young
people encounter representations of the Holocaust.
Of the 600+ students in Years 7 and 8 who did
not think they had learned about the subject at
school, approximately 74 per cent of Year 7s and
81 per cent of Year 8s were familiar with the term
‘Holocaust’ or with the history it denotes (figures
are approximate here as only students who
completed the survey electronically were asked if
they recognised a short explanation of the term).
It might then be argued that postponing formal
taught content of the Holocaust until students are
judged to have reached an appropriate maturity will
do little to prevent – or ‘protect’ – younger students
from encountering this difficult history.
It is also instructive to examine the subject
discipline in which the Holocaust is first introduced to
students in a school context. Students who reported
in the survey that they had already learned about
the Holocaust at school were also asked to indicate
the curriculum context in which this had taken
place. As Figure 4.3 shows, 86.1 per cent of these
students across all year groups had learned about
the Holocaust in history, 37.5 per cent in religious
education, 27.0 per cent in English and 26.2 per
cent in school assemblies. This is broadly consistent
with the findings of the 2009 teacher study in which
teachers reported that history was, by some margin,
the most common subject in which they taught
about the Holocaust, followed by religious education,
English, citizenship and PSHE (Pettigrew et al. 2009).
Figure 4.4 investigates this pattern in a little more
detail, presenting the responses to survey question
71 – about the subject in which they learned about
the Holocaust – given by three separate groups of
students in Years 7, 8 and 9 who each reported
that they had learned about the Holocaust for the
first time during their current academic year (so,
the Year 7s learning in that year, the Year 8s in that
year, etc). The figures suggest that it is only in Year 8
and beyond that history becomes the predominant
subject in which teaching and learning about the
Holocaust takes place. Indeed, in Year 7, only just
over a third of the students who had learned about
the Holocaust in school for the first time that year had
done so in history. A majority had been introduced to
the Holocaust in a subject other than history. Figure
4.4 also suggests that, within the school subject of
English, teaching about the Holocaust is more likely
www.ioe.ac.uk/holocaust