The Football and War School History Project 2018-2019

18/07/2019  -  2.00

Ben Gregory

It is with great pleasure that I can record a fifth year of the Football and War School History Project. This has once again been an invaluable experience for students, and one which has now been undertaken at three separate school sites at Key Stage 3 level; offering students the opportunity to experience social change through the use of artefacts and tracing the social changes of the twentieth century through the medium of the period’s conflicts and football.

During this academic year, Year 7 students alongside their normal curriculum model, were exposed to a variety of academic stimulation materials first founded on the use of artefacts such as pre and post decimal coinage, comics and magazines aimed at children through the period 1950-late 1980s. This allows for both numeracy and literacy involvement with the cost of living appreciated through the twentieth century and the language applicable to younger peoples’ entertainment literature. These stimuli feed into the overarching aim which is to engage students with the concept of social change through the use of these artefacts employing the historian’s skills of accessing nature, origin and purpose to demonstrate how even mundane features such as a 1950’s typewriter – made by a Japanese company as first the British and then the USA’s share of this market receded – detail the century’s development.

The Project has great merit in allowing students to build on their learning such as appreciating the involvement of PALS Battalions in the First World War and the circumstances experienced by Heart of Midlothian Football Club whose team volunteered for war en masse between August and November 1914 and was devastated by the fighting in the war’s opening. Equally, the knowledge imparted in the manner outlined, facilitates the involvement of external speakers: Martin Brodetsky from Oxford United Football Club charting the club’s history and their own social development from being an amateur to a professional club, as well as the leading military historian, Professor Gary Sheffield who detailed the events at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 where Britain’s volunteer army met with huge casualties from the summer of that year through to November and the battle’s muddy close.

I am therefore delighted to have completed this year of the Football and War School History Project. I would like to thank Dr Alex Alexandrou for his co-ordination of the project which provides such a wonderful opportunity for students to access artefact materials and develop historical skills that will be invaluable should they progress to History at GCSE level.    

Biography

Ben Gregory is Head of Humanities at St Birinus School in Didcot, Oxfordshire. Ben is a lifelong Everton FC fan and a historian. His specialist history subject is the development of domestic sport in Britain in the late nineteenth century