Top DVD from Their Past Your Future

It has been far too long since I blogged, but I wanted to flag up a brilliant free DVD that the team at Their Past Your Future (TPYF) is sending to every primary and secondary school in November. TPYF is an education project led by a partnership of the Imperial War Museum and others, and I was pleased to have the opportunity to meet with them today to talk about the GBHT. They kindly gave me a copy of the DVD which is being sent to schools and I thought I should also provide a link to their additional learning resources here.

TPYF raised a number of issues which have given me lots to think about, and the main one is how to ensure that the Trust funds history trips which will end up giving young people a high quality educational experience rather than a jolly. As we don't intend to organise the trips ourselves, the GBHT will have to find ways of encouraging history teachers to plan trips which will get the most out of the places they are going to visit. There's a lot here that we can learn from TPYF who have run 38 trips over the past four and a half years, and one of the things I think we need to think carefully about is how teachers prepare themselves and their students for the trip and what outcomes they expect after they return.

A major issue does seem to be that many teachers do not feel adequately trained to lead history trips and TPYF have sought to remedy this by providing a learning programme called InSite. This is definitely an area which GBHT trustees need to think about for the future and it may be that as part of the funding grant we can fund training for those teachers who would benefit. Any thoughts from history teachers about what would be useful training for designing and leading history trips would be much appreciated.