Teaching Industrial Britain at KS3

Industrial Britain 1750-1900: KS3 outstanding lessons

We all know that this is a vast topic and one that some colleagues have difficulty with  motivating some students. You will find very little on the Four Field crop rotation here, or mules and Spinning Jennies, but there are a number of really good enquiries on life in Industrial Britain. Now that pupils coming from KS2 no longer have to study Victorian Britain, thanks to Gove’s revisions of the NC, there is an argument for giving coverage of the Industrial Revolution, its significance and consequences even more status.

The outstanding lessons that follow are all enquiry-led and each focus on one of the main second-order concepts such as change and continuity in the case of Did the Factory Act really make much difference?

The third enquiry into the high infant death rate in Bradford involves pupils in a history mystery: if the death rate for adults dropped why did very young infants continue to die in such large numbers? A similar questioning style is used to explain the conundrum of people leaving the countryside in droves (where life expectancy was 38), to work and live in Manchester where life expectancy in 1842 was about 18!