The Schmooze
Now is a good time to reimagine Holocaust education
The revised National Curriculum gives us a golden opportunity to improve the teaching of the Holocaust
November 26, 2025 15:43
2 min read
The revised National Curriculum gives us a golden opportunity to improve the teaching of the Holocaust
November 26, 2025 15:43It often feels as though hardly a week passes without a well-meaning friend or family member sending me another opinion piece or podcast about what Holocaust education is supposedly getting wrong. Broadly speaking, I find myself agreeing and disagreeing with these critiques in roughly equal measure. This is partly because there are countless perspectives on what effective Holocaust education looks like – but also because people cannot even agree on what “Holocaust education” actually is. Are we meant to study the genocide of Europe’s Jews in depth, or use it as a case study to illuminate any number of other themes?
These questions were very much on my mind last week, when 175 experts and practitioners gathered over two days at JW3 for the AJR’s educational forum, Remembering & Rethinking 2025: Teaching and Learning About the Holocaust. It was inspiring to be among so many colleagues who devote their professional lives to improving how we teach the Shoah. I was particularly struck by the sector’s willingness to engage in honest, critical self-reflection. As with any conference, many speakers were eager to showcase new projects, and there were numerous examples of innovation and good practice. But these were balanced by searching conversations about what still needs to change. The opinion writers and podcasters might have been surprised by how rigorously practitioners already interrogate their own assumptions.
The timing of these discussions was apt because the AJR forum took place just two weeks after the Department for Education released the final recommendations of a year-long review of the national curriculum for England, led by Professor Becky Francis. Many of the challenges we encounter in Holocaust education are, in truth, challenges rooted not in our field but in the broader structure of education itself.
Since the first national curriculum was introduced in 1991, the Holocaust has been a compulsory topic for Key Stage 3 history, and the prime minister has already reaffirmed a commitment to keeping it in place. This mandate matters, but it is also vague and increasingly insufficient. If the revised national curriculum, set to arrive in 2028, aims to meaningfully support Holocaust education, it must do more than simply retain the requirement.
Some of the new recommendations are promising. An increased emphasis on media literacy and critical thinking, the inclusion of religious education in the national curriculum, making citizenship a statutory subject, and efforts to slim down GCSEs could create more space for exploring the Holocaust from multiple perspectives. Yet, these changes will not, on their own, amount to a major reimagining of how the Holocaust is taught.
Where real potential lies is in a piece of seemingly technical educational jargon – “vertical and horizontal coherence”.
The term may sound abstract, but it represents a significant opportunity. Vertical coherence refers to the logical progression of key themes from one school year to the next. Horizontal coherence means aligning the study of related topics across different subjects at the same time.
Together, these principles could allow students to build a deeper, more connected understanding of Jewish life before, during, and after the Holocaust, rather than encountering the topic as an isolated historical event.
The Holocaust, antisemitism and Jewish life each deserve dedicated attention in the curriculum. They are distinct subjects but intimately connected; one cannot be taught meaningfully without reference to the others.
Too often, Holocaust education has been weakened by a lack of contextual grounding in Jewish history and antisemitism. While the government has opened the door to this new approach, it will not provide the detailed blueprint. That responsibility falls to England’s Holocaust education sector.
If we seize the moment, we have an opportunity to design the significant shift that many commentators have long called for. This will require substantial collaboration between multiple organisations – something not always easily achieved. But as last week’s AJR forum demonstrated, we are experiencing a rare moment of shared purpose. The AJR is proud to help fund and convene work of this kind. Our sector must not let this opportunity pass us by.
Alex Maws is head of education and heritage at the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR)
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