UK
Number of UK schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day plunges by more than half
The number of secondary schools to hold events plummeted from more than 2,000 in 2023 to 854 in 2025
January 19, 2026 11:14
The number of secondary schools to hold events plummeted from more than 2,000 in 2023 to 854 in 2025
January 19, 2026 11:14The number of schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day has more than halved since 2023, figures show.
While more than 2,000 secondary schools across the UK held commemorative or educational events to acknowledge the occasion in 2023, that figure plunged to fewer than 1,200 the following year before tumbling again to just 854 schools in 2025, according to data from the Holocaust Memorial Trust. In total there are over 4,000 secondary schools across the country.
Holocaust Memorial Day is marked annually on January 27, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp.
On and around this day, schools, communities, faith groups and others across the UK come together at national and local events to commemorate the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered in the Holocaust by the Nazis and their collaborators, as well victims of other acts of Nazi persecution.
Each year’s commemorations have a different theme, chosen by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, as a focus for the events. The theme for 2026 is “Bridging Generations”.
Outlining some of the recommended reading material to mark this theme, the trust said the concept of bridging generations “invites us to consider our own obligations as subsequent generations”
The list includes texts from teenagers Anne Frank – the famed diarist – and Avraham Koplowicz who were amongst the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust.
“Most of the readings contain reflections from survivors or victims in which they ask future generations to remember them, their families and their experiences. In some cases, these messages are directed to some extent to family members born after the war. However, these and other messages contained in the readings are also aimed at posterity generally, as injunctions to us to commemorate and to comprehend the Holocaust,” the organisation said.
Responding to the data showing the declining number of schools marking the day, the Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis, said he fears “for what will happen this year” as he urged parents and educators not to succumb to external pressure to make teaching about the Holocaust “controversial” amid public concern and anger about the war in Gaza and the actions of the Israeli government.
Writing in the Sunday Times, Mirvis said Holocaust Memorial Day “is not a platform for political debate. It is not an endorsement of any government, perspective, or conflict. It is an act of human memory. To insist that it must justify itself by reference to today’s headlines is to fundamentally misunderstand it.”
Holocaust education therefore not “Jewish self-interest” but “civic education in its most urgent form”, he continued.
Mirvis added: “Honouring Jewish victims of genocide does not diminish compassion for any other people. On the contrary, it enlarges it, because collective memory is not a finite resource. The lesson of the Holocaust is not that Jewish suffering matters more, but that Jewish suffering matters at all. And that when Jews are dehumanised and attacked, it is a sign that our entire society is experiencing a fundamental moral malaise.”
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