History tells stories about people, places and things to help explain to young people of any age why the world is as it is as they grow up and begin to question it.
Schools will choose different periods and settings and topics to cove during different Key Stages, but all of them are pretty well guaranteed to be rooted in actual places that can be visited, explored and enjoyed.
It has been a curious fact that for many years primary classes have studied the Roman, Anglo-Saxon and medieval periods, while secondary school syllabuses have been more engaged in post-medieval periods. For a while secondary courses involved a great deal of ‘topic work’. While this discipline still exists, the recent examination syllabuses have returned to an emphasis on historical periods and links.
But all periods and topics provide fantastic opportunities for school visits. We are so lucky that so many general and specialist museums and visitor centres exist in the UK. The problem is not a shortage of possibilities but how one sifts through the available opportunities to make choices.
The Historical Association website carries information about course, conferences, study tours, and the Association has published ‘The Historian’ magazine for many years. Handsam is also happy to help, please contact us on 03332 070737 or email info@schooltripsadvisor.org.uk.
Most venues will have teaching materials and activities geared to students’ different ages and aptitudes whether at primary or secondary level. All of them will set out to develop students’ ability to understand, analyse and evaluate key features and characteristics of historical periods and events studied.
Some venues will be easy to identify because they fit neatly with the period and topic being studied but others may offer new possibilities, not least to the teachers themselves. Teachers need and deserve their own stimulation.
Over the next four years there will be an upsurge in visits to the First World War battlefields. Because of this there will be an increase in companies offering visits and requirement for battlefield guides, especially in northern France and Belgium. There are bound to be discrepancies in guides’ knowledge and experience. Close research into the credentials of the company you are contracting with, and the company’s guarantees about guides, will ensure that your group will not be disappointed.
Main organisations:
Commonwealth War Graves Commission
Inclusion: NASEN
Thought of visiting?
Roman Vindolanda and Roman Army Museum at Hadrian’s Wall
Viriconium, Wroxeter, Shropshire
The Jorvik Viking Centre, York
Offa’s Dyke Trail and Chirk Castle
The National Trust for Scotland
Clan Donald Visitor Centre, Isle of Skye
Bosworth Battlefield Visitor Centre
Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, Berlin
Exeter Cathedral Education Centre
The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
The Mary Rose Museum, Portsmouth
East Anglia Railway Museum, Colchester
The National Tramway Museum, Matlock
The Scott Monument is the largest monument to a writer in the world. It commemorates Sir Walter Scott.
There are 287 steps to the top of the Scott Monument, from where you can enjoy breathtaking views of Edinburgh and the surrounding countryside. Find out about Sir Walter Scott and the monument in the museum room.
Kit's Coty House and its neighbour, Little Kit's Coty House, are the remains of two megalithic 'dolmen' barrow burial chambers standing in open fields.
The sites offer fine long views across the North Downs and Medway Valley.
The Roman Wall of St Albans, which was built between AD 265 and 270 to defend the Roman city of Verulamium, can still be traced for most of its two-mile circuit.
Beautifully sited on the fringe of Dartmoor, Lydford boasts three defensive features. Near the centre is a 13th-century tower on a mound, built as a prison. It later became notorious for harsh punishments - 'the most annoyous, contagious and detestable place within this realm'. To the south is an earlier Norman earthwork castle: to the north, Saxon town defences.
Take your students on a 60 minute journey through 700 years of Berlin’s murky history, as our full cast of entertaining theatrical actors bring to life gripping stories of the capital’s most infamous characters and events, from medieval times to the 1900’s.
St George’s Market is one of Belfast’s oldest attractions. It was built between 1890 and 1896 and is one of the best markets in the UK and Ireland. It has been selected for numerous local and national titles and awards for its fresh, local produce and great atmosphere. It holds a weekly Friday Variety Market, the City Food and Craft Market on Saturdays and the Sunday Market.
Put those school books away and step into the past with a history lesson you will never forget!
Our Dungeon’s team have years of experience organising the best school trips. We make history and education fun. Your students will be taken through hundreds of years of Amsterdam ’s murky past through great acting, brilliant scripts and amazing special effects. It will be scary fun.
Set in the internationally renowned Orford Ness nature reserve, the Orford Ness Pagodas are cold war relics on a shingle spit in Suffolk, built to test Britain’s atomic bombs. Here the bombs’ detonators were put in pits and subjected to the shocks they might experience on their way to a target, to ensure they wouldn’t go off prematurely.
St Bartholemew's is the largest NHS Trust in the UK serving a population of 2.5 million in east London and beyond and our hospitals have long and important histories.
The museum is in room 101 at New Scotland Yard, Victoria – an L-shaped space crammed with glass display cabinets containing items covering over 140 years of crime and criminals.
The Norfolk Record Office holds millions of documents, filling almost 10 miles of shelves. They have been created by a variety of organizations and people, past and present, range in date from the eleventh century to the twenty-first and relate to every town and parish in Norfolk.
This picturesque and rustic stone chapel is thought to have been the chantry for Shap Abbey originally. It was built around the sixteenth-century and has been used as a cottage and meeting house during its long history.
The key to open the chapel door is hanging by the front door of the house opposite.
Lincolnshire Archives was established as a county service in 1948 with the bringing together of the records collected by the Lindsey, Kesteven and Holland County Councils, and the Lincoln Diocesan Record Office. The Archives service was known as the Lincolnshire Archives Committee.
William John Cavendish Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, 5th Duke of Portland (1800-79), was the eccentric owner of Welbeck Abbey. Living as a recluse in a small suite of rooms in the massive abbey, he employed a team of hundreds of workmen to excavate a series of underground rooms.
A burial ground for London's Nonconformists from 1665 onwards, Bunhill Fields is the last resting place of Pilgrim's Progress author John Bunyan (d. 1688) and Quakers founder George Fox (d. 1691). Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe (d. 1731), hymnwriter Isaac Watts (d. 1748) and poet and painter William Blake (d.1827) are also buried here.
The Newsam Library and Archives holds extensive collections of current and historical materials on education and related areas of social science.
In addition to supporting the work of staff and students at the UCL Institute of Education, it welcomes enquiries from all scholars, researchers, and others in the community with an interest in education.
The National Conservation Centre, formerly the Midland Railway Goods Warehouse, is located in Liverpool.
Lancashire Archives collects unique, historic records that reflect Lancashire and Lancashire life - past and present. These cover church registers, historic images of Lancashire, the North West Sound Archive, police records and old maps of the region.
Arrangements may be made for groups to visit Lancashire Archives
Situated in the heart of Cardiff’s elegant civic centre, today it houses Wales’s national archaeology, art, geology and natural history collections as well as major touring and temporary exhibitions.
Step back in time at the National Roman Legion Museum and explore life in a far-flung outpost of the mighty Roman Empire. Wales was the furthest outpost of the Roman Empire. In AD 75, the Romans built a fortress at Caerleon that would guard the region for over 200 years.
Groups
Pre-booked groups benefit from:
The leading authority on the history of the British Army is a first class museum that moves, inspires, challenges, educates and entertains.
Experience a real life period drama as you explore life above and below stairs.
Explore the impressive mansion house and uncover the story behind the Braybrooke’s unique natural history collection.
Strategically positioned atop Portsdown Hill, with panoramic views across the Meon Valley and Portsmouth Harbour, Fort Nelson is an historic monument, restored to how it would have been in the 1890s. Visitors can access most areas of the fortifications and see how the Fort would have operated.
General Collection
The Bushcraft Company offer residential school trips with a difference, taking students into the wild and giving them real back-to-nature experiences they will never forget.
A viral video shows a black girl being assaulted by a white woman in a corridor.
Police in Iceland are investigating after a British schoolgirl was slapped and chased by a tour guide in a hotel corridor.
The schoolgirl, 13, who attended Harris Girls’ Academy, was assaulted whilst on a school trip to Iceland to see the Northern Lights. The incident occurred at Hotel Örk, Hveragerdi on 13th October.