The British Empire

Outstanding KS3 history lessons on the British Empire

The requirement to teach about the British Empire at Key Stage 3 presents us with a range of challenges. We need to make the topic relevant and interesting. We also need to be balanced in our approach, given the empire-bashing that has surrounded the 150th anniversary of the Indian Mutiny (or should I say First War of Independence?) and the bicentenary of the abolition of Britain’s involvement in the Transatlantic Slave trade.

We also need to be aware of the sensitivities of teaching this topic in a multicultural society. But you know all this! What you want are some interesting approaches.

Rotten apple or …. How should we portray Dyer’s motivation in the Amritsar massacre?

This enquiry asks students to look critically at the depiction of the massacre in the film Gandhi as a way into trying to determine the motivation of Dyer.  Students are provided with an initial set of influence cards which they have to group and classify...

Read more

Teaching the British Empire KS3

In a recent article for the Telegraph, journalist and writer Jeremy Paxman made the following case for teaching the history of the British Empire: [It] explains so much about who we are now… Imperial history explains both why Britain has a seat on the UN Security...

Read more

The Empire strikes back! SMART TASK KS3

Having previously investigated the criticism of empire, students now set about defending it.  After studying a contemporary Indian view of Empire, which they critique in terms of usefulness, students explore a range of possible achievements of the empire, some using a structured sheet, others are...

Read more

What can we learn about the Empire from a Christmas pudding?

This lesson starts with a simple fun activity, working competitively in teams to locate the source of ingredients for an Empire Christmas pudding using a world map to help. Pupils are then introduced to the changing nature of the empire in the inter-war years before...

Read more

SMART TASK – How did a small country on the edge of North West Europe manage to rule a quarter of the world’s land surface and 400 million people?

This lesson asks an important question that the textbooks rarely cover and comes after students have looked at events in Africa and India in depth.  Pupils are presented with an hypothesis that the reason why the British were able to maintain such a large empire...

Read more

Smart Tasks: End of Empire: Why did it all end so quickly?

This SMART task ask pupils to classify a number of different smaller reasons why The Empire declined and fell, under four bigger headings.  But they are not told what these headings are.  This they must work out for themselves.  In searching for their own method...

Read more