UCL Beacon School

“You can’t interpret the world without understanding the Holocaust”

Our programme helps teachers to support young people as they deal with powerful and sometimes disorientating feelings, helping them to express themselves and to develop their emotional literacy. It also explores how and why the Holocaust happened through detailed historical study of the most extensively documented, intensively researched, and best understood genocide in human history.

This combination of the affective and the cognitive realms is essential if we are to both strengthen a commitment to genocide prevention and, through careful comparison with other examples of mass violence, to better identify the warning signs of future atrocities and to understand what sort of interventions might be available in order to prevent them.

UCL Centre for Holocaust Education works with schools to enable young people to deepen their knowledge and understanding of the significance of the Holocaust and to explore its relevance for their own lives and the contemporary world. Developing this area of the school curriculum has also been shown to have significant benefits for broader educational goals, for pupil engagement and achievement, and for teaching and learning across a range of subject disciplines.

The Quality Mark serves to uphold the integrity of the UCL Beacon School programme, ensures key criteria and expectations are met and that innovative best practice, specific to individual school contexts are recognised. The award of the Quality Mark and re-designation of UCL Beacon School status is the result of a successful review process.