New report reveals four in ten secondary school teachers have encountered antisemitism in class
A new study has revealed that four in ten secondary school teachers who teach about the Holocaust have witnessed antisemitism in the classroom.
According the research conducted by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education, fifteen percent of teachers also said that they witnessed Holocaust denial from their students either “occasionally” or “often”, while three quarters of the teachers surveyed said that they had encountered students who had repeated falsehoods about the Holocaust that they had read online.
The study recommends that more time in schools be devoted to learning about the Holocaust and its contemporary relevance, particularly as previous research has indicated that the time for learning about the Holocaust is being reduced in the Key Stage 3 curriculum. The study further recommends that teachers are given more time and encouragement to access training to confront the issues that they may encounter in the classroom.
The study, titled, “Continuity and Change: Ten years of teaching and learning about the Holocaust in England’s secondary schools”, used a mixed method approach, including both extensive survey responses from 1,077 teachers who teach about the Holocaust, as well as quantitative data from group interviews with 134 teachers from 45 different schools across the country.