The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust has reported a stark fall in schools marking Holocaust Memorial Day. In 2023, around 2,000 secondary schools marked the day, but by 2025 that number had dropped to just 845.
This comes at a time of heightened concern about rising antisemitism, illustrated by the recent controversy over a Jewish MP’s planned visit to a Bristol school.
In response, the secretary of state for education has announced a review into antisemitism in schools and whether teachers feel equipped with the support, resources and confidence they need to tackle this.
This is both welcome and necessary at a moment of profound urgency for Holocaust education.
The final survivors are passing away. With them goes the lived testimony that has carried this history for generations. As those voices fall silent, distortion, denial and minimisation find ever more space to grow.
Meanwhile, teachers are increasingly left without adequate support as they confront a far more complicated educational environment.
Misunderstanding
Research points to widespread misunderstanding among students and staff alike, from assumptions about Britain’s motives during the war to false beliefs about what was known at the time.
Such errors are not harmless. They expose how easily ignorance opens the door to division.
Holocaust education is not solely the teaching of Jewish history.
Within classrooms, it equips young people to interrogate prejudice, propaganda and state power.
It challenges students to consider how ordinary people become complicit, how falsehoods take hold, and what responsibilities fall to individuals, educators and institutions.
This is why UNESCO and educators across France, India and Australia have already intensified their focus on teacher training to address antisemitism.
The message to the education sector is unambiguous. Antisemitism is among the world’s oldest and most adaptable hatreds, and schools play a vital role in confronting it.
Schools need practical approaches
The good news is that schools do not need specialist expertise, large budgets or extensive curriculum time to engage meaningfully. What they need is practical approaches that can be adopted immediately.
Despite the loss of living survivors, learning can still be grounded in powerful testimony.
High‑quality recorded testimonies are widely available, and many schools find it effective to focus on one survivor’s story so that students can engage with their experience in depth.
Humanising the history in this way is essential. Young people connect far more strongly through individual lives and personal stories.
Using diaries, letters and photographs, as well as accounts of rescuers, resisters and upstanders, helps young people understand the Holocaust as a series of human choices rather than a distant historical event.
Critical thinking must sit at the heart of this work. Students benefit most when taught not only what happened but how it became possible.
Short lessons on propaganda, misinformation and media manipulation, connected to both historical and contemporary examples, give students the tools to analyse how ordinary decisions accumulate and how societies shift.
Exploring the different roles played by ordinary professionals, teachers, doctors, neighbours, police, can help students see that the Holocaust was not inevitable but was shaped by thousands of individual actions.
Student-led assemblies can also be powerful, giving children ownership of their research and reflection.
Cross-curricular work
Commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day can also be meaningful through cross‑curricular work.
Allowing drama, music, art and English departments to co‑create reflective performances or exhibitions can be very effective. The arts offer a particularly potent route into understanding.
When students take historical knowledge and turn it into creative expression, they often reach a deeper emotional and intellectual understanding.
Programmes like our own Echo Eternal demonstrate this transformation.
This year, students from CORE Education Trust schools across Birmingham are performing at Covent Garden alongside the Royal Ballet School and the National Youth Music Theatre to mark 80 years since the Windermere Children.
The project shows that Holocaust education can be living, relevant and connected to young people’s own experiences of loss or identity.
We stand at the edge of a generational handover. Soon, no one will remain who can say: I saw it. I was there. This is what happened.
If schools retreat now, the space will be filled by distortion, denial and hostility. But if they step up, they can ensure that the next generation inherits not only the facts of the Holocaust but the moral clarity that must accompany them.
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