GCSE History

Medieval & Early Modern Health

How did people stay healthy before modern medicine? Tracing public health from c.1250 to c.1750, work explores living conditions in medieval Britain — housing, food, clean water and waste — and the responses to the Black Death, before the growth of towns brings plague orders, the gin craze and the first government efforts to clean up the urban environment.

Modern Public Health

From cholera to Covid. Work follows public health through industrial Britain — the Public Health Acts and reform of filthy cities — and into the modern age, with responses to Spanish Influenza and AIDS and growing government action on pollution, smoking and healthy lifestyles. Students draw on their own experience of a pandemic to add perspective across time.

A continent transformed. Work explores how and why the USA expanded from 1789, the spread of cotton plantations and slavery, and the removal of indigenous peoples from the east — before the culture of the Plains Indians, the journeys of early migrants, and the gold rushes that drew a nation westward.

Civil War & American Cultures

Division, war and its aftermath. Work explores the causes of the Civil War and the African American experience of it, the limits of Reconstruction, and the conflict on the Plains — railroads, ranches, homesteaders and the Indian Wars — as reservations and the destruction of the buffalo reshaped the Plains Indians’ way of life.

History on our doorstep. Through a visit to the site, work explores why Norwich Castle was built where it was, how it has changed and been used across the centuries, and what its physical remains reveal about everyday life, attitudes and values — weighing the strengths and weaknesses of a site as historical evidence.

Conquest & Control

1066 and all that followed. Work explores late Anglo-Saxon England on the eve of the conquest, the succession crisis and the battles of Fulford, Stamford Bridge and Hastings — then the resistance to Norman rule, the Harrying of the North, and how castles, the Domesday Book and changes in land, law and Church cemented control of a conquered nation.

How does a democracy become a dictatorship? Work explores Hitler’s rise to total power between 1933 and 1934, then the machinery of terror — the SS, the Gestapo, the courts and concentration camps — alongside the reach of Nazi propaganda and the opposition that persisted from the Left, church leaders and youth groups.

Changing Lives, War & Occupation

Life, and death, under the regime. Work explores the impact of Nazi policies on men, women and young people, the growing persecution of Jews, and the move to a war economy — before the contrasting nature of occupation across Europe, the Holocaust, and the responses of collaboration, accommodation and resistance.

Revision & Exams

The final stretch. Revision is active: the five studies revisited, source and interpretation skills sharpened, and exam questions practised — from source analysis to the extended interpretation judgements that carry the highest marks.