On Wednesday 17 November, a member of the Essex Records Office visited Year 5 to provide an interesting and thought provoking History lesson with a difference! The theme was Victorian Children in Essex, and provided an exciting, extra stimulus for our Creative Curriculum topic, ‘The Victorian Tale’.
 
Year 5 were shown an early photograph of a class of school children, circa 1892, and immediately became history detectives, as they made comparisons between themselves and the rather unhappy looking Victorian pupils. Lively comments such as, ‘the girls are all in pinafores’, ‘why are there so few boys?’, ‘nobody is wearing glasses’, ‘that boy’s face is blurred’, led to more detailed discussions about Victorian clothing, education for boys and girls, no money to help with payments for glasses, and the advent of the first camera, for which you had to keep very still!

Other photographs or documents observed and discussed included a Victorian classroom; girls taking part in a cookery lesson; a scene from the workhouse and an advertisement for a new, local boarding school, The Roxwell Academy. The documents generating the greatest interest and comment were pages from a school’s punishment book: 2 strokes from the birch cane for breaking your school slate and 4 lashes for refusing to do a task set for bad behaviour, having been warned...Perhaps we do prefer our school in the 21st Century after all!