Press Release

Using a slice of history to make the past come alive for schools

17 Oct 2006

The Police Archive within The Open University’s International Centre for Comparative Criminological Research has received a £50,000 Heritage Lottery Fund grant to use one of the largest collections of law enforcement archives to bring history alive for students.

The project ‘Studying Social History and Citizenship by Pupils and Young People from Police Archives’ has been developed with the National Archives under its Archives for All programme. The aim is to develop two packages for schools using material in the archive.

In consultation with teachers in three schools in Bedford, the packages will consist of a guide for teachers and then a collection of documents ranging from letters and photographs, to diaries and police orders. Eventually packages would be available both on-line and on CD for teachers elsewhere.

OU Professor of History, Clive Emsley says the project “will show students the human side of history, making it more relevant to them than just memorising dates, battles and formal treaties. Out of the dust of decades we can resurrect the pictures and words of people who lived the history, and we feel that is going to interest young people in learning about the past as well as interpreting their future role as responsible citizens.”

The history package will focus on the role of the police and individual policemen in England during the Second World War. The Archive will use the story of Fred Fancourt, a policeman who drove an ambulance during the Blitz in Birmingham. It will be his words echoing from the past as recorded in his diary that will bring the events alive.

The Citizenship package will help to better define the teaching of citizenship by focusing on the citizen’s responsibility, particularly on the road, and how the police seek to foster such responsibility including the training of police officers. The OU archives will be used to show, for example, how cameras to detect speeders were developed from 1910 stopwatches to present day cameras.