Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to disseminate the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's Recommendations for Teaching and Learning about the Persecution and Genocide of the Roma during the Nazi Era, published in December 2024, to schools and to incorporate it into teacher training.

The Holocaust is the only historic event which is compulsory within the current national curriculum for history at key stage 3. The government has made a commitment that the Holocaust will remain a compulsory topic in the reformed national curriculum, which will also be required teaching in academy schools when it is implemented.

The history curriculum gives teachers and schools the freedom to decide how to teach the subject and what resources to use to support an understanding of the Holocaust and the Nazi’s persecution of non-Jewish groups including the genocide of the Roma. This can already include the work of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

The government supports the teaching of Holocaust education by funding teachers’ professional development in this subject through University College London’s Centre for Holocaust Education (CfHE), and the Holocaust Educational Trust’s (HET) Lessons from Auschwitz project, which gives students aged 16 to 18 the opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. CfHE will receive £500,000 in government funding in the 2024/25 financial year, match funded by the Pears Foundation, and HET will receive £2.3 million. Both Lessons from Auschwitz and the knowledge and training provided by the CfHE include information and resources to support an understanding of the Holocaust and the Nazi’s persecution of other non-Jewish groups, including the genocide of the Roma.

In addition, a further £2 million funding for Holocaust remembrance and education was committed in the Autumn Budget on 30 October 2024. This will be used to support the ambition set by my right hon. Friend, the Prime Minister for all students to have the opportunity to hear a recorded survivor testimony. The department is currently exploring how it can support schools to fulfil this ambition.