On Monday 13th June, after completing all their IGCSE exams, the Year 11 History students joined Mr Fendley, Ms Stanger, Ms Johnson and Mr Trevor at 7.30am at Prague train station, before boarding their train and making their way to Berlin, which was to be their home for the next 4 days. 

After having successfully navigated the Berlin metro, and having located the hotel, the students  immediately jumped into their first activity, a 4 - hour walking tour of some of the most interesting sights of European History including the Berlin Wall, Brandenburg Gate, the infamous Bebelplatz, the most significant holocaust memorials and Hitler’s bunker. The students were excellent and absorbed a great deal of information from our fascinating tour guide. The sun was setting and our exhausted students found some places to recharge their batteries; which mostly included pizza or donuts. 

When we awoke on Tuesday morning, the students wrestled for breakfast with a host of other schools whom were also staying in our hotel. Today’s destination was the one that for many of our students would involve extolling their emotional energies, Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. We arrived 40 kms north of Berlin by train and met our wonderfully brilliant tour-guide who was one of the most qualified experts on the subject, having worked and lived their for nearly two decades. The students were brilliant at absorbing and reflecting on her every word as we slowly made our way around the inhospitable landscape, finishing within the confines of the execution and crematorium chambers. The students still determined to learn as much as possible about the evils of the human condition, then asked to continue on their own where they made their way to the exhibitions on human experimentation and toture within the camps. This debilitating emotional journey meant that they needed a significant amount of free-time to reflect on the horrors they had witnessed, and on returning to Berlin the group was given the freedom of Alexanderplatz to digest all they had experienced. 

Wednesday arrived and this was to be their most educationally taxing day where the students were participating in a university style workshop examining the ‘role of the perpetrators and structure of terror within the Nazi state’ within a working museum known as the ‘Topographie of Terror’ - built on the former site of the Gestapo and SS security office. The students were given a highly information tour where the focus was on the ordinariness of the perpetrators and the dangers in calling them insane or evil but rather to delve into the nature of terror, propaganda and systematic persecution. This culmination of this 5 hour session ended with the students presenting the findings of several investigations which involved examining fascinating original source documents uncovered from the Nazi state that dealt with denouncements, the targeting of specific groups, how ordinary men committed the terrible mass-shootings and whether justice was really applied to the perpetrators. The students were absolutely fantastic, and our guide was astonished at how much core knowledge they had. After an educationally grueling day, the students were given the chance to watch the sunset over the river Spree, just in front of the East-side Gallery.

Our final day meant quick room inspections, bag drops and our last excursion, which meant leaving the centre of Berlin again and making our way to the beautiful lakes of Wannsee. We walked in the sun past many magnificent villas until we came upon our destination; the ‘House of the Wannsee Conference’, where Reinhard Heydrich had held the official meeting on 20th January 1942 to approve the ‘Final Solution’. The students were awed at the juxtaposition of both the beauty of the place against the terrible evil of the discussion that developed inside. Our students once again were exemplary and after finishing our final visit, we made our way back to Berlin, and onto the main train station where as the afternoon slowly ended we snaked our way through the German landscape and arrived into a warm evening in Prague. 

A massive thank you to all the Year 11 students who truly made this trip an unforgettable and wonderful experience, with their behaviour, resilience, respect and resourcefulness. Another huge thank you to the staff who accompanied us; Mr Trevor, Ms Stanger and Ms Johnson who were all invaluable. 

Mr Fendley

IGCSE Assessment and Exams

All History IGCSE candidates will take Papers 1, 2 and 3. Paper 3 is coursework based on a depth study unit and will be carried out by the students under teacher supervision.

The coursework is up to 2000 words in length, based on content taken from the Depth Studies covered in class.  The coursework should be based on a single question and should not be broken down into sub-questions. The coursework must be focused on the issue of significance.  The coursework component is internally assessed and externally moderated.