Video · Teachers Media
Mr Gladstone, and it might be said more
The Victorians are a core KS2 history topic in most UK schools, and one where the curriculum has shifted significantly in recent years. Where once pupils learned about famous Victorians and industrial inventions, current best practice tends to interrogate the era more critically — the empire, slavery's abolition and its aftermath, the lives of working people, the reform movements that reshaped politics.
About this video
The 2014 national curriculum revisions for KS2 history introduced more critical framing of British history, including expectations to teach the Empire and its consequences alongside the more traditional focus on invention, exploration and monarchy. The Victorian era sits at the heart of this shift: no period is more central to modern Britain, and none has been more thoroughly reconsidered by historians in the last few decades.
The classic KS2 Victorian topics — Queen Victoria, the industrial revolution, the railways, workhouses, the Great Exhibition — remain useful but are increasingly taught with additional depth: whose labour built the industrial economy, whose land the empire took, whose voices are missing from the standard narrative. Pupils are asked to think about who wrote history and whose experiences got left out.
The pedagogical opportunities are strong. Victorian sources — photographs, diaries, newspaper articles, campaigning posters — give pupils direct access to primary evidence. Local history often connects (many British towns have visible Victorian architecture, factories, workhouses, or transport infrastructure). And the era's reform movements — abolition of slavery in the empire (1833), Factory Acts, extension of the vote — give a chance to teach how change happens through sustained political struggle.
Threads worth pulling at KS2
- The industrial revolution and its human cost. Factories, child labour, disease, housing — alongside inventions and progress.
- Empire. Where it went, what it did, who resisted, what its lasting effects are.
- Reform. How things changed — abolition, Factory Acts, education acts, the extension of the franchise.
- Voices from the margins. Workhouse children, factory workers, women's movements, colonial subjects.
- Local Victorian history. What still stands in your town, and what it can tell pupils.
Discussion prompts
- How has your Victorian topic changed in the last five years, and what's driven the change?
- How do you handle the interpretive complexity — teaching pupils that historians disagree — at KS2 without overwhelming them?
- What Victorian source or story reliably lands with your pupils and gets them thinking historically?
Try this in your classroom
- Choose one local Victorian building or feature and build a lesson around it. Pupils investigate what it was, who used it, and what it tells us about the era.
- Compare two contemporary Victorian sources with different perspectives on the same event (a factory-owner's account and a factory-worker's account, say). Discuss why they differ.
- Ask pupils to plan a museum exhibit on Victorian Britain for younger pupils. What would they choose to include and why? Their choices reveal their understanding.