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This new site is one of our most powerful resources yet, allowing students to investigate the 20th century as the Cabinet saw it.
Cabinet Papers includes a range of interactive modules focusing on post-war Britain and the 1930s, including the genesis of the Welfare State and the National Health Service, as well as the General Strike and the history of the Trade Union movement. All the modules are built to A level exam specifications.
In addition the site features a powerful writing frame tool to improve essay technique, maps, information on every British government since the First World War and the complete text of Cabinet Papers from 1915 to 1978.
World War Two nominated for BETT Award
Our World War Two site has been nominated for a BETT Award - our second nomination in two years. We will be at the BETT Show at Olympia from 14 - 17 January, upstairs on stand T14 - poised to answer questions on all our resources, old and new.
World War Two features nine animated maps to show the progress of the conflict across the world, 20 classroom investigations for key stage 3 written by top history guru Ben Walsh and hundreds of documents, sound files, video clips and photographs. It the ultimate classroom resource on the conflict.
The site is divided into six theatres of war (two in Europe, Atlantic, Pacific, Asia and the Mediterranean and North Africa) and aims to explore not just the most well-known aspects of World War Two like the Battle of Britain or the D-Day landings, but also the fall of Singapore, the experience of living in occupied Europe and Monty's double. If you thought you'd seen it all on World War Two, we hope you'll think again.
January 2009 sees the launch of phase 2 of this exciting learning resource. In phase 2, students and teachers will be able to access powerful new tools in order to build their own online resources and presentations from a vastly expanded selection of hundreds of film clips, photographs and documents.
The National Archives has joined forces with the South East Grid for Learning (SEGfL), English Heritage and the British Film Institute to deliver a combination of archival materials for schools. Unlocking Archives is a project that encourages teachers to combine different types of archival material for pupils to use in the classroom.
Phase 1 is already online and brings together documents from Learning Curve, photographs from English Heritage's Heritage Explorer and film from the BFI's Screenonline to provide teachers with an unparalleled online resource for the History and Citizenship classroom at key stages 2-4.
Two new podcasts produced as part of our A level masterclass series are now online. Students can listen to a full-length 'university style' lecture from Dr. John Shaw looking at Victorian attitudes to poverty, and hear Dr. Peter Klaus of Pembroke College Oxford tackle some of the big ideas in history in extracts from our on-site masterclass sessions.
Meanwhile the Past Masters team look at Henry V and the Hundred Years War in France. Next up: the Berlin Airlift. As always drop us an email if you've got a topic you think we should cover in a podcast or if you're interested in booking one of our masterclass sessions.
The National Archives has set up a photostream on Flickr to help share our collections more widely. You can see our images at http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives/ and we encourage students and teachers to comment, annotate and tag the images. We'll be adding new pictures every week.
We also want your images of The National Archives. Our Flickr group is at http://www.flickr.com/groups/nationalarchives/ and we'd love to see images you might have taken of your visit here or pictures of our documents.
You might also want to check out our YouTube channel. We'll be adding lots more videos over the next few months.
World War Two: Government Posters 
Key stage 2 groups can find out how the British government fought the information war on the Home Front in this completely new lesson looking at Ministry of Information posters and film.
Past Pleasures
How did the Victorians have fun? This lesson for key stage 2 uses our extensive visual holdings from the 19th century to show Victorians were frequently amused.
Chamberlain and Hitler
What was Chamberlain thinking? Suitable for A level groups, students can read the PM's own notes from his Berchtesgaden meeting with Hitler as they grapple with Chamberlain's appeasement policy.
Florence Nightingale: why do we remember her?
Look at the nursing work Florence and her team carried out in the Crimea and her strict rules for nurses. See if you could have got the job in this key stage 1 and 2 lesson.
Learning Curve is changing. We're continuing our work redeveloping the site, aiming to make it easier to find things, improve the design and pull in content that in the past has been scattered across The National Archives' website. We'll keep you posted on how it's all going - you may have spotted a few changes already.
In the meantime we want your views on the redevelopment. What do you like about the current Learning Curve? What don't you like? How could things be improved? Drop us an email at education@nationalarchives.gov.uk
January
15th January 1559: Coronation of Queen Elizabeth I. Image was vital to the Queen - as to all Tudor monarchs - and the use of the queen's portrait was tightly controlled. What can the Royal seal tell us about its owner?
15th January 1929: Martin Luther King is born in Atlanta, Georgia. Find out more about his role in the struggle for equal rights in our Heroes and Villains exhibition.
30th January 1933: Adolf Hitler is sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. Was he, as in a words of one commentator, a 'passionate lunatic'?
February
8th February 1906: Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Liberal party wins a landslide majority in the General Election. The election was mainly about free trade so why did the new government begin a sweeping programme of social reform?
16th February 1882: An explosion occurred at Trimdon Grange colliery, causing the deaths of 74 people. Learn more about the village of Trimdon, find out what happened on the 16th and discover how the accident was remembered.
March
4th March 1941: British forces capture an Enigma decoding machine. How important was this for the war effort?
8 March 1965: 3,500 United States Marines arrive in South Vietnam, becoming the first American ground troops in Vietnam. By December the deployment was 200,000. Was this a turning point in the Cold War?
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For a free guide on Learning Curve and ICT in history, download our updated Teacher’s booklet.
