A large number of girls take history at both GCSE and A level each year. Excellent academic results are achieved through a wide variety of teaching methods and by encouraging pupils to argue, discuss and think for themselves.

We offer a Twentieth Century Modern World syllabus at GCSE with options that include Modern China and the war in Vietnam as well as the Russian Revolution and the Cold War. At A level we return to the 16th century as well as continuing to study different aspects of the twentieth and nineteenth centuries in parallel. Further down the school we follow the broad outlines of the National Curriculum at KS3.

Enthusiasm for the past is further stimulated by outside visits such as our annual 3 day trip to the battlefields of World War I with Y9 and our 5 day trip to Rome for Y12 historians. In the past we have also visited Berlin and Beijing with our GCSE historians. We run a thriving History Society which invites in eminent historians and our sixth form are also invited to history society meetings at Dulwich College. We join too with the College for a History Reading week in August aimed at Y12 pupils considering applying for history at university. We arrange theatre and gallery visits as appropriate: recent trips have included A Man for All Seasons, The Seagull and Gorky’s Enemies and a morning at the National Portrait Gallery. From September 2006 the younger girls can take advantage of our weekly Junior History Club which is being re-launched.

We often turn Tudor in June when Y7 enjoy a day at Kentwell Hall in Suffolk. In this magnificent Tudor mansion, Tudor life has been recreated and the girls meet (speaking only in old English and dressed in full Tudor costume) the noble Clopton family and their servants. They are able to explore the mansion and dairy, bakery and brewhouse behind it and then they venture into the beautiful gardens, the farm and the woodland. The girls engage in practical activities all day and gain a real insight into the home life, work and leisure pursuits of people at different levels of society in Tudor England.

This year, for the first time, Y7 have also enjoyed a Medieval Experience which involved them in a range of activities from leather apron making to becoming Black Death victims.

We run weekly lunchtime seminar classes to support and extend our A level curriculum aimed at those girls who either want to apply for history at university or take the AEA or both. The department is supported by a well-stocked and wide-ranging library.

The department takes great pleasure in the continuing success and popularity of History at Jags which we truly believe equips girls for their future by providing them with both a passion for the subject and insights into the world in which they will make their way. When George Eliot remarked that ‘The happiest women have no history’ she couldn’t have had Jags girls in mind!