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 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 arrange theatre and gallery visits as appropriate: recent trips have included Burnt by the Sun, War Horse, The White Guard and Hair the Musical and a morning at the National Portrait Gallery and a special workshop during Black History month on the theme of Black Leadership in the UK. 

Y7 enjoy Medieval Experiences which involves 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!