Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to improve teaching of the Roma Holocaust in schools.

The Department is fully committed to Holocaust education. Every young person should learn about the Holocaust and the lessons it teaches us today. The curriculum gives teachers and schools the freedom to decide how to teach the subject and what resources to use to support an understanding of the history of the Holocaust and the experiences of the non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.

The Department further supports pupils’ and teachers’ understanding of the Holocaust by providing funding for the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz project (£2,126,437 in 2019-20 and £2,193,675 in 2020-21) and to the UCL Institute of Education’s Centre for Holocaust Education (£500,000 in both 2019-20 and 2020-21, match funded by the Pears foundation). Additionally, £1.7 million for the 2019-20 financial year is being provided for the Bergen-Belsen Commemoration Programme to commemorate the 75^th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

A wide array of resources are available to help teachers teach about the persecution by the Nazis of different groups of people, including Roma victims.