As many of you will know, my late colleague and friend, Helen Snelson held representing the histories of the GRT community close to her heart. She observed that GRT were a group that were most likely to be overlooked in our school History curriculums. Below is a blog on the subject written by the brilliant educator and friend, Richard Kerridge, containing practical ideas on embedding some GRT History into your schemes of learning.
GRT History Month June 2026
Since 2008 there has been a dedicated ‘History Month’ to celebrate the history of Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers in wider society. As with other ‘History Months’ it would be fantastic if we did not need to identify particular groups as needing space for us to acknowledge their achievements and contributions to society, but we do! I wonder how many readers of this blog will look at their curriculum and be able to say
they have done a good job at integrating this group into it. I hope there are many of
you. I fear there will not be.
What you can do about it depends on your starting point.
A good start would be to read this article. The link takes you to York Clio, an amazing website full of great ideas and links. The article presents a “compelling rationale for why history teachers should be slotting in the stories of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller people to broaden inclusive representation and challenge intolerance”.
Another quick win for this year would be to hold a whole school assembly. There are many websites with resources for this. Friends, Families and Travellers is an excellent website and has resources here. If an assembly is too much this year, raise the need to do something with your line manager and SLT. Can you get time in a CPD day to highlight this and then push for more space in the school curriculum at a
later date?
More ambitious would be to include GRT history in your curriculum. The first article focuses on a way to do that, and you can find the resources on York Clio here or on the Curriculum Paths website. There is a reading list in the padlet on Curriculum Paths should you want to begin researching this history.
Two years ago, a small group of educators, including representatives from within the community, convened to discuss strategy for encouraging more schools to introduce GRT history into their curriculum. One of the results of this meeting was the curation of existing materials found on the internet. We hoped that by curating these resources, attributing them to certain key stages, and providing a health warning (if necessary) we could encourage educators to dip their toes into what already existed. These resources can be found on York Clio and Curriculum Paths.
We hope all three documents will prove useful in helping educators explore existing resources and be confident in using some of them, before developing their own (and submitting to Curriculum Paths for hosting).
There really is nothing stopping you from including this history because, as Snelson and Kerridge said in 2022, “[i]t is quite simply better history to teach a more representative past”.
Richard Kerridge 2026
yorkclio 