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Start your journey towards the Heritage Schools Award today. Create your account to explore the criteria, access step-by-step guidance and practical resources, and discover everything you need to showcase your school’s achievements.
Heritage Schools Award Hub
Welcome to the online home of the Heritage Schools Award, celebrating schools that use local heritage to enhance their curriculum. Here you’ll find hints, tips and resources to explore heritage in your local community, inspiration and ideas for embedding local heritage into your community and a place to showcase the impact of your work.
The Hub offers practical guidance, free resources, and a clear path towards gaining national recognition for your school. Whether you’re just starting to explore local history or ready to apply for the award, this is your place to begin.
Showcase
Schools across the country are finding imaginative ways to connect pupils with local heritage. From research projects to whole-school learning, these examples reveal how heritage can inspire learning and build pride in place.
The Architecture of Wallsend
Find out how KS3 pupils from a school in Wallsend in North Tyneside learned how to identify and record key historical architectural features in their town so that they were preserved for future generations.
Remembering Together
In this case study, KS2 pupils in Leicester visited local war memorials and recorded the names of the service people listed on them. They used online research to build up a picture of the service peoples’ lives and came together in a remembrance event to remember people from their community who had fought and died in war.
Around Our School: Liverpool
Find out how KS1 children in a primary school in West Derby, Liverpool used maps and old photos of buildings in their locality to explore continuity and change over
time.
Webinars
Primary History and Sustainability
25 Sep 2025
16:00
Dr Michael Riley will provide simple ideas for using primary history to teach for a sustainable future.
Learn More about Primary History and Sustainability >
How Can We Make Remembrance Day Meaningful and Memorable?
2 Oct 2025
16:00
Join Historic England’s Heritage Schools team to find out how to make Remembrance Day meaningful and memorable for pupils in your school.
Learn More about How Can We Make Remembrance Day Meaningful and Memorable? >
Building Schema Around Substantive Concepts in Primary History; Trade
9 Oct 2025
16:00
This practical webinar will look at how the concept of trade might be introduced to pupils and revisited through different topics.
Learn More about Building Schema Around Substantive Concepts in Primary History; Trade >
How to Enhance your Local History Curriculum: Maps
16 Oct 2025
14:00
This webinar will show you how to enhance your local history curriculum using historic maps as your starting point.
Learn More about How to Enhance your Local History Curriculum: Maps >
Useful Resources
Explore a collection of practical tools designed to help you bring local heritage into everyday teaching. From lesson plans and teaching resources, to planning guides and useful Historic England webpages these resources make it easy to embed heritage into your curriculum.
“It has done wonders for our staff, our school, even the wider community of parents. Without this, we would not have had knowledge of the local area to teach it the way we have done.”
Participating School
“They [pupils] actually really enjoy history now because it’s relevant to them. But, also, they just have a bigger respect for the community as well, which is a massive thing… but we find they are just respecting that area more because they realise the history and it feels a bit like it’s theirs because they learn about it here. They have a newfound respect for our village.”
Neil Adams
Beckfoot Thornton School
“[The Heritage Schools Award] really gave the local context. It has been transformational for the school curriculum. It has really helped us with chronological sequencing and now almost all of our history units of work have a local context to them. Then we started to think about how we could make these links in other subjects as well. Staff knowledge has increased too, so we can refer to local heritage more.”
Participating School
Get Started
Create your account today and take the first step towards national recognition. Find out more about the criteria for gaining the Heritage Schools Award and access tailored guidance and free resources that will help you prepare for your Heritage Schools Award submission.