Year 9 Students Visit Ypres and the Somme Battlefields

On Friday 16th to Monday 19th June, the Jane Austen College English department had the great pleasure of taking a group of Year 9 students to visit Ypres and the Somme Battlefields at the end of the summer term 2023.   

Students were extremely lucky to be accompanied by a Norfolk-based battlefields tour guide who planned their itinerary to ensure that the students could visit a range of WWI sites with important historic and local relevance. 

At Jane Austen College, students study GCSE Power and Conflict poetry towards the end of Year 9, which coincided with the trip. The AQA Literature poetry anthology includes a number of poems written during, or inspired by, WWI. The trip aimed to enrich the students contextual understanding of the poems they would be writing about in their GCSEs.  

The group were very fortunate with their battlefields tour guide as he worked to match the poems that had been studied in class (and some others that were carefully chosen) to the sites visited. Staff and students read different poems aloud at each of the sites, usually after the historical context. There were several sites that were particularly moving because the words meant so much more as the group stood together in the shadow of battles from our relatively recent history. 

During the course of the trip, a number of the students and staff were able to explore their own family connections, visiting the battlefields their great-grandfathers fought on and the graveyards in which they were commemorated. Our students also laid a wreath in the Menin Gate ceremony, which has been a daily act of remembrance since the end of WWI. It was an extremely moving ceremony.  

Numerous visitors to the site commented on how the Jane Austen College students were a credit to the school and nation in terms of their respectful attitude in the battlefields and cemeteries. The students were solemn and felt a deep sense of connection to those commemorated at the site, many of whom were not much older than themselves.