Photo and video Flash starters

The starter resources are attached to the depth study investigations.

Photo Starter

©Topfoto

The essence of this image is the apparent bewilderment of the witnesses to the scene. People knew about the unrest in Germany and the US after the First World War, and they would have been acutely aware that Britain had not suffered in this way. In this respect, the armoured car on the streets would have been puzzling. This sets up the obvious question of why the armoured vehicles are there, which is the prompt to go to the source from the Cabinet papers of  7 May 1926. This makes the connection between the reality on the streets and the discussions which take place in the Cabinet.

The General Strike starter is a fairly simple 'mystery' type exercise. Students are shown an image of armoured vehicles on the streets of London and asked for their thoughts. This resource is not designed to replace the teacher but to provide the teacher with material that can be used to suit their teaching style.

One teacher might simply want to discuss the image and ask students to speculate, while another may want to go straight to the stimulus questions and work through them.

Video starter

© Crown Copyright

The National Health Service (NHS) starter is more straightforward. It is a public information film created for the first day of the NHS on 5 July 1948. The value of this starter source is in the way it provides an insight into the mindset of the period. Points raised by Charley, and the answers given to him, are interesting in their own right but are also valuable in the way they reveal different assumptions from those of today.

While the video is playing, ask students to identify which statements or questions would, by today's standards, be considered unnecessary, inappropriate or offensive, and save the position of each comment using the available tags. The tags take you back to that place in the film for later class discussion.