six years, 96 students and a lot of hidden history

This spring, 29 Year 8 students at Yavneh College in North London completed the third in-person pilot of Making History Together (MHT) – and by every measure, it was the programme’s most impactful year to date.

Over three full days and 21 hours of facilitated learning, these young people explored the history of Belarusian Jews during the Holocaust through interactive games, archive activities, court case simulations, and personal reflection. They left knowing things that most British adults have never been taught. And then – remarkably – they went home and told their families.

a programme born in lockdown, now thriving in a school hall

Making History Together didn’t begin in a classroom. When Debra Brunner, CEO and Co-Founder of The Together Plan, conceived the programme in 2020, the world was in lockdown. The first cohort joined via Zoom – young Jewish people from living rooms across different countries, coming together in a shared virtual space to learn about a history almost entirely absent from the British curriculum.

That global, online phase ran for three years and reached 33 students in total. But Debra and her team knew that the programme’s full potential could only be realised face-to-face. In 2023, Making History Together moved in-person to Yavneh College, one of the UK’s leading Jewish secondary schools in North London.

The growth since then has been remarkable. From 16 students in the first in-person year, to 18 the following year, to 29 students in 2026 – a 61% increase year-on-year, driven significantly by word of mouth among students themselves. Across all six years, MHT has now directly reached 96 young people.

more than a history lesson: character development through hidden history

What makes Making History Together genuinely distinctive is not simply the history it teaches – it is how it teaches, and what else it develops in young people along the way.

At its heart, MHT is a character development programme. The history of Belarusian Jews serves as a profound and largely unknown lens through which students are invited to examine themselves: their values, their identity, their relationship to power, and their capacity to lead with integrity and compassion. Every historical theme is paired with a personal dimension. Students don’t just learn about leadership – they interrogate what kind of leader they want to be. They don’t just learn about antisemitism – they develop the critical thinking tools to understand how hatred takes root and how to resist it.

This is education in the truest sense. Students learn to question, to reason, and to see the world – and themselves – with greater clarity and depth. They leave not only knowing more, but thinking differently.

And crucially, none of this happens at the front of a classroom. MHT is deliberately, emphatically informal. Students sit on the floor. They play games. They argue cases in mock courts. They handle real archival documents. They design their own Passport journals. The approach is high-energy, collaborative, and often surprising — students consistently reported that they expected something formal and dry, and found something that made them lean in.

“Loved the informal style – perfect level. Thought it would be formal; found it much more fun.” – Student feedback

This is not a small thing. The informal, non-classroom format is a significant part of why the programme works – and why students who signed up reluctantly, or only to avoid other lessons, ended the three days saying it was one of the best educational experiences they’d had. It also sets MHT apart from almost every other Holocaust education programme available to schools in the UK today.

what students learned – and felt

Before the programme, most students arrived knowing about the Holocaust in broad outline. They left knowing something far more specific: that 20% of the entire Belarusian population was murdered during the Second World War. That 100,000 Jews were imprisoned in the Minsk Ghetto. That 1 million Jews died in Belarus – a country that, as multiple students admitted, they hadn’t known existed before the programme began.

This is precisely the gap MHT was designed to fill. The Belarusian and Soviet Jewish experience – the mass shootings, the ghettos, the partisan resistance, the deliberate suppression of memory under the Soviet Union – receives almost no coverage in UK schools. For these students, three days at Yavneh College changed that.

But the impact went far beyond historical knowledge. Across all four feedback sources gathered at the programme’s close – student Passport journals, three separate focus groups, and facilitator notes – Jewish identity emerged as the most emotionally significant area of impact.

“It will influence them about how they view their identity in the future. They understand what their ancestors had been through. Being through so much antisemitism makes them proud to be Jewish.” – Student focus group

Several students connected the programme directly to their own family history. One returned home to find a grandparent’s passport stamped with swastikas. Multiple students said they planned to research their own Jewish ancestry. And working with real archival documents – seeing the names and ages of children their own age recorded among those who were murdered – made the history viscerally, personally real.

the history that came home

One of the most striking findings from this year’s evaluation was the extent to which students took the programme home with them.

Approximately 71% of students in the recorded focus group – five out of seven – discussed the programme with parents or siblings after returning home. One student read the programme materials directly to their parents. Others spoke to younger siblings, extending MHT’s reach into age groups well beyond those enrolled. And 100% of students – with no dissenting voices across any of the three feedback sessions – said they would sign up again.

Multiple students went further: they want to come back as mentors for future cohorts.

“One thing I’ll remember: how much deeply hidden history there was in the Soviet Union.” – Student Passport reflection

Students also connected what they’d learned to the present moment with striking directness: “People don’t like Jews after October 7th – social media. People aren’t educated, and this programme teaches that.” And repeatedly, across all three groups, they made the same request: this programme should reach non-Jewish schools too.

beyond the 29: the wider reach of Making History Together

The 29 students who completed the full programme are only part of the story.

The Together Plan’s travelling interactive exhibition – built around the same six themes as MHT – is installed every year at Yavneh College for Holocaust Memorial Day, where it is visited by all 500 students across the school. The Together Plan has developed 11 dedicated workshops to complement the exhibition, used by the school for three consecutive years. That means the hidden history at the heart of MHT permeates the entire school community – not just the cohort who experience the full programme.

And the reach extends internationally. Inspired by MHT, a college in Minsk developed its own Holocaust education initiative, bringing historians, educators, and survivors to speak with students and taking them to massacre sites across Belarus. The Together Plan produced a version of the exhibition in Russian for use in Belarus — sponsored, alongside the UK edition, by the UK Embassy in Minsk. A UK programme, built on the history of Belarusian Jews, is now helping non-Jewish students in Belarus itself reckon with their own country’s hidden past.

what comes next: from proven pilot to growing programme

The evidence is in. Six years of delivery, three years of in-person piloting, and a cohort that grew by 61% in a single year – driven not by marketing, but by students telling other students – confirm what the feedback makes abundantly clear: Making History Together works.

The pilot phase has done what pilots are designed to do. It has tested the methodology, refined the delivery, demonstrated the impact, and built the foundations of a model that is ready to grow. The question now is not whether MHT should expand – it is how to give it the investment and support it needs to do so sustainably.

That means training others to deliver the programme, so that growth is not limited by the capacity of a single team. It means packaging MHT thoughtfully so it can be adopted by other schools – Jewish and non-Jewish – without losing the energy and depth that make it exceptional. It means continuing to refine and develop the curriculum as it reaches new communities and contexts. And it means building the infrastructure that allows all of this to happen in a way that is financially resilient and not dependent on any single source of funding.

The Together Plan is a small charity with a large ambition and a proven model. We are not asking for investment in a concept – we are asking for investment in something that has already been shown to change the way young people think about history, about their identity, and about themselves. What MHT needs now is the resource to grow organically: to develop, to deepen, and to reach the thousands of young people across the UK who deserve access to this kind of education.

If you believe in the power of education to shape who young people become – and if you want to be part of what comes next – we would love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected].

Making History Together is a character development programme for Jewish young people aged 12–13, using the hidden history of Belarusian Jews during the Holocaust as its lens. Students explore identity, leadership, power, antisemitism, resilience, and what it means to repair the world – through an informal, game-based approach that prioritises critical thinking, personal growth, and the best version of each young person. It is delivered by The Together Plan, a UK charity founded in 2013.

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