You are allowed to read this if you teach in some far distant place – Bradford, Pontefract or even Ipswich or Southampton. It may even be useful to you because, while the detailed example below deals with Leeds (and Yorkshire) it’s here to exemplify how you might use your locality as a way into the Civil War. There’s no doubt that the Civil War is a difficult topic to teach at KS3, not just because of the difficulty of the religion issues and political concepts but because children have difficulty relating the events to their own lives. Using your locality (whether town or county) may begin to solve this problem as well as emphasising the experience of ordinary people and not just generals and MPs.
