A Level History: Industrialisation and Social Change, 1759–1928
Breadth Theme 2: The World of Childhood
Lesson 8: What was childhood like in the age of industrialisation?

This is a fully resourced, ready-to-teach A Level History lesson for the course Industrialisation and Social Change, 1759–1928, focusing on Breadth Theme 2: The World of Childhood.

The lesson explores the enquiry question:

How far did industrialisation change children’s lives between 1759 and c.1830?

Students investigate the experiences of children before and during early industrialisation, considering rural labour, pauper apprenticeships, factory work, mining, domestic service, street work and middle-class childhood. The lesson is designed to help students move beyond a simple “industrialisation made childhood worse” argument by examining change, continuity, class difference and the growing visibility of child labour.

Students will analyse primary-source extracts from the period, including evidence from the Sadler Committee, Robert Owen, Robert Blincoe’s memoir, and the Children’s Employment Commission. They will use these sources to evaluate the extent to which industrialisation transformed children’s lives and why child labour became a subject of increasing public concern.

The resource includes:

• full 90-minute lesson plan
• clear enquiry question and learning objectives
• Teacher exposition notes
• child labour context activity
• primary-source evidence carousel
• provenance and vocabulary support
• living graph activity
• causation cards
• judgement task
• essay-style paragraph scaffold
• homework task
• extension questions
• teacher guidance and suggested answers

Key skills developed:

• change and continuity
• causation
• source analysis
• evaluation of evidence
• constructing nuanced A Level judgements
• building breadth-theme essay arguments

This lesson is ideal for students studying the impact of industrialisation on social change and is particularly useful for building the foundations of later lessons on government intervention, philanthropy, education and changing attitudes towards children.

The lesson is suitable for a 90-minute A Level class, but could easily be adapted for shorter lessons or independent study.