History GCSE Elizabeth Edexcel KT3 L4 Elizabeth Deals with Poverty (Fully Resourced).
This complete lesson is part of the Edexcel 9–1 GCSE History Elizabethan England unit, Key Topic 3: Elizabethan Society in the Age of Exploration, 1558–88. Lesson 4 explores How effectively did Elizabeth deal with the issue of rising poverty?

The resource is fully resourced and requires no textbook, making it ready to teach immediately. It covers Elizabethan attitudes to the poor, government fears of vagabondage and rebellion, and the range of laws and policies introduced to tackle poverty.

Detailed lesson content:

Do Now / 5-a-day starter: retrieval on rising poverty (main food of the poor, population growth, enclosure, closure of monasteries, collapse of cloth trade).

Comprehension check: students correct and extend answers in full sentences.

Impact of poverty on society: reading activity explains vagabondage, rural depopulation, urban poverty, and Elizabethan attitudes dividing the poor into two groups:

Impotent poor (too old, young, or sick to work; deserving of help).

Able-bodied poor (viewed as idle, dangerous, punished by whipping, imprisonment, or worse).
Students answer comprehension questions in full sentences.

Government action task: students learn why Elizabeth’s government intervened by completing a table of laws and actions, linking each one to causes such as Christian duty, fear of crime, fear of rebellion, population growth, farming changes, trade failures, and unemployment.

Evaluating effectiveness: for each law, students judge whether it helped reduce poverty, punished the poor, or failed to make a difference. They annotate with explanations of effectiveness.

Extended writing task: students write a structured response to the question “To what extent do you agree that the Elizabethan government dealt with the issue of poverty effectively?” Sentence starters and scaffolding provided.

Plenary: final reflection on how much attitudes towards the poor changed during Elizabeth’s reign, and whether government action solved the problem.

This lesson provides students with secure knowledge of Elizabethan attitudes to the poor, the causes of government action, and the effectiveness of Elizabeth’s policies. It builds contextual understanding and evaluative writing skills in line with the Edexcel 9–1 specification. Fully resourced and ready to teach.