Year 9 are working through the long-term causes of the war, and today's focus is the Anglo-German naval race. The teacher plays a twelve-minute documentary extract on the board covering Tirpitz's Navy Laws of 1898 and 1900, the launch of HMS Dreadnought in 1906, which made every older battleship obsolete, and the 1909 campaign in Britain summed up in the slogan 'We want eight and we won't wait'. Students take notes in their books under three headings, what Germany did, how Britain responded and why each side felt threatened, and the teacher pauses the extract twice to check the headings are filling up. The lesson ends with a paragraph on whether the naval race made war more likely, using at least two dates from the notes.
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