Why did British politicians see the need for welfare reforms in the early 1900s?
We’ve carefully selected these sources for this investigation from the Churchill Archive to explore the issue of why politicians began to show interest in welfare reforms in the early 1900s when they hadn’t done so previously. This investigation is designed to be a flexible resource which can be used in a variety of ways.
As a web-based resource, it’s suited to use in homework assignments as well as classroom work.
Students should be able to read through the opening source and introduction and then work their way through some or all of the sources.
Teachers may decide to limit the range of tasks they want students to tackle within each source; for example, only tackling the Surface level questions or simply testing just one of the inferences in the ‘Deeper level’ section. It should be stressed here that most students are very adept at the Surface Level type of question and the majority would benefit from more work which challenges them to work at the Deeper Level.
We’ve carefully selected these sources for this investigation from the Churchill Archive to explore the issue of why politicians began to show interest in welfare reforms in the early 1900s when they hadn’t done so previously. This investigation is designed to be a flexible resource which can be used in a variety of ways.
As a web-based resource, it’s suited to use in homework assignments as well as classroom work.
Students should be able to read through the opening source and introduction and then work their way through some or all of the sources.
Teachers may decide to limit the range of tasks they want students to tackle within each source; for example, only tackling the Surface level questions or simply testing just one of the inferences in the ‘Deeper level’ section. It should be stressed here that most students are very adept at the Surface Level type of question and the majority would benefit from more work which challenges them to work at the Deeper Level.
Activity 1: An overall judgement
The investigation is based on the premise that students will use the sources as a collection. They may find it useful to record their findings on a table such as this as they work through the sources.
Possible reason why politicians began to see need for welfare reform
Source(s) which support this argument
Extracts from the source(s) which can be used as evidence to support this argument.
The investigation focuses on a number of areas of social reform: the condition of old people and the unemployed. The Churchill Archive contains a wealth of material on many other aspects of welfare and social reform. Searches on the following areas will reveal that there was lots of debate about:
Prison reform
Condition of children
Treatment of workers (particularly Chinese labourers) in the colonies
Study the sources on these areas and complete a table similar to the one in Activity 1.
Activity 3: Other aspects of social reform
Look at Source 6 in this investigation and the list of priorities Churchill sets out. Is it possible to use the archive to decide how far welfare was a priority? If it isn’t a priority, then which issues were higher on the list and why?
