Gallipoli Centenary Education Project

The Gallipoli Centenary Education Project (GCEP) ran from May 2014 to April 2016, bracketing the Gallipoli centenary year of 2015. The project was jointly funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund, benefactors and members of the Gallipoli Association (GA). The Gallipoli Centenary Education Project set out to engage schools with the story of Gallipoli, aiming to raise awareness of the Campaign and the issues around it, during the centenary period of 2014-16. At the centre of the project were five partnerships based at museums in areas in the UK which sent soldiers to Gallipoli. In addition the project funded several smaller arts projects and worked with individual schools. In each sub-project, museum staff engaged local schools to take part in arts activities, partly because Gallipoli is not part of the history curriculum and partly to allow engagement with the subject on a personal and emotional level. The arts activities were led by freelance artists, actors and musicians. In addition there were three battlefield trips and a schools’ conference. A website was developed partly to offer teachers inspiration for their projects and partly to provide a central place where school projects could be presented to a wide national and international audience. A total of 1629 people (including pupils, teachers, museum staff, freelancers and volunteers) participated in the project and 11666 found out about Gallipoli through the project (not including media readers, listeners or viewers). Website visitors increased during the course of the project, with the main countries represented at Gallipoli amongst the highest international visitors. A successful conference took place in March 2016 at which schools from all over the UK attended to present their projects, as well as three Irish schools and a teenager from Melbourne, Australia.