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Linda Asquith

Lecturer, researcher and holocaust educator, Linda Asquith completed her PGCE Citizenship at
Bradford College in 2004.

Linda AsquithAfter 3 daughters and a varied career, Linda took a degree in Criminal Justice Studies at Leeds University. “Around this time a friend at Uni made a rather offhand comment about how he thought I would be ‘an ace teacher’. So, off went an application for a place on Bradford College’s PGCE in Citizenship. I remember one tutor spending a good hour on the phone with me when I threw a wobbly because I hated my primary placement! Nothing can prepare you fully for that moment when you first find yourself in front of a class, and for once there is no one sat at the back ready to help you out – nothing prepares you for the sheer panic you feel, but when I was at that point, I knew I had a whole range of skills to fall back on that I had developed during my training year.”

Linda made an immediate impact, becoming head of department after just 2 years of teaching. “I loved teaching, and took to it like a duck to water. I spent 3 years at a high school in Wakefield, teaching a mixture of RE, PSHE & Citizenship. I was promoted to subject leader of Citizenship at the end of my NQT year, and then followed that with a promotion to head of PSHCE at the end of my second year. Halfway through that year, I was beginning to get jealous of the students - I wanted to learn too! I’d really enjoyed my PGCE and doing my own evaluation and research, so I decided to investigate a postgraduate course in something related to state crime and genocide.

I’d been involved in Holocaust Education since my NQT year, when I successfully won a BT Award to run a Holocaust education project in school. I ran a trip to London to the Imperial War Museum, arranged for a Holocaust survivor to visit us in school, and along with a colleague I went to visit Auschwitz. I was then accepted onto the Imperial War Museum’s Fellowship in Holocaust Education project, which involved study visits to Israel, Lithuania and Poland. So, I applied for a PhD studentship at the University of Huddersfield, focusing on the genocide survivors.”

Linda is currently lecturing part-time in criminology, working in schools for the Holocaust Education Trust and doing doctoral research into victims’ experience of genocide.

Photograph by Shelagh Ward