The traffic on the motorway and the weather were kinder to us than expected and the wonderful organisation of the education department at Bletchley meant that the whole day was packed. Year 9 were taken on a guided tour of the site in which the background of this remarkable place was explained, before separating into smaller groups and diving into the various buildings and huts that have been preserved for eighty years. Some of these have been reconstructed to look as they would have in the 1940s and others have been turned into museum exhibitions. We saw the office in which the intelligence sharing element of the ‘Special Relationship’ between wartime allies the UK and the USA was signed and a recreation of the Bombe machine which famously enabled the team at Bletchley to decipher the secret Nazi wartime messages. Also on the tour was the Polish Memorial, celebrating the breakthroughs by mathematicians from Poland which was the foundation upon which the British codebreaking work was built.

Later, all the Year 9s were able to participate in fascinating, fun and challenging code-breaking classroom sessions which taught them about ciphers in the context of the Second World War. They were also given the chance to push a key (and therefore enciphering a letter of their choice) on a real WWI Enigma machine – one of the very few of its kind still in working order.

To finish the day the students were able to visit a mini-exhibition on AI, currently being hosted at Bletchley Park. This presented the pros and cons, the misconceptions and the dangers and encouraged the students to weigh up the two sides of the debate on this most topical of technologies for themselves. This work is going to form an important foundation for their Term 6 English unit.

All in all, it was an extremely successful trip touching on History, Mathematics, Computer Science and the role of women in STEM – 75% of the wartime Bletchley team were women!

The History Department