What is the value of local history? How should the history curriculum reflect the lives of our pupils and local communities? While Andrea was on her PGCE placement, we found ourselves posing these questions one afternoon, during a mentor meeting. We discussed how local history can shine a light on people and places who may otherwise be overlooked. This led us to consider the significant Polish population in our school and local community, including Andrea herself, whose family were local but whose grandfather had emigrated from Poland in the 1940s. We concluded that the underrepresentation of eastern European history in our curriculum did our pupils a disservice, and so we began to discuss how to include purposeful encounters with Polish (and eastern European) history earlier in the curriculum...