Introduction

All Year 7 pupils who attend Burnside Business and enterprise College in Wallsend explore aspects of Hadrian's Wall, including its history. The college is located near Segedunum Roman fort and was designed with a ground plan based on the shape of a flattened Roman legionary helmet. Roz Elliott is Deputy Head and, for her and her students, perhaps the most important aspect of the Wall and all that it represents is how it helps to promote community cohesion by providing a context through which to explore contemporary issues of identity and multiculturalism. The soldiers stationed at Segedunum and at other forts along Hadrian's Wall came from many different parts of the Empire. The students can explore what it might have been like to have been stationed in a foreign land, to marry locally, to adapt to local ways of life yet maintain links with home, and relate this to their modern world.