Remembrance and Service: a day in their shoes
Most Remembrance content is dates, poppies and a two-minute silence. None of it explains why it matters to an apprentice who has never had to make the calls the people being remembered had to make. So I built a course that hands them those calls instead. This is the real, finished Rise 360 course. Play it below.
The question I set myself: how do you make Remembrance mean something to an apprentice who has never thought about who is actually behind the uniform, the siren or the collection tin?
The problem
Remembrance content usually stops at the ceremony: the Exhortation, the Last Post, the two-minute silence. All of it is worth knowing, and none of it, on its own, tells you why remembrance is still relevant to someone starting a career today. The apprentices taking this course were not there for the events being commemorated. Reading about sacrifice in the abstract was not going to land. I needed them to feel, even briefly, what it is to be the person making the call.
The idea
Build up from the ceremony to the people behind it. The course opens with what Remembrance is and what Service actually means, day to day, then hands the apprentice a scenario called A Day in Their Shoes: they step into the role of a community doctor, a police officer and an active-duty soldier, each facing a decision with incomplete information and no good option. Only after making those calls do they move on to how we honour the people who make them for real, and what any of it means for their own profession.
How it works
Five lessons, each building on the last:
- What is Remembrance? The Act of Remembrance itself: the Exhortation, the Last Post, the Kohima Epitaph, and an interactive walkthrough of a typical commemoration, so the ceremony is understood before anything else is asked of the learner.
- What is Service? A matching exercise linking everyday services, the NHS, the police, the fire service, the armed forces, to what they actually do for the apprentice personally, not as an abstract institution.
- A Day in Their Shoes. The core of the course. The apprentice takes three roles in turn, a community doctor with two patients and one of them first, a police officer walking into a volatile domestic incident, a soldier ordered to choose between a patrol and a village that needs help, and has to decide with the same incomplete picture the real person had.
- Honouring Those Who Serve Us. A second decision exercise: choose how to recognise healthcare workers, military personnel and emergency responders, and weigh up the trade-offs between a gesture that feels good and one that actually helps.
- What is Next? Symbols of remembrance the apprentice will already recognise, the poppy, the rainbow in the window, clap for carers, and a direct link from Remembrance to their own field: historical context, continuous improvement, mentorship, teamwork, community engagement.
Why it works
The scenarios do the work the ceremony alone cannot. Deciding who to treat first as an overwhelmed community doctor, or whether to break from a patrol to help a village, is uncomfortable in exactly the way the real decision was uncomfortable, and that discomfort is what makes the Act of Remembrance mean something afterwards rather than before. By the time the apprentice reaches the closing lesson and is asked what remembrance means for their own studies and profession, it is not a rhetorical question. They have just made three versions of the decisions being commemorated.
Remembrance that is felt, not just observed. Even in an apprenticeship module.