Exam Connection

🎯 Exam Connection

Frequency: This topic appeared in 3 out of 5 recent AQA sittings (MEDIUM-HIGH). Questions about the League's successes and failures are very commonly set. If you know the successes, you can always use them to add nuance to questions about why the League failed — showing you understand the contrast between the 1920s and 1930s.

Typical questions you will face:

• "How useful is Source A to a historian studying the work of the League of Nations in the 1920s?" (12 marks, AO3) — Evaluate using NOP (Nature, Origin, Purpose). A Level 3 answer evaluates how the source's nature, origin, or purpose makes it more or less useful, supported by own knowledge. A Level 4 answer uses detailed NOP analysis AND deploys specific own knowledge — e.g., using the Aaland Islands or Upper Silesia decisions to test whether the source accurately portrays the League's 1920s record.
• "Write an account of how the League of Nations dealt with disputes in the 1920s" (8 marks, AO2) — Analytical narrative with causal links. Level 3 requires showing the MECHANISM: what conditions in the 1920s enabled success and how those conditions produced specific outcomes. Level 4 requires sustained narrative with specific knowledge linking the 1920s successes to the conditions that made them possible — and connecting to the failures of the 1930s.
• "How far do you agree that the League of Nations was a failure?" (16 marks, AO1+AO2) — Extended essay. You must include the 1920s successes as counterargument. A strong argument: the League was not simply a failure — it had genuine achievements but was helpless against determined major-power aggressors. Note: this essay is 16 marks with NO separate SPaG allocation in Section C.

For Level 3+ on the 8-mark account question: Show the mechanism, not just the pattern. "The League succeeded in the 1920s because the disputes it faced — Aaland Islands (1921), Upper Silesia (1921), Bulgaria (1925) — involved small countries without the power to defy its rulings. Moral condemnation and the threat of economic sanctions were sufficient deterrents. When Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931, this changed: Japan was a permanent Council member with its own army, and the USA (which Japan traded with) was outside the League. The conditions that enabled success in the 1920s no longer existed."