Historians of education are well placed to engage in applied historical approaches providing authoritative evidence of the past to inform policy and practice. This article is based on the presidential keynote delivered at the History of Education Society (UK) annual conference in 2019. As such it reflects on possible future directions for the history of education and considers the role of informal educational activity that takes place outside the classroom, including that of children's reading for pleasure. Stories in the interwar British, Canadian and Australian "Girl's" and "Boy's" annuals provide an example of how appropriate gender roles were presented to their young readers at a time of intense social and political change for Britain. With Brexit heralding a similar significant moment of change and the pandemic lockdowns resulting in children spending more time at home, it is concluded that the significance of 'informal' education, both historically and today, requires our attention.