This was a staple of British primary schools.
There was an accompanying series of books related to this series, highlighting areas of interest for children to discuss in class after watching a particular episode. For example, one book was for the series about Victorian Britain and would have chapters on areas addressed in the show such as child labor, life in a Victorian school, the impact of the railways in the UK etc. Each episode from that series would have a corresponding entry in the book for child viewers to read afterwards.
Episodes' title sequences included several successive captions giving: season title, episode name, year(s) when action took place. The IMDB episode titles have been formatted as "season name: episode title (year)". Season 5 displayed the exact date; only the year is included in the IMDB title, with the exact date given as a trivia entry.