History
Intent
One of our aims is to inspire pupils’ curiosity about the past in order to support and encourage the asking of perceptive questions: Our curriculum provides children with opportunities to ask questions, think critically, consider evidence, examine arguments and develop perspective and judgement.
Children will understand History as a coherent, chronological narrative, how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world. They will develop a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’ and ‘parliament’. Children will understand methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have constructed History.
Implementation
Through the teaching of the progression of historical skills, we aim to supply the children with the resources and tools needed to be effective historians. As a school we have developed a thread which weaves a strand of local history through our curriculum.
Children will progressively acquire, use and apply a growing bank of vocabulary, skills and knowledge in order to develop into confident, accurate and meaningful historians. They will effectively use history knowledge organisers to develop their own historical knowledge and to retain key knowledge being taught. Knowledge organisers will be re-evaluated after each topic in order to keep them relevant and useful.
At the end of each topic, key knowledge is reviewed by the children and checked by the teacher and consolidated, as necessary. Children will have access to all previous knowledge organisers to support the retention of facts and to allow children to make connections between different events in history.
Impact
Through the teaching of History, we aspire to teach children to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time. We believe teaching History in this way is key to broadening children’s horizons and challenging preconceived ideas about the society we live in.
