History

Civilisation – Invasion – Culture

Intent

‘A high-quality history education will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the world.’

Department for Education

Our history curriculum aims to stimulate the children’s interest, curiosity and understanding about the lives of people who lived in the past, and through this to develop a sense of identity and cultural understanding based on their historical heritage. Learning about their heritage helps our children to understand modern multicultural Britain and their place within it.

Our history curriculum covers all the age-related content from the National Curriculum, alongside additional aspects of local and national history that we believe will enrich our children’s understanding of their own position in our community and world. Through high quality teaching pupils develop:

• Chronologically secure knowledge and understanding of local, British and world history.
• How to think critically about how knowledge of the past is constructed from a range of sources.
• Their understanding of different societies and periods within history and make links between features across different periods and cultures.
• Their ability to construct informed responses that involve thoughtful selection and organisation of relevant historical information.

Implementation

We have carefully planned our history units of work to create a series projects that cover the fundamental knowledge, skills and understanding of history set out in the National Curriculum. Our subject leaders have created detailed unit plans outlining the objectives for each lesson, differentiated activities and possible learning experiences for the children.  This ensures a clear progression of skills within each unit and across key stages. Some examples of these unit plans are available below.

To bring the subject to life we ensure our pupils have a broad range of learning experiences such as visits to local museums and archaeological sites. These rich educational experiences help our children develop their understanding of the past in a real-life context. Alongside this, we use a range of sources to support their study of history including photographs, artefacts, newspaper reports, letters and specialist resource boxes. We also strive to utilise clear and relevant cross curricular links to help shape our children’s learning of different historical topics; creating an immersive learning experience for them.

Impact

Our History Curriculum is progressive and designed to build on children’s prior knowledge as they move through school. We have developed a progression grid which outlines the learning objectives in each area of historical study, ensuring an organic progression of key skills. We use our progression grid to monitor and assess pupils’ learning against national expectations, and to make informed judgements about their attainment. To make these judgements we use evidence from children’s independent work, contributions to class discussions and group work.

Subject leaders work closely with the staff team to assess the impact of each unit on children’s leaning and attainment, ensuring that learning experiences are of the highest standard. Please find below some examples of these learning experiences and the work that pupils have completed.

Exploring the mine workings in Gunnerside Gill

History progression grid and example unit plans

For more information about history, please contact our subject leader, Tom Fremlin.