History
WHAT are we aiming for?
Our HISTORY curriculum aims to create children who:
- inspire our children to learn about the world they live in.
- ensure that our children know more and remember more about what has gone before.
- enable our children to gain a deep understanding of how history has shaped our society today and grasp historical concepts such as change and continuity, similarity and difference, and causation.
- teach and equip children with the skills and processes necessary to find out about the recent and distant past.
- support our children’s development of chronologically secure knowledge and understanding of British, local and world history.
- provide access to facts, dates and accounts of the past via primary and secondary sources including artefacts, photographs, oral and written sources.
- enable children to confidently use a wide vocabulary of everyday historical terms and those relating to specific periods.
- provide our children with a range of transferable skills such as the ability to conduct research, find and evaluate sources of information.
HOW do we achieve this?
Our HISTORY curriculum has been carefully designed to build both knowledge and skills progressively. Historical (substantive) knowledge is supported with historical processes (disciplinary knowledge) and children are encouraged to explore events with curiosity, build on arguments, weigh evidence, and formulate their own ideas.
Each year group focuses on three overarching enquiry questions, with new insights revealed over a sequence of lessons. Through sustained attention to a single question, children can make connections, draw contrasts, and analyse trends. Conceptual threads are woven into the curriculum, ensuring children can recognise causes and consequences of actions and developments and build the bigger picture in terms of change over time within society and development of knowledge. Children are given regular opportunities to recall and think about the content they are studying to support the consolidation of new learning to long-term memory. Our children also benefit from opportunities outside of the classroom that further enhance the curriculum, including day trips relating to areas of study.