History Curriculum
History Curriculum Statement
‘A high-quality history education will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It should inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. Teaching should equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. History helps pupils 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’. National Curriculum
At St Clare’s Catholic Primary School, we are committed to providing our pupils with a creative curriculum that develops their knowledge of the past and inspires them to ask and understand historical questions. We strive to immerse our pupils into a curriculum that allows them to understand the chronology of British history and that of the wider world. We want our pupils to be confident, articulate learners who are able to express their knowledge and understanding of specific historical events and how these events have influenced a wide range of cultural societies and ways of life.
Intent
Our history curriculum aims to develop historical skills and concepts which are transferable to whatever period of history is being studied and will equip children for future learning.
Each unit in our overview is underpinned by rich, substantive knowledge and ambitious vocabulary, whilst also ensuring children are developing their disciplinary knowledge (historical skills). Each unit of work is planned carefully to ensure concepts are taught in optimal order to support children's understanding. As well as developing a breadth of historical knowledge, we want our children to become skilful historians. Each unit of work has an emphasis on historical enquiry where children investigate historically framed questions whilst also developing historical enquiries of their own. In addition to substantive and disciplinary knowledge, children will develop their experiential knowledge through museum visits, handling artifacts and engaging in carefully planned fieldwork.
Key historical concepts sit at the core of our curriculum to ensure the defining characteristics of the subject are ever-present.
‘Golden Threads’
Our curriculum is refined yearly, but it maintains a consistent knowledge base to ensure conceptual progression. We have identified a set of key historical concepts or ‘golden threads’, that children will repeatedly revisit throughout their time at St Clare’s. Our golden threads are: Local History, Power, Settlement, Migration, Empire. Diversity. Each unit will not include every 'thread', but over a year, children will visit each one more than once.
For KS1, our curriculum can be covered chronologically in reverse to allow a full opportunity for children to really grasp the difficult concept of the passing of time. Starting with changes in living memory, moving onto events beyond living memory. This prepares children for the chronological work they will do in KS2.
The intent in lower KS2 is that children can work in chronological order from ancient history. Upper KS2 allows children to repeat and embed this sequence of chronology with a wider selection of ancient history such as ‘Early Islamic Civilisations’ through to more modern history such as ‘The Impact of War and ‘Crime and Punishment’. The repeat in KS2 of chronological order from ancient to modern allows for children to truly develop and embed a sense of time and how civilisations were interconnected.
We believe strongly that children should have a rich understanding of their local heritage. This is why local history is woven into our history curriculum to ensure it is explicitly taught and that links with larger historical themes are made.
Implementation
In order for children to know more and remember more in each area of history studied, there is a structure to the lesson sequence through our progression curriculum. This ensures all areas of the curriculum are covered to embed the mastery approach to teaching. This structure allows us to build a depth to children’s historical understanding. Through revisiting and consolidating skills, our curriculum helps children build on prior knowledge alongside introducing new skills and challenge.
Our teaching of history is driven by an enquiry approach that seeks to capitalise on children's curiosity and prior learning. Units of work are structured around an overarching historical enquiry to ensure teaching is focused and children are working towards a clearly defined outcome. The overarching enquiry is often broken down into small sub-enquiries to give children a sense of incremental progression and make learning large chunks of content more manageable.
Impact
We pride ourself on high expectations and quality evidenced work presented in books. The impact of using the full range of resources, will be seen across the school with an increase in the profile of history. The learning environment across our school will be more consistent with historical technical vocabulary displayed, spoken and used by all learners.
Children will begin to make relevant links from history to other curriculum subjects, such as geography and science. They will improve their enquiry skills and curiosity about the history studies, and the impact it has had on the world.
Inclusive Practice
When we are getting things right for our learners with SEND, we are getting it right for all learners. Inclusive Practice means we use approaches that are effective for learners with SEND. This will provide all learners with opportunities to learn in small steps and carefully build upon their prior knowledge. This is done through a range of approaches including:
- creating a language rich environment which is vital to closing the gap between learners with SEND and their peers and enabling future attainment.
- demonstrating what we want learners to do and show them what we mean.
- using physical resources to help abstract concepts become more accessible and meaningful and recognise the value of Dual Coding.
- reducing Cognitive Load and activate children’s prior knowledge/schema through a connected curriculum that builds of prior learning, knowledge and skills and provides regular opportunities for learners to practise recalling what they have learnt, to help them easily access this information when it is needed.
By the time they leave, pupils will:
- Have a curiosity and fascination about the past
- Have a secure understanding of the chronology of the periods/events in history that they have studied
- Use factual knowledge to describe past societies, periods and events
- Select, gather and organise evidence from a variety of primary and secondary sources to find out about the past
- Look closely and methodically when analysing a range of historical sources
- Understand the significance of the people and events they have studied
- Recognise similarities and differences between the historical periods they have studied
- Recognise that some things stayed the same across the historical periods they have studied and how and why some things changed
- Explain the possible cause/s of historical events and why people behaved as they did
- Understand the consequences of past events and their impact on individuals, groups and society
- Give opinions about historical events/periods and reasons for their opinions
- Understand some of the different positions from which people see and understand historical events
- Understand that explanations, interpretations and opinions of the past can differ and are open to debate
EYFS Links
Understanding the World
- Compare and contrast characters from stories, including figures from the past
- Recognise that people have different beliefs and celebrate special times in different ways
Past and Present ELG
- Talk about the lives of the people around them & their roles in society
- Know some similarities & differences between things in the past and now, drawing on their experiences and what has been read in class
- Understand the past through settings, characters & events encountered in books read in class and storytelling
Speaking ELG
- Express their ideas and feelings about their experiences using full sentences, including use of past, present and future tenses