History

The History Curriculum aims to incorporate the school’s values of Love, Respect and Endeavour into lessons: we want our pupils to genuinely enjoy their learning, respect the knowledge that they gain and work hard to improve themselves.

Our History Curriculum helps our pupils to understand how the country we live in has been shaped over time. This knowledge is developed through developing pupils’ ability to investigate and interpret historical sources.
Therefore, our history intent is to – • Provide a coherently planned, sequenced and adaptive curriculum to meet the needs of all our pupils.
• Encourage critical and analytical thinking in order to form substantiated opinions.
• Develop effective literacy skills in writing, speaking and listening that enable pupils to further explain their opinions.
• Provide enrichment opportunities that are varied and rich both outside and within school.
• Explore the further education opportunities and career paths that history can lead to.

The National Curriculum is followed, making sure we do not repeat the areas covered by our feeder schools nor areas that will be covered at high school. The curriculum is organised to follow the chronology of the curriculum content, enabling pupils to understand the historical process of the formation of Modern Britain, its democracy, its religion and its society.

In Year 6, History is taught alongside Geography as part of Humanities (six lessons a fortnight), which in turn is taught alongside Literacy. History becomes a discrete subject in Year 7 (three lessons a fortnight) and Year 8 (four lessons a fortnight). Pupils progress is based on assessments, essays, evidence from pupils’ books and oral contributions in class.

Pupils from all backgrounds will develop an understanding of British history and how our country has been shaped over time. They will have become increasingly sophisticated in their investigation of historical sources, being ever more critical and analytical in their approach. Pupils will be better able to develop informed opinions and substantiate them with historical evidence, sometimes in essay form. We believe that critical and analytical thinking will also allow our pupils to see through propaganda and ‘fake news’ to better understand the world they live in today.