History

Our history curriculum aims/intends to:

• Enable pupils to develop knowledge of and understand significant aspects of both local history, and history of the wider word: the nature of ancient civilisations, the expansion of empires, characteristic features of past non-European societies, the successes and failures of significant people and significant events within living memory.
• Enable pupils to understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, and use them to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses.
• Enable pupils to understand the 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 been constructed.
• Ensure equal access to learning for all pupils, with high expectations for every pupil and appropriate levels of challenge and support.
• Promote the moral, mental and physical development of our pupils and prepare them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life through reflections of actions of others in the past and whether those actions caused positive or negative outcomes.
• Pupils to gain historical perspective and feel confident to make links between the knowledge they are acquiring and to be able to use their skills to develop their understanding from term to term and year to year in different contexts.
• Pupils to gain, and confidently use, a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry'.

History is taught from Early Years to Year 6. Teachers are encouraged to find opportunities to include a historical context in the curriculum as often as possible.