Intent

All of the elements of our curriculum intent statement underpin our teaching of History. However, History provides particular opportunities for teaching the following aspects of our intent statement.

• ensuring that our curriculum upholds dignity and values all God’s children so that we are successful in preventing rather than just reacting to

stereotyping and prejudice 4 a (i)

• making sure that the people, events and issues we study enable pupils to understand, respect and celebrate difference and diversity. 4 a (ii)

Aims

The national curriculum for history aims to ensure that all pupils:

• Know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world
• Know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the nature of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; characteristic features of past non-European societies; achievements and follies of mankind.
• Gain and deploy a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry’ 
• 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
• 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
• Gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales.

Implementation

The History curriculum  is carefully and coherently sequenced to enable our children to develop a growing knowledge of the themes outlined above. Pupils’ knowledge builds towards clearly defined end points so everyone knows what we expect our pupils to achieve by the end of each topic, each year and each key stage. To meet the educational needs of our school community we have selected the following core knowledge concepts as a focus for our teaching. These are explored in increasing depth as pupils move through the school.

• Culture, Settlement, Transport, Exploration, Invasion, Empire, Religion, Civilisation, Parliament and Peasantry.    

In Reception class History is taught as part of the ‘People and Communities’ area of learning within the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum. Further details of how the Early Years curriculum is organised can be found on our Early Years policy.

In Years 1 to 6 History is taught as a discrete subject, though meaningful links are made with other subjects in our curriculum. For example, in Y1, ‘The Seaside Now and Then’ links with Geography. In Y6, ‘The Mayan Civilisation’ links with Maths. The topics we teach are outlined in the curriculum map for History. (see Appendix 1). This is published on our website.

To support high quality knowledge rich lessons, the school subscribes to the History Association and pays a yearly fee to borrow artefacts from The Museum of Lancashire. Pupils regularly visit The Atkinson, Southport’s Museum and Art Gallery to enhance their learning. Other visits include The Eco Centre in Southport for the Stone Age and the Roman town and museum of Chester.

All teaching materials are adapted to meet the requirements of our Christian vision and curriculum intent.