The subject leader for History is Mrs Campbell.

History Curriculum Statement

Intent

At Grange, our intent is to teach History in a carefully considered way which will help our learners have a coherent knowledge and understanding of the past and which will allow them to develop specific historical disciplinary skills.  We aim to develop their sense of self and their heritage through a good sense of chronology – which will help them to understand Britain’s past and indeed the chronology of the wider world. 

We intend our History curriculum to encourage our learners to engage in a process of enquiry – to be able to question, weigh evidence, develop perspective, understand bias and appreciate why there are different versions of the same event.  We plan to provoke children to ask perceptive questions, to make inferences and connections across places and time and begin to understand the complexity of people’s lives and the process of change; to begin to appreciate the diversity of societies and relationships as well as understanding their own identity and the challenges relevant to them.

In order to fulfil this intent, we offer our children a History curriculum which has scope, rigour, coherence and sequencing.

Implementation

Since 2022, we have been part of a national Opening Worlds cluster.  Opening Worlds is a progressive curriculum designed to support the humanities at KS2.  It is written and delivered by Christine Counsell – a nationally recognised history expert whose work was extensively cited in the Ofsted History Research Review.  This curriculum is not an ‘off-the-shelf’ scheme but an ongoing commitment to ongoing professional development around the subjects and pedagogies and collaboration locally and nationally with an expectation that member schools also build in local links and learning opportunities.

The curriculum has at its heart, a focus on oracy and the power of storytelling – which is very relevant and stimulating for our children at Grange.

Alongside this, we have working in ‘Opening Worlds’ style, to redesign our KS1 curriculum with several local partner schools so that it echoes the pedagogies of our LS2 curriculum and prepares our children to access our KS2 curriculum.

In EYFS, early opportunities are provided for children to begin to engage with History. It involves guiding children to make sense of their physical world and their community. The frequency and range of children’s personal experiences increase their knowledge and sense of the world around them – from visiting parks, libraries and museums to meeting important members of society such as police officers, nurses and firefighters. In addition, listening to a broad selection of stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems will foster their understanding of our culturally, socially, technologically and ecologically diverse world. As well as building important knowledge, this extends their familiarity with words that support understanding across domains. Enriching and widening children’s vocabulary will support later reading comprehension. We recognise that visits and visitors need to provide experiences which the children may otherwise not have and where possible, provide positive role models from the community for children to learn from.

By the end of Early Years therefore, the children should be able to:

• Talk about the lives of the people around them and their roles in society.
• Know some similarities and 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 and events encountered in books read in class and storytelling.
• Express their ideas and feelings about their experiences using full sentences, including use of past, present and future tenses and making use of conjunctions, with modelling and support from their teacher.[6h1] 

Across all keystages, we ensure our curriculum is inclusive and progressive by focusing on the learning of key vocabulary, using widgets to help support retention.  We also identify key knowledge and vocabulary which is carefully planned to aid sequencing and building over subjects and across year groups.  Our pupils make progress because they encounter meaningful examples across different contexts repeatedly – enabling them to grasp abstract concepts and to add new knowledge to that already learned and remembered. 

Some knowledge is particularly important to future learning. For example, because we teach about settlements and rivers in Year 3, our pupils progressively understand how difference civilizations developed and empires formed because of this fundamental knowledge.

Pupils make progress in history by developing:

• their knowledge about the past (this knowledge is often described as ‘substantive knowledge’)
• their knowledge about how historians investigate the past, and how they construct historical claims, arguments and accounts (often described as ‘disciplinary knowledge’)

To maximise the impact on all pupils’ capacity to learn, we deliberately include:

• pre-teaching or earlier encounters with concepts

• assessments to check pupils’ security with these concepts.
• intervention to address gaps or misconceptions.

Our carefully sequenced curriculum, and the pedagogy used to teach it ensures that:

• Pupils are supported to learn new content by meaningful examples and understanding of the specific historical context that makes ideas and concepts more familiar.
• Pupils have repeated encounters with a wide range of important concepts in a number of different contexts.
• Teaching emphasises some content and concepts for direct and explicit teaching, but it also ensures wide-ranging opportunities for incidental learning.
• Pupils encounter and enjoy rich stories and contextual details about the past, which make abstract ideas more meaningful and gives life to some key historical figures.

In Year 6 we visit France, where we get opportunities to visit museums and battlefields, which brings our World War 1 topic to life. We visit towns such as Ypres in Belgium, where we always take part in the Menin Gate Ceremony – an occasion which is very important to us as a school.

Impact

We assess the impact of our History curriculum in a range of ways which includes:

• Assessment:
  • Formative assessments are designed to identify gaps in pupils’ knowledge of specific content and concepts.
  • A range of different assessment approaches are used together to assess pupils’ knowledge, e.g. low-stakes regular quizzing; regular revisit of previous knowledge taught as ‘lesson starters’; end of unit synoptic tasks.
• Observations of pupils learning and engagement during and after visits and fieldwork lessons, which is much improved as they now have the knowledge and vocabulary to engage.
• Regular and collaborative quality assurance – both in school and across schools in the local cluster and nationally.
• A range of monitoring actions, including staff audit of skills, scrutiny of plans and books, deep dives.
• Incidental impact in other subject areas – for example, we see evidence of historical knowledge being used as a basis for non-fiction writing, even in KS1.
• The increase in adult knowledge and enthusiasm around curriculum design and delivery because of ongoing collaboration across school and schools.
• Termly reports to governors and attendance at governor curriculum meetings.

NB a detailed curriculum plan and rationale is available in school – this has been written by Christine Counsell.