History

We believe that our children deserve a broad and ambitious history curriculum, rich in knowledge and skills. The study of history ignites children’s curiosity about the past in Britain and the wider world. Through finding out about how and why the world, our country, culture and local community have developed over time, children understand how the past influences the present. History enables children to develop a context for their growing sense of identity and a chronological framework for their knowledge of significant events, places and people. What they learn through history can influence their decisions about personal choices, attitudes and values. We seek to create a life-long love of the subject through building a deepening knowledge of the past, a respect for people and an appreciation of how historians make sense of the past. Our curriculum is designed to provide our children with the subject specific language they need to describe, question and discuss historical events and their impact on the world. The curriculum is sequenced to ensure that pupils learn within a coherent chronological framework. Key concepts and themes such as civilisation, society, invasion and government are interwoven. The curriculum offer is suitably challenging and carefully adapted to ensure that all pupils can secure the core knowledge and skills required for future learning.

The Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum supports children’s understanding of history through the planning and teaching of ‘Understanding the World.’ This aspect is about how children find out about past and present events in their own lives, their families and other people they know. Children’s understanding of the past is predominantly developed through settings, characters and events encountered in the books read in class and through shared stories.

KS1 pupils develop an awareness of the past, using common words and phrases relating to the passing of time, building on their prior learning in the EYFS. They create timelines to help them know where the people and events they study fit within a chronological framework and identify similarities and differences between ways of life in different periods. Pupils use a constantly increasing vocabulary of historical terms and a range of sources to develop their understanding of key features of the past. They learn about a range of significant events, people and places within and beyond their immediate locality. The unit focusing on a local history study provides pupils with an understanding of what life was like in their local area and wider Devon during different periods of time. These units also lay the foundations for future studies in KS2. The unit on Ancient Egyptians provides pupils with their first opportunity to learn about an ancient civilisation. The unit on London provides pupils with an opportunity to delve into the history of Britain and study significant events such as the Great Fire of London.

The history curriculum at Key Stage 2 seeks to give pupils a solid foundation and broad overview in some of the most important periods, events and themes in British and world history. It is comprehensive but necessarily selective. The curriculum gives pupils a strong grounding in British history from the first settlements through Roman Britain, the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, the medieval period and up to the Industrial Revolution and touching on Britain during the two World Wars. While studying these periods the units explore themes of change and continuity, perspective and power. Five units have been carefully selected to explore world history to provide global coverage and introduce several themes. The unit on Ancient Greece introduces key ideas around power and its legitimacy, the Shang Dynasty gives insight into the progress and achievements in China at a time when there was much less occurring in Europe. The unit on the Middle East gives pupils an overview of the history of this vitally important region and the reasons for the intractable problems faced today. The unit on the Benin Kingdom deliberately challenges the narrative often prevalent in the teaching of African history – celebrating a highly successful civilisation while introducing the slave trade. Finally, the unit on Civil Rights provides an overview of how Black people have been treated in the USA, through the Civil Rights movement and Dr King, right the way up to Black Lives Matter.

By bringing pupils up to the present day – in the case of Civil Rights and the Middle East – the curriculum demonstrates the importance of past events in shaping the world of today. Throughout the curriculum, connections and comparison are made between events and individuals: the unit on the industrial revolution exploring the Great Reform Act by taking pupils from the Magna Carta (which they have previously studied) through the changing seat of power in England over the subsequent six hundred years.

Throughout the curriculum, pupils are taught the substantive content which defines each period. This knowledge is meticulously planned and regularly revisited and elaborated upon. More abstract concepts, too, are carefully developed across the key stage, so that pupils gain an increasingly sophisticated understanding of, for example, kingship or empire. However, it is not only substantive knowledge that is taught. The disciplinary knowledge of history, such as cause and consequence, chronological understanding, similarity and difference and the use of sources of evidence are all explicitly taught and practised.

Impact
​By the time the children leave our school they should have developed the following:
 
A secure knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from the historical periods covered.
The ability to think critically about history and communicate confidently in styles appropriate to a range of audiences.
The ability to consistently support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using detailed, appropriate and accurate historical evidence derived from a range of sources.
The ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past, forming and refining questions and lines of enquiry.
A passion for history and an enthusiastic engagement in learning, which develops their sense of curiosity about the past and their understanding of how and why people interpret the past in different ways.
A respect for historical evidence and the ability to make robust and critical use of it to support their explanations and judgements.