Intent

The history curriculum at Eastfield will:

• Deliver a high-quality history education with carefully chosen topics, content, details and breadth to ensure pupils acquire a coherent knowledge and understanding of the past both in Britain and the wider ancient civilisations.

• Develop pupils’ chronological knowledge of periods in history to enable them to organize their learning into coherent narratives.

• Specify the substantive concepts which will occur frequently throughout studying history and repeated in different contexts, to ensure pupils develop their understanding in more depth.

• Encourage children to think and act like historians by learning how historians study the past and construct accounts of the past through specific examples.

Each unit of work is carefully chosen to focus on one or more of the key disciplinary concepts:

1. Cause and consequence

2. Similarity and Difference

3. Continuity and Change

4. Significance

• Support pupils to use their historical enquiry skills to make sense of the 4 key concepts.

Implementation

• The history curriculum begins in the Foundation Stage where children begin to develop a sense of past and present in their immediate community. Through the aspect, Understanding the World (Past and Present), children will be encouraged to make sense of ‘now and then’ and compare and contrast characters from stories including figures from the past.

• In Key stage 1, pupils begin to expand and develop their knowledge of the past by focusing on 4 topics, set out in the National Curriculum, which give breadth of study to different areas of history.

• We develop disciplinary knowledge to work in harmony within each strand of substantive knowledge so that the children are given the opportunity to think and act like historians. Each unit focusses on one or more of the 4 big disciplinary concepts, Cause and Consequence, Similarity and Difference, Continuity and Change and Significance. Throughout each unit, pupils are taught historical enquiry skills such as interpreting the past, asking and answering questions and reviewing and analysing sources of evidence and develop these skills at a more independent level as they progress through each unit.

Sources of evidence are carefully selected so children can understand how historians learn about the past. We use non-textual sources such as photographs, songs, artifacts as well as longer extracts and whole texts.

• Each unit is carefully sequenced and begins with developing chronological knowledge of the period being studied, eventually widening to include other periods of history. Changes through history in housing is used as a constant comparator of different periods because this is a familiar concept to all children. The substantive concepts of law and society also run through each unit and the 4 key concepts are planned according to which are most pertinent to the unit These concepts have been prioritized to address diversity throughout Britain and the wider world across time.

• In key stage 2, British history is sequenced chronologically. Interlinked with this are studies of world history, such as the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece and the Mayans.

Impact

Outcomes evidence a broad and balanced history curriculum and demonstrate the children’s acquisition of identified key knowledge. Emphasis is placed on analytical thinking and questioning which helps pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world and are curious to know more about the past. Through this study pupils learn to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement.

Further information