History
Intent
At Pott Shrigley, our history curriculum is delivered through coherent, sequenced, and immersive lessons designed to develop pupil’s knowledge and understanding of the past, both in Britain and the wider world. Our aim is to equip children with the skills to critically examine historical evidence, inspire their curiosity to know more about the past, ask perceptive questions, and think critically. Our termly units are based on the National Curriculum and are designed to ensure clear progression so that our pupils can build on and develop historical concepts, knowledge, and skills year on year.
Implementation
We carefully plan our lessons in a systematic way to ensure key coverage of historical periods and concepts. We start each unit looking at timelines so that children know where people and events they study fit within a chronological framework. We use a variety of teaching approaches and high-quality resources to ensure that all children can access the history curriculum and be challenged to think critically, develop historical vocabulary, and explore historical sources. This ensures that our children understand how to make connections, draw contrasts, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement.
Furthermore, for history to be brought to life for our pupils, we will provide immersive experiences for them such as school trips and visitors so that they can gain an understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’ and ‘civilisation’ and place their growing knowledge into different contexts. We will incorporate local historical studies into our bespoke curriculum so that our children comprehend how significant events and people in our locality have shaped the area that we live in today, enabling them to compare how things have evolved and understand why. Alongside the mapped out termly units in each class, we cover whole school themes including Black History Month and Remembrance Day where pupils come together to learn about these significant historical events.
Pupils are introduced to carefully chosen ‘Golden Threads’ in Class 1 and these are revisited during their time at school. Throughout each stage, children build on prior knowledge, revisiting and revising key concepts, before introducing new information for children to deepen their skills and understanding to create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses.
We use ongoing assessment to ensure that children are retaining knowledge, and we conduct pupil voice so that children are given the opportunity to articulate what skills they are learning.
Impact
The impact of providing the children with a carefully planned history curriculum is that they will leave Pott Shrigley having acquired a deep understanding of key historical events, people, and periods. They should have developed a positive attitude towards history that they will carry with them in their future at secondary school and beyond. In addition, it should be evident that pupils have made progress and have gained the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to become historically literate and that they can draw upon what they have learnt across into other subjects and in their wider understanding of the world around them.