History

Our high-quality history education enables pupils to gain a coherent narrative of Britain’s past and that of the wider world.

Our curriculum aims to inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. Pupils will learn to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. History helps pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time. We teach children the skills and disciplines of how to ‘be a historian’: To investigate and interpret the past; To build an overview of world history; To understand chronology; To communicate historically.

We recognise that as we have a 2-year rolling programme, it is not always possible to teach historical units in chronological order. We therefore expect every child to develop a sense of chronology within each unit of learning. This is reinforced with a class timeline that is frequently updated and added to as children learn new information about the past.

An essential aspect of our teaching of history is that we make meaningful links to our local area – our local history of mining, the Romans, the Georgians and the impact of the second World war – and to the geography of our local area such as rivers and canals and how this impacted local industry and trade. We enrich our topics with trips and visitors and make links with personal family histories and links as far as possible.