Intent:

At Barwic Parade, we aim for our pupils to develop an appreciation and understanding of the past and wider world, with the intention of improving every child’s cultural capital, understanding of the world around them and their own heritage. We encourage them to analyse, question and delve deeper into new learning, by accessing a range of primary and secondary sources. Our pupils will be taught the key historical skills of: chronological understanding, historical understanding, historical enquiry, interpretations of history, organisation and communication. These skills are mapped out in a progression model, which outlines the sequential way in which skills, knowledge and vocabulary are taught.

Our curriculum has been designed to cover all of the skills, knowledge and understanding as set out in the National Curriculum, which states that ‘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.’ Our long term plan for history is designed around ideas put forth in Chris Quigley’s Essential Curriculum, that children need to revisit learning at carefully planned intervals to enable them to move the new learning from short to long term memory.

Characteristics of a Historian:

• The ability to think critically about history and communicate ideas very confidently in styles appropriate to a range of audiences.
• The ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past, formulating and refining questions and lines of enquiry.
• A respect for historical evidence and the ability to make robust and critical use of it to support their explanations and judgments.
• An excellent knowledge and understanding of people, events, and contexts from a range of historical periods and of historical concepts and processes.
• 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 desire to embrace challenging activities, including opportunities to undertake high-quality research across a range of history topics.

Implementation:

At Barwic Parade history is taught explicitly every two weeks, as part of our mixed-age curriculum. A new area of learning is explored in each lesson and revisited at carefully planned intervals throughout the year, to enable children to build on their previous learning while deepening their understanding. We have designed the curriculum in this way in response to new and relevant research about how children can move learning into their long term memory. We support them to create robust schemas of knowledge, vocabulary and understanding which provide strong foundations for future learning and can be extended throughout their lives. Every classroom has a timeline around it, which is utilised whenever relevant throughout the year to support the children’s development of chronological understanding and help them to make links to history in other areas of learning. Children are able to explore a diverse range of historical figures, inventions and events, chosen with purpose to offer a broad coverage of local and wider world history, as well as a range of time periods.

Below is our overview of history for the year, covering year 1 to year 6:

Impact:

We aim to prepare our pupils for life as an adult in the wider world and believe that our history curriculum will support them to achieve this. They will be able to analyse and think critically, and make informed judgements based on their knowledge of the past, on both a local and wider world level. Our children will be aware of how historical events have shaped the world that we now live in, and will be inquisitive and able to pursue their own interests to be able to understand a topic more. We have planned to measure the impact of our curriculum through:

• Regular mini quizzes or assessments throughout the year, these will enable the children to revisit their learning and aid the process of moving their learning to long term memory
• Discussions with pupils about their learning – Can they demonstrate that they have learned and remembered more?
• The use of our otrack tracking system, to accurately assess children’s attainment and progress in historical skills and knowledge.