Intent

At Newton Leys Primary School, we have designed our History curriculum to ignite our children’s curiosity about exploring the past. There is a focus on the development of the children’s specific historical skills and knowledge. This is taught through a topic-based approach and by giving the children hands on experience wherever possible. Our teaching of History equips our children with knowledge about the history of Britain, significant aspects of the history of the wider world, the lives of significant people from the past, and changes in living memory. In understanding this, our children will gain cultural capital and have a greater appreciation of today’s world and their place in it. We want to teach children how to ask and answer questions about the past, developing their inquisitive minds and giving them the opportunities, through many different topics, to help them to love learning about History.

Implementation

At Newton Leys Primary School, we use objectives from the National Curriculum to deliver our history topics. In each year group, the children will be taught key historical skills and concepts linked to each historical Topic. Each Key Stage has a Progression of Skills History Pack, which details the key skills and concepts that must be taught in each year group. These key concepts have been divided under the following headings.

The substantive knowledge strands are further broken down into the following key threads:

Understanding history and how historians think however is a close intertwining of the disciplinary skills of becoming a historian and the substantive knowledge of what has happened. For more information on our disciplinary skills, please click on the attachment below. 

We cater for children with an SEND and children who might have gaps or require some support in accessing History through scaffolding and an understanding of their current knowledge and ability through formative assessment and retrieval activities. The retrieval activities at the start of the lesson also support the children's strengthening of their schemata (connections in their memory) to ensure that knowledge is revisited and sticks.

Impact

We see the impact of what our History curriculum and teaching provides through learning walks, pupil work and pupil voice. By the time our children leave our school, they should have:

·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.

·A desire to embrace challenging activities, including opportunities to undertake high-quality research across a range of history topics.