History Curriculum

Age Range: 11-18

To enable students to make sense of the world around them, develop their own voice in making judgements about the past, and to engage critically with History as a discipline.

History Curriculum Big Ideas

Power Who has had power in the world? Who has challenged this power?
Worldview What ideas have framed how people understand the world?
Conflict How has war changed Britain? How has the experience of conflict changed over time?
Society What has life been like for ordinary people?

 

The School 21 approach

Subject Design Principles:

  • Enquiry led approach that prioritises genuine and engaging historical questions and that prepares students for further study without merely repeating content.
  • A commitment to diversity of histories.
  • Reading, writing and oracy at the centre of what we do.
  • Integrated source work and use of historians (engaging with the discipline of history).
  • Give students a chronological framework to understand the world Encourage and develop deeper historical thinking through engaging the students with second-order concepts: Causation, consequence, change and continuity, similarity and difference, significance.
  • Emphasising the stories of individuals in the past.
  • Teach an explicitly anti-racist curriculum.
  • Retrieval practice in every lesson.

 

Phase Specific Journey:

Phases 3 and 4 Developing passions and increasing independence
Phase 3 and 4 Journey Students have an understanding of the four time periods of British History – Medieval, Early Modern, 18th & 19th centuries and modern Britain.
Students are able to place key events into chronological order.
Students are able to identify key impacts on society from ‘big events’ e.g Norman Conquest.
Students are able to identify and explain similarities and differences in Britain from Medieval period – 19th Century.
Begin to develop use of key writing frames to help structure their answers.
Use of voice to make key judgements.

 

Phases 5 and 6 Building choice, autonomy and empowered professionalism
Phase 5 and 6 Journey Being able to identify and explain similarities and differences in key areas of focus over time e.g. USSR, Crime and Punishment in Britain.
Students are able to place key events in chronological order.
Students are able to identify enquiry questions and create answers that answer the key questions.
Students are able to dissect sources in order to identify how they support enquiry questions.
Students are able to make judgements on the usefulness of a source/interpretation based on their contextual understanding of a time period.
Able to articulate judgement through different mediums.

 

Year 7

Autumn term 1

Big History

Autumn term 2

Normans

Summer term 1

Summer term 2

Year 8

Autumn term 1

In what ways was Britain turned upside down in the seventeenth century?

Why is Oliver Cromwell ‘the most hated man in Ireland’?

Autumn term 2

How useful is Joseph Collyer’s engraving for understanding how the trafficking of enslaved people was abolished?

Spring term 1

Was the Industrial Revolution wholly positive for Britain?

 

Spring term 2

What did British colonialism look like in the nineteenth century?

Why does it matter what we call the events of 1857?

Summer term 1

WW1

Votes for Women

Summer term 2

Year 9

Autumn term 1

The Holocaust

Autumn term 2

World War 2

Spring term 1

The Atomic Bomb

Spring term 2

Who decolonised in the 20th Century?

Summer term 1

Summer term 2

Year 10

Autumn term 1

Crime C1000- Present Day

 

Autumn term 2

Law Enforcement C1000 – Present Day

Spring term 1

Whitechapel, C1870-C1900: Crime, Policing and the inner city.

Spring term 2

Elizabeth: Queen, government and religion 1558-69

Elizabeth: Challenges to Elizabeth I – home and abroad, 1569-88

Summer term 1

Elizabethan Society in the Age of Exploration 1558-88

Summer term 2

Revision

Year 11

Autumn term 1

Hitler’s rise to power, 1923-1933

 

Autumn term 2

Nazi control and dictatorship, 1933 – 1939

Spring term 1

Life in Nazi Germany, 1933-1939

The Cold War

Spring term 2

The Cold War

Summer term 1

Summer term 2

Year 12

Autumn term 1

Communist Government in the USSR, 1917 – 85

Establishing Communist Rule, 1949 – 57

Autumn term 2

Industrial and Agricultural Change, 1917 – 85

Agriculture and Industry, 1949 – 65

Spring term 1

Control of the people, 1917 -85

The Cultural Revolution, 1966-76

Spring term 2

Social Developments, 1917 – 85

Social and cultural changes, 1949-76

Summer term 1

The fall of the USSR, 1985-91

Summer term 2

Coursework

Year 13

Autumn term 1

Coursework

Autumn term 2

Spring term 1

Spring term 2

Summer term 1

Summer term 2