History Curriculum Department

History Curriculum

Age Range: 11-18

Subject Vision Statement: 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.

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?

 

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.