Our vision at St. Paul’s is to inspire the smallest seeds to flourish so that everyone can reach their full potential. Through our History curriculum and wider school opportunities, we want our children to develop a passion for a wide range periods of time and types of History.

The National Curriculum for History aims to ensure that all pupils:  

• Know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world.

• Know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the nature of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; characteristic features of past non-European societies; achievements and follies of mankind.

• Gain and deploy a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry’.

• Understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, and use them to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses.

• Understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed.

• Gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales.

Our History Curriculum:

Intent

We want our children to develop an understanding of Britain’s past, and that of the wider world while also learning to appreciate the complexity of people’s lives and the diversity of societies. we believe that this will help prepare them to be citizens in the world today. Our ambitious enquiry-based curriculum aims to encourage the children to be true historians who can be critical and analytic thinkers, recognise multiple points of view and make connections between the past and present. Our children will develop resilience as they study sources closely and voice, explain and defend their own conclusions. As they explore the different ways that we can learn about the past, our children will discover the important role that historians play in our understanding of the world as it is today and the number of career opportunities available.

Implementation

All learning will start by revisiting prior knowledge. Staff will model explicitly the subject-specific vocabulary, knowledge, and skills relevant to the learning to allow them to integrate new knowledge into larger concepts. Weekly curriculum quizzes are used to review learning and check that children know more and remember more. History assessment is ongoing throughout the relevant cross-curricular themes to inform teachers with their planning lesson activities and differentiation. Summative assessment is completed at the end of each topic where history objectives have been covered. Our historians will be given a variety of experiences both in and out of the classroom where appropriate to create memorable learning opportunities and to further support and develop their understanding.

Please see below Whole School History Overview:

Please see below examples of history curriculum units. The full history curriculum is available in school and available to see upon request.

Impact

The children of St Paul’s will leave school having a love for history and will develop their own research questions to peruse further. Children will have developed aspirations in relation to History and this will be carried on into Key Stage Three. All children will be able to discuss what they have learnt and apply their knowledge to the modern-day age.

Assessment

Children are assessed once per half term throughout humanities: three times a year for history and three times a year for geography. The penultimate lessons of each topic is assessment based, whereby children complete a range of activities (dependant on year group) to show what they have learnt throughout the unit and apply their knowledge within the wider world. The final lesson of each topic is then used as a mop-up session, so all children can achieve their individual targets. This assists teachers to provide relevant learning according to their year group learning objectives and to identify any gaps within learning. Overall assessment is monitored by the humanities coordinate to check progress of all pupils across the school.

Early Years

The EYFS framework is structured very differently to the national curriculum as it is organised across seven areas of learning rather than subject areas. The aim of this document is to help subject leaders to understand how the skills taught across EYFS feed into national curriculum subjects.

This document demonstrates which statements from the 2021 Development Matters are prerequisite skills for history within the national curriculum. The table below outlines the most relevant statements taken from the Early Learning Goals in the EYFS statutory framework and the Development Matters age ranges for Three and Four-Year-Olds and Reception to match the programme of study for history.

The most relevant statements for history are taken from the following area of learning:

• Understanding the World