INTENT

In line with the National Curriculum we want our pupils to gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. We want our history curriculum to inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. Teaching should equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. 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. At Whiston Worrygoose, we teach history as a discrete subject and we cover our key concepts through blocks of learning. This is to ensure that children are able to understand the unique nature of history as a discipline and allow them to build on their essential historical knowledge and skills. However, we also ensure that history is integrated into other areas of the curriculum, such as art and writing lessons, and take children on educational visits to experience the impact of historical events, first hand.

IMPLEMENTATION

We plan for History using the National Curriculum objectives to ensure a robust and thorough approach. All of our Curriculum Unit Plans have been carefully designed to ensure children are receiving high-quality lessons with meaningful learning opportunities, which will stay with the children throughout their lives. Cross curricular outcomes in history are specifically planned for, with especially strong links between history and writing lessons to embed tier 3 vocabulary. History at Whiston is taught in blocks throughout the year, so that children can achieve depth in their learning. Key learning and concepts build sequentially throughout children’s learning journeys and our blocks show progress, ensuring essential prior learning is in place and also matches children’s age and maturity. At the beginning of each unit, children are provided with opportunities to retrieve prior knowledge to ensure they are ready to move on and embed new learning. They also have extensive opportunities to retrieve knowledge from lesson to lesson and apply their learning to challenging and thought- provoking questions. Pupils are assessed formatively from lesson to lesson and summative assessment also takes place at the end of each block of learning.

IMPACT

At Whiston Worrygoose, our History curriculum is designed to ensure knowledge and behaviours are systematic across the school so that every child benefits from them. Each unit builds on the knowledge from prior units and provides essential opportunities for pupils to retrieve knowledge from their long-term memories. Pupils are assessed on a regular basis, both during lessons and at the end of each block of learning. This allows teachers to set appropriate, progressive targets and challenge children in their thinking and learning.

We measure the impact of this curriculum in many ways. Firstly, outcomes in history and writing books evidence a broad and balanced curriculum and demonstrate children’s acquisition of identified key knowledge and vocabulary. At the end of both key stages, children will be able to talk about our key concepts but their knowledge and breadth of understanding will have deepened each year and with each unit they cover. By the end of key stage 2, our learners will have also gained a wide range of transferable skills, which they can apply to other subjects and contexts.