History Aims

History is the story of human civilisation and we aim to ensure that children understand a broad narrative of historical events – both of a certain time period but also within a much wider chronological understanding of British and world history. With this in mind, each topic (in Years 3-6) starts with an overarching timeline that draws on their knowledge of when other eras happened. This also reminds children that history isn’t just one thing after another, but rather a much more complicated series of overlapping and connected narratives. This timeline builds on one introduced in Early Years and Key Stage 1 which places events and people within ‘living memory’ and ‘beyond living memory’.

Children progress through historical enquiries of each era, with British history taught chronologically in order to provide children with a coherent narrative of who occupied Britain, when and for how long. History is driven by enquiry. Teaching through an enquiry approach is not only an effective means of teaching substantive knowledge (of chronology, events and individuals) as it also provides children with disciplinary knowledge. This is knowledge of how historians undertake historical enquiries to make comparisons and historical judgements about continuity and change, cause and consequence and similarity and difference. These history skills are embedded in learning objectives and independent tasks over the course of our seven-year curriculum.

Knowledge Threads – what we teach and why

A dilemma in planning a history curriculum is deciding what to teach and what to leave out. Each era we study is steeped in fascinating stories, people and events but if the knowledge we expect our children to learn is too broad or links between each era are unclear, this could lead to confusion, misconceptions and a lower level of retention overall.

Instead, we have set out clear ‘threads’ of knowledge which are continually revisited within each unit so children gain an increasingly secure understanding of concepts and terminology. 

Community & Culture	Conflict & Rebellion	Exploration & Invention	Hierarchy & Power
Beliefs and values Architecture Social groups and hierarchies	Invasion Military	Trade and industry Discoveries Travel	Systems of government Comparing the lives of the rich and poor