History at Spring Bank Primary School

At Spring Bank Primary school we shape our History curriculum to fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum and EYFS statutory requirements. Our intent is to provide a broad, balanced and personalised curriculum that encompasses British Values and provides ambition and challenge, while ensuring it is accessible to all learners. Our History curriculum is fully inclusive for every child.

Through our teaching of history, children will develop a knowledge of local, British and world history. They will learn key factual knowledge and understand historical concepts and abstract terms. We want our historians to enjoy and love learning about history by gaining knowledge and skills. We aim for all children to experience educational visits, visitors into school, access to real-life artefacts and practical activities to allow children to fully immerse themselves in the topic. Great importance is given to our history curriculum as we believe this helps to:

• Develop an interest in the past and an appreciation of human achievements and aspirations.
• Develop the skills to be able to link their learning in history to other areas of the curriculum.
• Learn about the major issues and events in the history of our own country and of the world and how these events may have influenced one another.
• Instil a curiosity and understanding of events, places and people in a variety of times and environments.
• Develop a knowledge of chronology within which the children can organise their understanding of the past.
• Understand how the past was different from the present and that people of other times and places may have had different values and attitudes from ours.
• Understand how our local area has changed over time and what may have caused those changes, helping children to develop a sense of pride.
• Understand the nature of evidence by emphasising the process of enquiry and by developing the range of skills required to interpret primary and secondary source materials.
• Understand the values of our society.
• Understand that events have a multiplicity of causes and that historical explanation is provisional, debatable and sometimes controversial.
• Develop historical perspective in various contexts enabling children to understand 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.

The National Curriculum will provide a structure and skill development for the history curriculum being taught throughout the school. The curriculum learning journey for history has been organised to ensure British history in KS2 is followed as chronologically as possible, developing children’s knowledge year on year and enabling teachers to link new learning to previous learning and knowledge. Key concepts, subject vocabulary and knowledge have been clearly mapped out from Reception to Year 6, based on the requirements of the Early Years Statutory Framework and the National Curriculum with clear links to other subjects carefully built in to provide opportunities to embed knowledge and deepen learning.

Please see the documents below for the overview of learning.