Our Vision for History

It is our belief that the provision of History within our setting should meet the needs of each and every one of our children and be informed by our understanding of their backgrounds and the social, cultural and environmental barriers they face. Our determination to help our children overcome these barriers to learning, by ensuring we offer them appropriate and ambitious curriculum opportunities, is the principal at the core of all of our curriculum drivers. It is our responsibility to equip our children with the cultural capital they require to thrive as informed and thoughtful members of our community. As such, the depth and breadth of the concepts and knowledge we have built into our curriculum is determined by our understanding of our children, the barriers we need to help them break down and the milestones we need to help them achieve. It is our duty to nurture their understanding of how the world they live in has been shaped by the events of the past and to inspire them to realise their own agency to shape their world of the future.

Our Aims for History

Through high-quality History teaching, we aim to do the following for our children:

• Help them develop their local and global historical knowledge and skills through both instructional and discovery-based learning.
• Inspire an enthusiasm for the process of asking and answering questions about:

• The historical events, such as civilisation and warfare, and influential people, such as monarchs and dictators, which/who have shaped our planet and societies
• The impact those events and people have had upon the times in which we live
• How past and current events and people have shaped and will impact the world our children will inherit

• Enable them to apply their knowledge and skills to answering the questions posed at the start of each unit and confidently articulate their findings by the end of each unit.
• Nurture a greater of appreciation of cultures other than their own and promote the virtues of tolerance.
• Cultivate a constructive and proactive acceptance of the fact that we as human beings can have both a positive and negative impact upon the world around us.
• Instil in them the awareness and belief that they have a voice and can be advocates for change.
• Provide them with opportunities to put all of the above into practise.

For more information on our curriculum intent and the pedagogical research that informs our aims, please see our History Policy.

How do we deliver History?

The key principles of how we deliver our History provision to our children are:

• The teaching and learning of History as both a discrete and overlapping subject area is made explicit to our children.
• The links and crossover between History and other subjects are fully explored.
• Links are continuously made within and across units and Years Groups so that children are given every opportunity to apply and build upon procedural and semantic knowledge, threshold concepts, milestones, knowledge webs and schema and are able to both commit learning to and recall learning from long-term memory.
• Ample opportunity to use and apply subject specific skills, such as interpreting sources of evidence, is planned into units.
• Every opportunity to promote our School Vision and Values through the teaching and learning of History is taken full advantage of.
• Cross-curricular teaching and learning opportunities are taken full advantage of, particularly in Writing, Reading and Science.
• Our teachers demonstrate strong subject knowledge to engage and enthuse children.
• All units are front-loaded with Knowledge Organisers, which clearly map out for our children the direction their learning will take them in and the knowledge and skills they will acquire. 
• We deliver vocabulary rich teaching (word banks provided and displayed).
• There is ample scope for exploration of the ideas and concepts which form the learning foci.
• We consistently create opportunities for long term retrieval of knowledge (follow-up tasks and discussions).
• We celebrate learning milestones (displays and work-sharing).
• We break down barriers to learning.

For more information on our curriculum implementation, the pedagogical research that informs our delivery, examples of Knowledge Organisers and the core historical concepts, skills and knowledge to be taught, maps of the potential links that can be made within and across subjects and Year Groups and cross-curricular writing opportunities, please see our History Policy.

Curriculum Design in History

It is our intention that all of our children work towards building a robust history schema through the exploration of interlinking threshold concepts in order to achieve learning milestones. These concepts - namely investigating and interpreting the past, building an overview of world history, understanding chronology and communicating historically - and milestones are revisited and applied within and across units and Year Groups in order to facilitate commitment to and retrieval from long-term memory so that they become securely embedded.

For more information on our curriculum implementation and the pedagogical research that informs our design, please see our History Policy. Please also see the link below for more information on our History Progression.

Our Intended Coverage in History

In KS1, our curriculum coverage has been designed with the intention of building a solid foundation of historical knowledge and understanding (changes within living memory, events beyond living memory that are significant nationally or globally, the lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements, significant historical events, people and places in their own locality).

In KS2, our curriculum has been designed to offer ample scope to introduce more sophisticated knowledge and skills, and to revisit, apply and progressively deepen historical understanding and expertise (changes in Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, the Roman Empire and its impact on Britain, Britain’s settlement by Anglo-Saxons and Scots, the Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor, a local history study, a study of an aspect or theme in British history that extends pupils’ chronological knowledge beyond 1066, the achievements of the earliest civilizations, Ancient Greece, a non-European society that provides contrasts with British history).

In EYFS, children work to the statutory framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) to achieve ELGs. 

Through the delivery of a knowledge rich curriculum children in EYFS build a focused and sequenced body of knowledge which they are able to remember. In the EYFS the Humanities subjects come under the title of ‘Understanding the World’ (UTW). UTW involves guiding the children to make sense of their physical world and their community. The frequency and range of children’s personal experiences increases their knowledge and sense of the world around them – from visiting parks, libraries and museums to meeting important members of society such as police officers, nurses and firefighters. In addition, listening to a broad selection of stories, non-fiction, rhymes and poems will foster their understanding of our culturally, socially, technologically and ecologically diverse world. As well as building important knowledge, this extends their familiarity with words that support understanding across domains.

For more information on our curriculum implementation and the pedagogical research that informs our coverage, please see our History Policy. Please also see the link below for more information on our History Curriculum Coverage.

In order to make certain that all unit planning and all learning is driven by the acquisition of the knowledge and vocabulary at the core of each concept, our Knowledge Organisers act as our Medium Term Plans for each unit and a Core Knowledge document, including the key questions that our children need to be able to answer at the end of each unit is provided for all Year Groups.

Please see below for examples of these:

As of next year, we will also be fully relaunching our Peterhouse Courageous Advocacy project and begin working towards a Schools of Sanctuary Award and Christian Aid Global Neighbours accreditation. Additionally, we hope to renew our links with the Time and Tide Museum and revive our Peterhouse Hoard Project, as well as our involvement in the Culture Schools Programme. Alongside all of which, we will continue to engage with as many opportunities to mark days and dates of cultural and historical significance as possible.

For more information on all of the above, please see our History Policy.

For an update on our approach to Courageous Advocacy for this year, please see our Courageous Advocacy Curriculum Page.  

Assessment in History

As with all subjects, our teachers follow the school Assessment Policy. In History, the expectation is the following:

• Pre/post assessment and retrieval tasks will be planned into units and individual lessons to provide evidence of progress and of knowledge and concepts from within and across units and Year Groups having been committed to long-term memory.

For more information on our curriculum impact and the pedagogical research that informs our approach to assessment, please see our History Policy and/or our:

For some examples of our End of Unit Knowledge and Skills checks, please see below: