Planning Progression
History Rationale
By the time they leave primary school, children need to have knowledge about the history of Britain and the wider world and have a coherent understanding of historical concepts and historical enquiry. Children need to be able to use history to understand the world and society today and make links to British values. Teaching of history equips children to ask perceptive questions, to think critically and develop perspective and judgement.
At Excalibur Primary School, we aim to provide our children with an exciting, relevant and challenging curriculum, bringing learning to life through a range of learning experiences, including visits and workshops. Through teaching of our creative history curriculum, we enable our children to develop a positive attitude towards becoming confident historians through the three domains: historical knowledge, historical concepts and historical enquiry.
History at Excalibur Primary School is delivered in one half of each term. Within each topic, key questions direct learning and each unit culminates in a composite task to enable the children to apply knowledge learnt throughout the topic. Through the wide range of topics taught, based on the National Curriculum, we teach aspects of history from the Pre-historic Era, to events post 1066, as well as events leading us to the present day. By the end of KS2, our children will have a clear, concise and chronological understanding of history that has happened before them, and will be able to confidently articulate the place history has in their own lives. Our children will gain an understanding and appreciation for how historians came to learn about the past. They will learn how historians use and analyse evidence sources to construct, challenge and test claims about the past. As historians, our children will be provided with opportunities to evaluate sources in terms of their reliability and validity, using key analysis vocabulary. They will begin to consider why viewpoints differ and the impact that this may have on the inferences drawn by historians.
Our history curriculum has been designed to be both knowledge-rich and coherently sequenced. The sequencing of our history curriculum allows our children to develop a chronologically secure knowledge and understanding of local, British and world history, building on their learning in EYFS, where our children develop a sense of past and present, through stories and their own experiences. Knowledge means not only substantive knowledge of historical events, dates and people in the past, but also knowledge of substantive concepts in history - the key concepts running through our history curriculum are: transport, culture and beliefs, and conflict and resolution - and disciplinary historical concepts: continuity and change, characteristic features and cause and consequence.
Our history curriculum is designed such that it:
- Is cyclical – children return to the same disciplinary and substantive concepts.
- Is increasing in depth of learning – each time a concept is revisited, it is covered with greater complexity.
- Builds on prior learning – prior knowledge is utilised so that our children can build on previous foundations.