Our History Subject Leaders are: Mrs Robinson and Miss Sutton

Intent

At Disley Primary School, our intent is that our teaching of history will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. We aim for it to inspire pupils’ curiosity about the past and to know more about the past. We aim to enable children to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. Through the teaching of history, we endeavour to teach children 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. Our history curriculum has been designed to cover all of the skills, knowledge and understanding as set out in the National Curriculum. To ensure that pupils develop a secure knowledge that they can build on, our history curriculum is organised into a progression model that outlines the skills and knowledge to be taught in a sequentially coherent way in order to build on the key skills, which are taught during each key stage.

Implementation

A maximum of four topics are taught across the year to ensure that children achieve depth in their learning. Statutory topics from the National Curriculum are allocated chronologically so that children have a chronological understanding of British history from the Stone Age to the present day. Children are also taught world history, such as learning about ancient civilisations of Maya and Greece. Further themes have been selected to ensure that children will learn and make progression in key skills for history within the context of our school.

Topics are allocated on a 2-year rolling programme for each key stage, and key skills are incorporated into each topic to ensure that all key skills are covered to enable children to make progression in these areas as they move up through the school - this is documented on a curriculum overview.

Knowledge organisers are provided for each child at the beginning of each topic to support them in learning new facts and vocabulary. Where possible, cross-curricular links will be made, for example, texts relating to the theme being studied may be selected for Guided Reading sessions and also for writing in English. School trips and visitors will also enhance the learning experience. 

Impact

Our History Curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression. If children are keeping up with the curriculum, they are deemed to be making good or better progress. At the end of each topic there will be a ‘quiz’ to ascertain whether the children have gathered and retained new knowledge. Assessment will be made through ‘quiz’ results and through a scrutiny of each child’s work in their topic and English books.