History is concerned with stimulating the children’s interest and understanding about the life of people who lived in the past. We aim for the children to develop a sense of identity and a cultural understanding based on their historical heritage. We teach children to understand how events in the past have influenced our lives today. We teach the children to investigate these past events and, by so doing, develop the skills of identifying local links, chronological understanding, understanding of events, people and changes in the past, historical enquiry and interpretation and organisation and communication. We want the children to build upon their historical knowledge and skills each year as they progress throughout the school and to have a meaningful understanding of the key concepts that we have embedded throughout our curriculum such as legacy, empire and trade.

Our history lessons use the language of SOLO Taxonomy and include the use of knowledge organisers and D4Ds. There are different approaches to teaching history including visual, auditory and kinaesthetic ways for children to learn.  All learners must be catered for including those with EAL, SEN and the more able. This is achieved through the use of D4Ds and also by providing extra scaffolds, word banks and vocabulary mats to help further support those pupils with SEN and EAL. More able pupils should be challenged through the embedding and mastery tasks within the D4Ds. Teachers will often use support staff to help enable the children’s learning and they can also be used for pre-teaching groups and discussion of vocabulary. Our history displays are used as working walls and feature important vocabulary that each child needs to understand and also timelines to help the children understand the chronology of the period that they are studying and how it fits into the wider topics that they have previously studied and are going onto study; along with links to what is happening in other areas of the world.

We assess children’s work in history by making informal judgements as we observe them during each history lesson. On completion of a piece of work, the teacher marks the work and comments as necessary. Once the children have completed a unit of work, we make a summary judgement of the work of each pupil by carrying out an informal assessment through the use of answering a, ‘big question’. The results of these informal assessments are recorded and reported back to the headteacher, subject leader, pupils and pupils’ parents. We use these assessment results to plan future work with that pupil, to provide the basis for assessing the progress of the child, and to pass information on to the next teacher at the end of the year.

The history curriculum offers pupils a wide range of enrichment opportunities. These may take the form of trips, workshops and activities to enhance their academic learning and personal development. All pupils are able to participate in the activities and trips available.