At St. Helen’s CE Primary School, we believe that high-quality history lessons inspire children to want to know more about the past and to think and act as historians.

By linking learning to a range of knowledge and themes, children have opportunities to investigate and interpret the past, understand chronology, build an overview of Britain’s past, as well as that of the wider world, and to be able to communicate historically.

Our school’s curriculum also aims to develop children’s knowledge and understanding in history by developing the children’s chronological understanding; by being specific about the historical knowledge the children will learn; and by using historical enquiry to learn about and interpret the past.

We develop children with the following essential characteristics to help them become historians:

• An excellent knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from a range of historical periods, including significant events in Britain’s past;
• The ability to think critically about history and communicate ideas confidently to a range of audiences;
• The ability to support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using historical evidence from a range of sources;
• The ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past by formulating and refining questions and lines of enquiry;
• A respect for historical evidence and the ability to make critical use of it to support their learning;
• A desire to embrace challenging activities, including opportunities to undertake high-quality research across a range of history topics;
• A developing sense of curiosity about the past and how and why people interpret the past in different ways.
• Our history curriculum will be heavily knowledge based. Within each topic/theme, key facts, concepts, themes and skills will be expected to be taught too.
• Our history curriculum will, where possible, take advantage of the rich cultural heritage in the local area around the school. Plus, where possible, members of the local community will be invited into school to share their local knowledge. This has happened before to great effect.
• The school’s intent is to have teachers with an excellent knowledge of the subject, either through professional development or peer mentoring/paired teaching; they will be able to implement the curriculum effectively.
• The rationale is to provide a curriculum rich in knowledge and vocabulary, where reading and writing will be threaded through each subject, to ensure the children use cross-curricular skills to deeply embed their learning.
• All children will access the curriculum with adaptation where necessary.
• All children will be engaged through exciting, challenging lessons, using high quality resources.
• Teachers will be expected, as a given, to have high expectation of achievement for all learners, irrespective of background, needs, ethnicity etc.
• Our curriculum intent, and its effective implementation, is to encourage children to think and reflect. There will be opportunities for the children to study the bigger questions linked to history e.g. cause and consequence, historical bias.