History Curriculum Intent Statement 2022

Our vision is to present students with the information they need to help them understand the history of these islands in a coherent, chronological narrative, from 1066 to the present day. This will enable students to understand how the lives of the people living in the UK, and in other parts of the world touched by the UK,  have been affected and shaped by key historical events so that they can understand how Britain has influenced, and been influenced by, the wider world. It will also enable students to understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world including the achievements and follies of mankind such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade and major conflicts such as the First and Second World Wars.

The Key Stage 3 Curriculum

The History Curriculum has been designed to:

• Enable and encourage students to gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge within different contexts. This includes understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales.
• Promote the social, moral, spiritual and cultural development of every student and to develop British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.
• Engage students in learning which is enjoyable, stimulating and relevant to students now and for the future by exploring the history of modern day problems such as slavery, racism and anti-Semitism.
• Enable students to develop their knowledge, display an understanding of concepts and acquire skills so that they are able to choose and apply these in relevant situations; and to instil an aspirational mindset.
• Encourage and promote a positive attitude towards learning; pride in their own progress and achievement; and a strong work ethic, through providing a curriculum which offers opportunity to celebrate and share success: valuing attainment, progress and effort equally.
• Ensure that students of all abilities have equal access to learning, with high expectations for every student and appropriate levels of challenge and support.
• Ensure that all content, terms and skills will be taught (within a differentiated framework) to all students so that no one is at a disadvantage because of the quality and curriculum of their experience of History at KS1 and 2.

Knowledge and Understanding of Key Concepts 

During each unit, students will be explicitly taught core terminology and vocabulary so that they are able to gain and deploy a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘feudalism’ ‘democracy’ ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry’ and historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance. They will learn to use these words and concepts to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, and frame historically valid questions and compare different time periods. Knowledge and understanding of key historical terminology will be checked at regular intervals as Key Fact Checks and within the 4 formal assessments each year.

Content

We are committed to providing engaging ways of covering the statutory aspects of the National Curriculum. To this end, during Years 7, 8 and 9, students will learn about key events and developments within the following studies: 

• The Romans in England (special focus on health and medicine)
• Life in England during the Middle Ages
• The Religious Turmoil during the reigns of the Tudor and Stuarts
• The Slave Trade and the experience of Slavery in the New World from the TransAtlantic trade to the emancipation of slaves in the US following the American civil war. 
• Living Through the Industrial Revolution (Special focus on living and working conditions as well as progress in medical knowledge, prevention and treatment)
• The Struggle for Female Suffrage from the mid 19th century through to 1928
• Dictatorship in Europe in the first half of the 20th Century
• Aspects of the First and Second World Wars
• Life in Nazi Germany
• The Holocaust
• A Tale of Two cities: Berlin during the Cold War years 1945-1989. 

Rational: 

Study in Development

The theme of medicine will be touched on during each time period studied as a study of development. This will include looking at Roman ideas and practices, the Black Death, the increased problems linked to urbanisation, the increased role of the government in the health of the nation from the provision of basic public health facilities to the creation of the NHS and the work of individuals such as Edward Jenner, Florence Nightingale, Louis Pastuer and Aneurin Bevan. Students will be explicitly invited to link later developments and practices with those from early time periods and to consider why there has been change and, in most cases, progress. 

Links to the Present Day

Because not all students will continue their History studies at Key Stage 4, significant 20th events such as the Holocaust, the rise of dictatorships and the Cold War are studied in Year 9. This is because this is when the students are at an appropriate age to understand the complexity and significance of these events. This is essential so that the current issues such as anti-Semitism and political extremism are given a proper historical context.

The Development of Skills

The curriculum has been structured to provide students with the skills needed  to create their own structured accounts of events, including written narratives and evaluation of evidence. Many of these skills are transferable and there is a big focus on structured, extended writing tasks. Students will also develop the ability to understand and be able to deploy the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence (both sources and interpretations) is tested to make historical claims, and to discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed.

Assessment

As well as regular checks on recall of key facts from previous lessons, there are four formal assessments every year in which will assess:

• Knowledge and understanding of key vocabulary
• The ability to make and support inferences (Years 7 and 8)
• The ability to evaluate sources (Years 8 and 9)
• The ability to understand how and why interpretations differ (Year 9 
• Knowledge and understanding of events
• The ability to write about the past in a meaningful, using supporting information
• The ability to describe, explain and analyse developments in history and evaluation their importance

Each formal assessment includes an extended writing task. Before each assessment there will be a lesson devoted to developing recall skills and teaching different methods of revision. Each assessment will be followed by a lesson where model answers will be studied which demonstrate PIE paragraphs (Point Information Explanation). This is so that students are able to improve not only their knowledge but also the crucial skills involved in using knowledge to support opinions and producing well structured answers that support different points of view and which explain key concepts such as causation and consequence.