History Statement

Intent:

At St Michael’s, 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 delivering an exciting and challenging curriculum that delivers a personalised approach to our school’s local history and further beyond, 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.

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.

Implementation:

The aim of our curriculum at St Michael’s is for children to have the skills to be successful, independent, motivated and resilient learners in preparation for the next stage of their education. The curriculum lead has worked alongside subject leaders to ensure knowledge and skills are mapped out accordingly for each year group, showing progression across the school. All staff aim to deliver interesting and inspiring history lessons that allow children’s natural curiosity to blossom.

• Teachers plan lessons to ensure children make connections across a variety of subjects.
• The curriculum is planned thoroughly, starting with the children’s current knowledge and skills, so that real progress can be made and measured.
• Each term there are a variety of visits and visitors planned in each year group to enrich the learning and create memories via real life experiences.
• Children’s prior knowledge is assessed at the beginning of a topic and learning planned accordingly.
• At the end of each topic, pupils are assessed based on the knowledge and skills that have been acquired.

Impact:

Our History Curriculum is high quality, well thought out and planned to demonstrate progression. We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

• Assessing the knowledge and skills learnt through the topics.
• Reflecting on the standards achieved against planned outcomes.
• Celebrating the learning at the end of each topic, where children demonstrate the knowledge they have gained.
• Sampling children’s learning across the school.
• Pupil discussions.
• Annual tracking of standards linked to the National Curriculum.