History

Intent

We believe that a well-rounded History curriculum will allow children to gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past. We have carefully designed our History curriculum so that children gain this knowledge as they progress through the school. In addition to this, we recognise the important role that History plays in preparing our children with skills that they can use for life, raising their aspirations, understand how to be a good and responsible citizen, understanding change and societal development and a context in which to understand themselves and others. This is extremely important for children at Coatham in allowing them access to a much wider world.

Implementation

To ensure high standards of teaching and learning in history, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. History is taught as part of a termly topic, focusing on knowledge and skills stated in the National Curriculum. At Coatham, we ensure that history has the same importance given to it as the core subjects, as we feel this is important in enabling all children to gain ‘real-life’ experiences. The history curriculum at Coatham School is based upon the 2014 Primary National Curriculum in England, which provides a broad framework and outlines the knowledge and skills and taught in each Key Stage. Teachers plan lessons for their class using our progression of knowledge and skills document. Teachers can use this document to plan their history lessons suitable to their class’s interests and what they want to learn. The progression document ensures the curriculum is covered and the skills/knowledge taught is progressive from year group to year group. When teaching history, the teachers should follow the children’s interests to ensure their learning is engaging, broad and balanced. History teaching focuses on enabling children to think as critically. A variety of teaching approaches are used based on the teacher’s judgement. History provides excellent opportunities to enhance the learning of more able pupils through the investigations, analysing sources and writing extending pieces.
At Coatham we provide a variety of opportunities for history learning inside and outside the classroom. Educational visits and visitors, are an opportunity for the teachers to plan for additional history learning outside the classroom. The children have explored local museums and had visitors into school to share history learning and have hands on experiences.

Impact

Within history, we strive to create a supportive and collaborative ethos for learning by providing investigative and enquiry-based learning opportunities. Emphasis is placed on investigative learning opportunities to help children gain a coherent knowledge of understanding of each topic covered throughout the school. Our history curriculum is high quality, well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression. We focus on progression of knowledge and skills and we measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods: Assessing children’s understanding of topic linked vocabulary before and after the topic is taught. Summative assessment of pupil discussions about their learning. Images and videos of the children’s practical learning. (Evidence Me) Interviewing the pupils about their learning (pupil voice). Termly reporting of standards across the curriculum. Marking of written work in books.