History

Intent

A high-quality history curriculum at Bellingham Primary School will enable our pupils to gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It should inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past.

At Bellingham Primary school we teach our children to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. History curriculum immerses students in a range of cultures and creates an enquiring and critical outlook on the world, with skills that can be applied in other subjects. History also helps our pupils to understand complexity of people’s lives the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time.

Our history curriculum is enriched by rich, diverse experience across the whole school. We believe that history should be an interactive subject which strives to ignite a child’s natural curiosity. Through our history curriculum we want children to develop a key understanding about the history of Britain from the earliest times to the present day. We ensure pupils understand how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced the wider world.

Aims:

The national curriculum for history aims to ensure that all pupils:

• know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world
• know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the nature of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; characteristic features of past non-European societies; achievements and follies of mankind
• gain and deploy a historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as "empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry’

• understand historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference and significance, and use them to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically-valid questions and create their own structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses
• understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed
• gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, 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.