Our Vision for History

At Christ Church Primary School, our history curriculum enables pupils to connect both emotionally and intellectually with the past, igniting curiosity to know more about British and world history.  It is our aim that history lessons help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. We aim to enable children to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. Through the teaching of history, we endeavour to teach children to understand the 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 mission is for all children to leave not only understanding the significance of history and the role of a historian, but also to understand how it has shaped their world, and to also respect what has come before them.  Through achieving these aims, we want children to flourish in all areas of their learning.

Our History Curriculum

We teach children a sense of chronology, and through this they develop a sense of identity and a cultural understanding based on their historical heritage. Thus, children learn to value their own and other people’s cultures in modern multicultural Britain and, by considering how people lived in the past, they are better able to make their own life choices today. We teach children to understand how events in the past have influenced our lives today; we also teach pupils to investigate these past events and, by so doing, to develop the skills of enquiry, analysis, interpretation and problem-solving.

We have a progressive, well sequenced history curriculum throughout school, that has been carefully designed to enable children to develop secure, deep and fluent substantive and disciplinary knowledge and skills.  Links are made within and across lessons to support pupils in making connections, developing a strong overview of chronology.    Our curriculum follows the National Curriculum programme of study for history.

Key Stage 1

Key Stage 2

Children are introduced to key disciplinary concepts (‘know how’) and substantive concepts (‘know what’) to give coherence across the curriculum, as follows: 

Key Information

• The history curriculum has been created and written by our staff making it engaging and relevant for the children at Christ Church.
• Children cover a wide variety of historical periods across the school from the prehistoric ‘Stone Age’ right up to the modern day.
• Children have the opportunity to learn about the history of the area in which they live including Dudley Castle, the local canal network and the impact of the industrial revolution on the Black Country.
• We provide a variety of history-based school educational visits for our children to provide real-life experiences, hands-on learning and to spark curiosity outside the classroom. 
• We invite historians into school to provide students with engaging, first-hand insights into the past, making historical events and figures more relatable and memorable.

Developing Literacy through History

We develop literacy through all areas of our curriculum, including History, in the following ways:

• Using an increasingly broad historical vocabulary in lessons to extend children's language and equip them to discuss historical concepts
• Reading a range of carefully chosen source materials and interpreting these
• Providing a variety of writing opportunities, including answering the ‘big question’ for the unit, note-taking, responding to source material and writing in role as historical figures
• Encouraging high quality oracy for example, through discussion, debate and interpretation of sources
• Linking some of our English curriculum to history so children are immersed in reading and writing about the past

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