Curriculum
History
Curriculum intent, implementation, and impact
Intent
History at Wrekin View has been carefully planned to expand and stimulate the curiosity in our children of wanting to find out how the past has shaped the world they live in and develop their knowledge in a wide variety of topics.
We want our children to know what a historian is and the children will be encouraged to use a variety of resources to form their own conclusions and understanding of the past and how key historical events have influenced and affected the present. The children will be confident to communicate their own thoughts and opinions, ask perceptive questions, think critically, and develop their own judgements.
We aim to broaden the children’s interest in World History and appreciate the important role it has played. They will begin with studying their own locality, which is rich in its own history, before moving onto wider British and World history.
At Wrekin View we are committed to ensuring our children have a love and appreciation of history, whilst ensuring they have a deep understanding of how history can influence their decisions about personal choices, attitudes and values.
Implementation
As a academy, we maintain strong links to the National Curriculum guidelines to ensure all aspects, knowledge and skills of History are being taught across all year groups. We use progression grids to ensure there is clear skills, knowledge and vocabulary progression throughout school. Our curriculum is taught on a half termly basis where the children are taught a history topic across a half term, with the children studying three history topics per year. We have chosen our topics carefully to be both in line with the National Curriculum as well as being as interesting as possible in order to create a bespoke History curriculum for our school.
Where appropriate we use historical artefacts, visitors, workshops and visits to excite and intrigue our children to find out more about events and people from the past and to immerse them fully in the historical topic they are learning about. We aim to give our children as much understanding as possible about what life was like during a particular period in history by having practical and hands on lessons where possible.
Children study a variety of topics ranging from Stone Age to The Roman Empire, as well as doing a variety of topics of both their local area over time and important people from their locality. We also look at some whole school themes at important parts of the year and complete whole school activities on these include Remembrance Sunday and King Charles’ III Coronation.
Subject co-ordinators are given regular time to ensure resources are kept up to date, to monitor the subject teaching and books across the school and to provide subject feedback to SLT as appropriate. Time is also given to conduct student voice feedback where the children will be given the opportunity to speak freely about the teaching of history within their classroom environment to allow us as a school to create as bespoke a curriculum as is possible for our children. We also subscribe to a number of online subscriptions including The National College and History Association to allow all staff access to CPD on History to allow them to feel as confident as possible in delivering each Historical topic.
Foundation subjects are assessed at the end of each year stating whether children are working towards, at or exceeding age-related expectations.
Impact
Through the high quality first teaching of History taking place our children will be enthusiastic history learners, evidencing this in a range of ways. Through pupil voice, children will be able to talk confidently about the skills and knowledge they have acquired in each of their history topics. By the end of KS2, the children will be able to discuss and compare the different history topics that they have studied across the school. Children will be engaged in History lessons and always want to find out more.
Work in books will show that a range of topics are being covered, cross curricular links are made where possible and differentiated work set as appropriate.
The school environment will celebrate history through a whole school display celebrating the children’s work. We will also celebrate key historical events as a whole school throughout the year such as Remembrance Day. Through the high-quality learning, children will learn lessons from history to influence the decisions they make in their lives in the future.
