History
History Lead - Mrs R Whittaker
At Laughton All Saints’ C of E Primary Academy, we have a high-quality history education that helps our pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It inspires pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. We equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. Our vision is for our pupils 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. At Laughton All Saints’, pupils do not simply learn a series of facts about the past. Our curriculum enables pupils to interpret and evaluate evidence and reach conclusions. To do this successfully, as historians, we support our children to research, interpret evidence, including primary and secondary sources, and have the necessary skills to argue for their point of view; a skill that will help them in their adult life.
To find out more about our rationale and intent, please click below:
"History can bring pupils into a rich dialogue with the past and with the traditions of historical enquiry. The past and changing accounts of the past have shaped the identities of diverse people, groups and nations. Through history, pupils come to understand their place in the world, and in the long story of human development. The study of history challenges pupils to make sense of the striking similarities and vast differences in human experiences across time and place." - Ofsted's Research Review Series
At Laughton, we also recognise that history does not always stay "behind us". History helps us understand how events in the past made things the way they are today. Learning lessons from the past means we not only learn about ourselves and how we came to be, but also develop the ability to avoid mistakes and create better paths for our societies.
Our History curriculum:
We follow the national curriculum for history. Here is a link to the national curriculum documentation:
History Programmes of Study: Key Stages 1 and 2
Aims and ambitions for History:
Our aim is for all pupils to:
- 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.
What do we expect our children to learn in History by the end of each key stage?
In early years:
- Begin to make sense of their own life-story and family’s history.
- Comment on images of familiar situations in the past.
- Compare and contrast characters from stories, including figures from the past.
In key stage 1:
- Changes within living memory. Where appropriate, these should be used to reveal aspects of change in national life
- Events beyond living memory that are significant nationally or globally
- The lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements. Some should be used to compare aspects of life in different periods
- Significant historical events, people and places in their own locality
In key stage 2:
- Changes in Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age
- The Roman Empire and its impact on Britain
- Britain’s settlement by Anglo-Saxons and Scots
- The Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor
- A local history study
- A study of an aspect or theme in British history that extends pupils’ chronological knowledge beyond 1066
- The achievements of the earliest civilizations – an overview of where and when the first civilizations appeared and a depth study of Ancient Egypt
- Ancient Greece – a study of Greek life and achievements and their influence on the western world
- A non-European society that provides contrasts with British history – the early Islamic civilization, including a study of Baghdad
Knowledge in History:
Knowledge is broken down into two main types:
- Substantive knowledge - knowledge about the past
- Disciplinary knowledge - knowledge about how historians investigate the past, and how they construct historical claims, arguments and accounts
Deploying both substantive and disciplinary knowledge in combination is what gives pupils the capacity or skill to construct historical arguments or analyse sources. This is because knowledge of the past must be shaped by disciplinary approaches in order to become historical knowledge. Similarly, acquiring disciplinary knowledge is made purposeful and meaningful to pupils when it is related to particular historical problems where pupils have sufficient knowledge of the period, setting and topic to reason, to make inferences and to grasp the terms that others are using in any debate.
Children also gain generative knowledge as they move through our History curriculum. Generative knowledge can include substantive concepts (abstract concepts such as invasion, monarch or empire), or chronological knowledge (knowledge about the order or features of historical periods)
Substantive concepts feature regularly throughout the study of history in a range of contexts. As a result, they are particularly important to pupils’ understanding of new material. A pupil might come across the terms ‘invasion’, ‘monarch’ or ‘empire’ in every year of school history. They will then be able to draw on their secure knowledge of these concepts repeatedly in a number of different contexts.
Chronological knowledge helps children to understand the broad characteristics of historical periods, giving a timeline or a context to what pupils learn. Securing an overview of the past supports pupils to develop this knowledge into coherent narratives that are more memorable for them. Cumulatively, pupils’ knowledge of periods and events will form a network of knowledge that might be conceptualised as a ‘mental timeline’, which in turn makes pupils’ existing historical knowledge more secure, and therefore makes new knowledge easier to learn.
How is History taught at Laughton All Saints'?
Please see the following documents which give a flavour of how we craft and plan our curriculum.
Click here to view the overview of our curriculum:
Click here to see how the History curriculum progresses over the year groups in school, and how it is broken down:
Click here to view the music vocabulary we teach children, and how it is sequenced for each year group:
History Vocabulary Progression
Will my child use anything to support them in knowing and remembering more?
In each unit, the children are given a 'knowledge organiser' which helps them in lessons and at home. Here are a few examples: