History at Thames

At Thames Primary Academy, we want children to have a strong connection to their local, national and international history. We aim to deliver a curriculum that reflects these connections, diving deep into the knowledge of different eras, people and places. We aim to provide the children with a rich variety of learning opportunities that are meaningful and valuable to their understanding of their local and global community through time.

Our History curriculum seeks to provide children with a strong and confident understanding of the UK, as well as the development of other countries from ancient times to more recent history. It is a curriculum that develops the children’s thirst for knowledge and motivates their learning. The curriculum is deliberately not taught in “chronological” order in an attempt to build the skills within students of creating timelines and understanding that periods and civilisations overlap. 

The History curriculum at Thames mirrors the design concept of the Geography curriculum – starting local in terms of time and place with a historical investigation of the school, the local community and the period in which the school was built and then scaling up. In Geography the core ideas are ideas of scale and place and in history this is about time. There is also some knowledge connectivity between the history and geography content to maximise the schema of students. 

Links to Whole School Drivers

• Community – drawing on our local area and the people in it as a primary historical source, building a strong sense of place and change over time.
• Possibilities- looking at historical figures and significant events through time, exposing pupils to others lives in order to reflect on how they might impact on the world in their own life time.
• Communication- pupils will have consistent opportunities to review, reflect and share their historical understanding through a rich, shared dialogue.
• Healthy Advocates- what can we learn about keeping healthy, both in body and mind from lessons from the past?

We aspire to develop our children’s vocabulary, knowledge, oracy and understanding of their history. We support them in understanding the past as they move into the future, developing them into confident and understanding citizens. We also want to develop our children’s awareness of diversity throughout history, both within our national history but also the international history of other countries and cultures. We hope that this will make our children aware of the racial inequality throughout the world’s history.

The evolution of every pupil as a historian runs throughout our curriculum, specifically the development of the skills of being a historian; gathering evidence, examining artefacts, using primary and secondary sources and undertaking research.

At Thames Primary Academy, our staff are supported in their teaching and planning by our subject leaders to ensure that progress is consistent in the children’s History learning. There is a strong commitment to knowledge and skills that are passed onto the children in a variety of contexts and situations.

We follow a core knowledge curriculum, which has created a methodical sequence for children to build on their knowledge year by year as they move through the school. As children learn new vocabulary, facts and figures, these will be recapped in later years to consolidate learning as our history is linked in many ways. 

Alongside this knowledge, we also teach our children to be historians and how to study the past. We focus on comparing past eras to what we know today, examining artefacts and understanding what they can teach us about the culture and lives of people in history and how to ask probing questions to extend our knowledge and unpick more of our history.

We hope to form strong, powerful links with our local history community, embedding this in our curriculum to provide new and exciting learning opportunities. We will utilise our local facilities and sites to support children’s learning and memory of key aspects of different historical eras, using these in real life settings. This may involve visits to local historical sites e.g. Blackpool Tower to learn of its origins, as well as Fleetwood Museum to learn about how our area has developed from its origins to the present day.

Our History curriculum provides a wide breadth of study, incorporating all the content of the National Curriculum. It is carefully designed and sequenced to ensure a clear progression in the development of knowledge and skills to maximise learning for all pupils. 

It is essential that as pupils learn, they will develop a history schema which is organised in a meaningful way so that they learn and remember more. They are encouraged to make connections in their learning through the knowledge that they are taught. Through every topic, pupils will explore the big ideas or the threshold concepts which will form the foundations of the schema. These threshold concepts are:

• Investigate and interpret the past – This concept involves recognising that our understanding of the past comes from an interpretation of the available evidence.
• Build an overview of world history – This concept involves an appreciation of the characteristic features of the past and that these features are similar and different across time periods, and an understanding that life is different for different sections of society.
• Understand chronology – This concept involves an understanding of how to chart the passing of time and how some aspects of history happened at similar times in different places.

• Communicate historically – This concept involves using historical vocabulary and techniques to convey information about the past.

Each threshold concept has its own facets of knowledge which help to strengthen the schema. These knowledge categories include:

Settlements

Beliefs

Culture and pastimes

Location

Main events

Food and farming

Travel and exploration

Conflict

Society

Artefacts

Making connections and highlighting them throughout the teaching of the breadth to help the knowledge to ‘stick’ in the pupil’s memory is a crucial part of learning. We use retrieval practice to aid pupils in storing knowledge in their long-term memories. We endeavour to build knowledge with an awareness of cognitive loads, and so we start from what children already know, and build on this using a carefully planned progression. Lessons and new topics begin with a review of prior learning to support pupils in assimilating new knowledge with previously introduced concepts. 

We encourage parents and members of the community to share their knowledge and experiences of the local area and wider world with pupils. We share where members of our community have been, and where we are going on a large scale world map to encourage conversation about the wider world, and an appreciation of the value of a broad geographical knowledge.

We ensure all pupils can access our teaching by planning support for those that need it in the form of differentiated resources or additional teacher support.

Our children’s accumulated historical knowledge will be assessed regularly at the end of the era or period they are learning about. This may take the form of quizzes linked to the core knowledge in each era, or an investigation as a historian with historical artefacts or images. Other frequent retrieval opportunites will be woven throughout the learning using mini plenaries, key assessment questioning and recaps.

Our children leave our school confident in their knowledge of many aspects of History, as well as understanding the progression of time and chronology. This will allow them to have a strong understanding of their wider community.