History

At Abbott, pupils make progress in history through building their knowledge of the past, and of how historians study the past and construct accounts. Teaching supports pupil progress by embedding frameworks of content and concepts that enable pupils to access future material. Abstract concepts are best learned through meaningful examples and repeated encounters in different contexts.

Our curriculum design, teaching and assessment prioritises the knowledge that pupils need, in order to understand and learn new material.  The two forms of knowledge that are developed in our History curriculum are:

• Substantive Knowledge – pupils’ knowledge about the past
• Disciplinary Knowledge – pupils’ knowledge about how historians investigate the past, and how they construct historical claims, arguments and accounts

By implementing both substantive and disciplinary knowledge, pupils’ capacity to learn and remember more is enhanced. 

Through a high-quality history education, we aim to help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world.

Teachers inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past by providing opportunities for them to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement.

Our history curriculum helps 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.

 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.