Intent:

History at Boringdon provides the children with opportunities to gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past, including the local area and the wider world. The knowledge gained and understood is built upon as the children progress through school through a carefully crafted enquiry curriculum, alongside the knowledge-rich Opening Worlds curriculum. This enables deeper learning and understanding of history. Throughout their time at Boringdon, the children will become curious about stories and events from the past, consider significant events and people in living memory and beyond, ask questions and develop perspective and judgements. History will help the children to understand the stories from different time periods, the complexity of people’s lives, process change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenges of their time.

How is History planned and taught at Boringdon Primary School?

We have a carefully constructed curriculum at KS1 which has been constructed and developed by the school alongside experts in the Trust. The learning is sequenced with a clear progression of knowledge, concepts, skills and vocabulary which help the children to develop as young historians. The techniques used in the delivery of the KS1 curriculum supports the children’s transition into KS2. At KS2, we use the Opening Worlds Humanities Curriculum to deliver the National Curriculum for History. Opening Worlds is a knowledge-rich humanities programme for teaching History in Years 3 to 6. Where meaningful, there are cross-curricular links to other subjects for our units.

We teach a coherent curriculum that is the progression model. Each area of study has an enquiry question (a synoptic task) that the children work towards answering using the components of knowledge that are taught during that unit. This taught knowledge allows the children to make connections and reach their own informed conclusions. There is a specific disciplinary focus for each synoptic task, but the children use various disciplinary concepts as they move through units. Through both shared stories and teaching, there is exploration and teaching of key vocabulary. This allows the children to gain understanding and put meaning to the vocabulary taught. Through these stories and the creativity within lessons, we ensure that our children are engaged and enthused learners. Each lesson builds on previous knowledge and we ensure that all children understand before learning continues. Our History curriculum covers a range of cultural, historical and ethical backgrounds and offers purposeful and meaningful experiences to apply, share and develop knowledge. Planning provides the opportunity to embed previous learning and develop links between lessons and key concepts. The Opening Worlds programme at KS2 has strong vertical sequencing within subjects (where children gain security in their use of rich and broad vocabulary through systematic introduction, sustained practice and deliberate revisiting) allowing for ‘overlaps of learning’ and carefully designed horizontal and diagonal connections across the Humanities subjects.

We aim to ensure that our History curriculum prompts curiosity, critical thinking and allows learners to connect strands of learning across, not only our Humanities curriculum, but all aspects of the curriculum.

Enrichment

We recognise the importance of enrichment opportunities within our History curriculum and ensure this happens in a variety of ways, including:

• Visits to local historical sites and museums
• Workshops from visiting speakers
• Displays and exhibitions for parents and carers

How do we check that pupils have understood before we move on?

• Answering retrieval questions to support recall and committing information to their long-term memories
• Understanding and using prior knowledge, from current or previous year groups, alongside the unit, making connections and thinking about similarities, differences, and connections
• Confidently debating and discussing choices made
• Lesson observations and subject leader discussions with pupils
• Regular pupil voice opportunities to allow the children to demonstrate their knowledge and also reflect on their own learning and progression
• End of unit synoptic tasks

Children will demonstrate their understanding and knowledge through independently applying all that they have learned to answer the main enquiry question (synoptic task). Assessments are made formatively and summatively with retrieval quizzes within lessons and synoptic tasks used as an end of unit assessment where the main enquiry question is answered. These synoptic tasks give the children scope to share a wide breadth of understanding in relation to the topic taught.