Helsby Hillside Primary SchoolHistory
Intent - What Do We Aspire for Our Children?
Our Curriculum Intent for History
At Helsby Hillside, we provide a high-quality history curriculum that is ambitious and designed for all pupils. It is coherently planned and sequenced towards cumulatively providing our children with a secure, coherent knowledge about British, local and world history.
Our curriculum content is rich with knowledge. Alongside the development of substantive knowledge, children will build their disciplinary knowledge, learning to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, and sift arguments. Across units of work, children revisit recurring historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity, difference, and significance. These concepts allow children to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically valid questions and create their own structured accounts. Our curriculum has been designed to develop children’s understanding of abstract historical themes such as invasion, religion, settlement, and innovation. These themes are regularly revisited throughout the curriculum, resulting in children developing a deeper, more nuanced understanding of these ideas. Children will study a range of cultures and historical perspectives, enabling them to be respectful, tolerant, and empathetic.
Children will leave Helsby Hillside knowledgeable about key people, events, and time periods from the past. These will be woven together to form coherent historical narratives that will act as a springboard for their secondary education.
Curriculum Implementation
Learning knowledge is not an endpoint in itself; it is a springboard to learning more knowledge. Each unit in our overview is underpinned by rich, substantive knowledge and ambitious vocabulary, whilst also ensuring children are developing their disciplinary knowledge (historical skills). Each unit of work is planned carefully to ensure concepts are taught in a logical sequence to support children's understanding. In addition to developing a breadth of historical knowledge, we want our children to become skilful historians. Each unit of work has an emphasis on historical enquiry where children investigate historically framed questions whilst also developing historical enquiries of their own. In addition to substantive and disciplinary knowledge, children will develop their experiential knowledge through museum visits, handling artefacts and engaging in carefully planned fieldwork.
‘Golden Threads’
Our curriculum is refined yearly, but it maintains a consistent knowledge base to ensure conceptual progression. We have identified a set of key historical concepts or ‘golden threads’ that children will repeatedly revisit throughout their time at Cuddington. Our golden threads are: Civilisation, Settlement, Religion, Migration, Invasion, and Innovation. Each unit will not include every 'thread', but children will visit each other more than once yearly. For example, in Year 4, children will encounter the concepts of invasion, societal change, settlement and invention when studying the Romans. In Year 5, children will revisit the concepts of societal change and invasion as they explore how Britain changed during the Dark Ages when the Anglo-Saxons arrived.
