History at Hemington Primary School 

We aim to provide a highquality History education, where key events and concepts are taught to help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It should inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. Pupils will learn to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement.

History 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. With some themes comes the opportunity to look at changes within the locality of the school; the immediate community and wider environs such as Bath and Bristol. 

Our curriculum approach to History is organised around enquiry questions at both the unit and lesson level. This approach aims to  ensure that substantive knowledge is deliberately and explicitly taught and organised in a meaningful fashion, and towards answering (and, where appropriate, asking) disciplinary appropriate questions. As such, each unit will be internally coherent, with carefully selected content framed within lesson specific enquiries (for example - What legacy did the Romans leave behind in Britain?) and will build pupils’ understanding of key substantive concepts over time and overarching unit enquiries such as Romans in Britain - What did the Romans do for us? In order to maximise flexibility, units will make the assumption of pupils having little prior knowledge within the curriculum. 

Knowledge organisation - the enquiries and proposed sequence of enquiries across our curriculum is organised around the substantive concepts. Broadly, the enquiries will use a narrative to help pupils make sense of the substantive concepts. Each enquiry will have a disciplinary focus of at least one second order concept. This disciplinary focus is made explicit for each enquiry. Within each enquiry, pupils will encounter substantive concepts which will be illustrated through concrete examples. Pupils following this sequence of enquiries, will develop a sophisticated understanding of key substantive concepts by coming to appreciate how different manifestations of certain substantive concepts (e.g. empire/revolution) differ and challenge simplistic definitions.

Developing a clear understanding of chronology is central to learning History. We therefore embed this key knowledge throughout all units so that pupils gain an understanding of History as a coherent narrative.

 Click here to see our History Long Term Plan.

Click here to see our History Progression of Threshold Concepts