Intent

Our history curriculum is designed to be sequential and relevant to all children from Nursery to Year 6. Rooted in our Roman Catholic mission to Love, Learn and Serve, it supports the development of the whole child—academically, socially, and spiritually.

Our curriculum builds on knowledge and skills taught in previous year groups and lessons, ensuring continuity and progression. We aim to nurture inquisitive thinking, encouraging children to ask questions, explore the past, and understand how history shapes our world today.

Guided by Love, we promote respectful and caring relationships, enabling children to engage with diverse perspectives and experiences in history with empathy and compassion. Learn underpins our commitment to valuing each child’s uniqueness and providing opportunities for growth through meaningful historical enquiry.

We enrich learning with inspiring experiences such as external trips, internal visitors, the use of artefacts and technology—all of which help to bring history to life. These opportunities build confidence, resilience, and self-esteem, while fostering independence and intrinsic motivation.

Our curriculum explores themes such as inequality and injustice, encouraging children to value diversity and challenge unfairness in the world around them. In the spirit of Serve, we use history as a means to reach out to the wider community, developing children’s understanding of their role in society and their responsibility to support others through friendship and justice.

Where appropriate, we link historical content to the Sustainable Development Goals, giving pupils a broader understanding of global issues and the role they play in shaping a fairer future. Through history, we empower our children to Love, Learn and Serve—becoming thoughtful, informed, and compassionate members of society.

Implementation

Implementation

All learning will start by revisiting prior knowledge. This will be scaffolded to support children to recall previous learning and make connections. Staff will model explicitly the subject-specific vocabulary, knowledge and skills relevant to the learning to allow them to integrate new knowledge into larger concepts. Learning will be supported through the use of knowledge organisers that provide children with scaffolding that supports them to retain new facts and vocabulary in their long term memory. Knowledge organisers are used for pre-teaching, to support home learning and also as a part of daily review.

Consistent learning walls in every classroom provide constant scaffolding for children. Subject specific vocabulary is displayed on the learning wall along with key facts and questions, and model examples of the work being taught. Learning is reviewed also on a termly basis, after a period of forgetting, so that teachers can check whether information has been retained. History assessment is ongoing throughout the relevant cross-curricular themes to inform teachers with their planning lesson activities and differentiation. Summative assessment is completed at the end of each topic where history objectives have been covered. Our historians will be given a variety of experiences both in and out of the classroom where appropriate to create memorable learning opportunities and to further support and develop their understanding.

Impact 

We aim to develop progressive skills of a historian throughout While at St Bede’s .  In addition we want pupils to gain a secure knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from the historical periods, We want children to become inquisitive historians and be able to l ask questions, find evidence, weigh it up and reach their own conclusion using a variety of sources. They will have the necessary skills to communicate their findings and argue for their point of view; skills that will help them in their adult life. We also want pupils to have a secure chronological understanding of all the periods studied, how they fit into the wider context and the ability to understand the concept of chronology  

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