Being Historians
History at Colne Engaine
Our History curriculum aims to ignite children’s curiosity and develop a fascination about the past in Britain and the wider world. At Cone Engaine, our history curriculum is aimed at developing a well-rounded knowledge of the past and its events, with intention to improve every child’s cultural capital, understanding of the world around them and their own heritage.
Through finding out about how and why the world, our country, cultures and local communities have developed over time, we aim to equip our children with an understanding of how the past influences the present, as well as embedding a good knowledge base.
Our History curriculum helps children to develop a context for their growing sense of identity and a chronological framework for their knowledge of significant events and people.
We teach the National Curriculum through the Chris Quigley milestones for History supported by a clear skills and knowledge progression on a two-year cycle of units and linked to all areas of the curriculum. This ensures that skills and knowledge are built on year by year and sequenced appropriately to maximise learning for all children. It is important to us that the children develop the skills of a historian, making and identifying connections between periods of history during their time at Colne Engaine and do not just learn a series of facts about the past.
In ensuring high standards of teaching and learning in history, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school and well-planned lessons support children to find evidence, weigh it up and reach their own conclusion. To do this successfully, as historians, children need to be able to research, interpret evidence, including primary and secondary sources, and have the necessary skills to argue for their point of view; skill that will help them in their adult life so we make this a key focus within our lessons.
Curriculum drivers shape our curriculum breadth. They are derived from an exploration of the backgrounds of our students, our beliefs about high-quality education and our values. They are used to ensure we give our children appropriate and ambitious curriculum opportunities. Threshold concepts tie together the subject topics into meaningful schema. The same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of topics across history to support making links. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of our curriculum, our history curriculum ensures that our children return to the same concepts over and over, and gradually build understanding of them. For each of the threshold concepts, three milestones (each of which includes the procedural and semantic
knowledge students need to understand the threshold concepts) provide our progression model. Finally, knowledge categories in each subject give students a way of expressing their understanding of the threshold concepts
At Colne Engaine, we aim for children to use and develop skills of enquiry, investigation, analysis and evaluation. When they leave Colne Engaine, we want them to have a secure knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from the historical periods covered; the ability to think critically about history and communicate confidently in styles appropriate to a range of audiences and have the ability to consistently support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views.
We aim for our pupils to be passionate about history; equipping them to become well-informed, lifelong learners.
Click below to explore our progression in History
