Thornham St James C.E. Primary School
At Thornham St James, we want to support the creation of confident and knowledgeable young historians and to have learning experiences that promote an enthusiasm for and enjoyment of these subjects. We want our children to love history. We want them to have no limits to what their ambitions are and grow up wanting to be archivists, museum curators, archaeologists or research analysts! We want all our pupils to remember their history learning in our school, to cherish these experiences and embrace the opportunities they are presented with.
Intent
Our history curriculum is driven by the whole-school vision to give students the skills, attributes and academic qualifications to shine, living lives of choice and opportunity. In selecting and sequencing knowledge for our curriculum, we are guided by the national curriculum and led by our whole-school curriculum design principles.
The KS1, our curriculum builds disciplinary knowledge through a focus on developing subject specific concepts, like evidence and decision making, so that children enter KS2 ready to engage with more substantive knowledge, and leave Thornham St James ready for the secondary school Humanities curriculum. By providing a chronological approach to History units covered in KS2, children will experience a sense of their British and cultural identities in a global context, across time.
Implementation
AT Thornham St James, our History curriculum seeks to give pupils a solid foundation and broad overview in some of the most important periods, events and themes in British and world history. It is comprehensive but necessarily selective; with ambition beyond the minimum statutory requirements of the History National Curriculum.
Our History curriculum gives pupils a strong grounding in British history, taught chronologically from the first settlements through Roman Britain, the Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, the medieval period and up to the Industrial Revolution, touching on Britain during the two World Wars, and exploring the changes in Modern British society. While studying these periods the units explore themes of change and continuity, perspective and power.
Carefully selected, the four units exploring world history provide global coverage and introduce a number of themes. The unit on Ancient Greece introduces key ideas around power and its legitimacy, the Shang Dynasty gives insight into the progress and achievements in China at a time when there was much less occurring in Europe. We chose to include units on the Benin Kingdom to challenge the narrative often prevalent in the teaching of African history – celebrating a highly successful civilisation while introducing the slave trade. Finally, the unit on Civil Rights provides a survey of way black people have been treated in the USA, through the Civil Rights movement and Dr King, right the way to the Black Lives Matter.
By bringing pupils up to the present day – looking at civil rights movements in the UK and around the world – the curriculum demonstrates the importance of past events in shaping the world and the identities of the people and communities they live in.
Throughout the curriculum connections and comparison are made between events and individuals: the unit on the industrial revolution exploring the Great Reform Act by taking pupils from the Magna Carta (which they have studied years before) through the changing seat of power in England over the subsequent six hundred years.
Throughout the curriculum, pupils are taught the substantive content which defines each period. This knowledge is meticulously planned and regularly revisited and elaborated upon. More abstract concepts, too, are carefully developed across the key stage, so that pupils gain an increasingly sophisticated understanding of, for example, kingship or empire.
Beyond substantive knowledge, the disciplinary skills of history, such as source analysis, interpretation, perspective, continuity and change are all explicitly taught and practised.
We teach in subject blocks in order to preserve the integrity of subject specific skills and knowledge. Knowledge in each unit is carefully planned and sequenced. Each lesson within a unit of work is carefully crafted and builds upon what has been previously taught from one year to the next. Each unit includes a work booklet. This helps structure every lesson through a rich, challenging, but age-appropriate text. Key graphics, images and diagrams are all included alongside the text. In line with Rosenshine’s (2012) principles of effective instruction, questions and tasks break up the lesson into small manageable chunks while also ensuring that pupils get regular opportunities to practice new learning. The work booklet clearly sets out the understanding that teachers will develop in class, ensuring high academic expectations of all pupils (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 2008). Increasing the subject knowledge of teachers, especially non-specialists such as primary school teachers, is paramount as ‘pedagogical content knowledge’ has been identified as the most important controllable factor associated with student outcomes (Coe et al, 2014).
Impact
Whilst delivering the curriculum, teachers are constantly checking to ensure that pupils are learning the necessary knowledge and identifying and addressing misunderstandings. Assessment is used as a tool to support pupil learning. The benefit of retrieval practice is one of the strongest findings in cognitive psychology (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; Storm, Bjork & Storm, 2010). Low-stakes quizzes are efficient, effective and motivating for pupils, while also providing teachers with information about what pupils have misunderstood or are struggling to remember. Each lesson begins with a flashback quiz, but we also use a range of retrieval strategies beyond the lesson to ensure content is retained in the long-term memory through spaced learning. To ensure coverage of prior learning, teachers follow a retrieval plan so that all topics are revisited over time.
Frequent audits of the History curriculum take place. Following the findings from these audits, the Geography curriculum is adapted to build upon the learning opportunities and assessment end points for each year group and ensures progression and repetition in terms of embedding key learning, knowledge and skills.
At Thornham St. James, we are committed to ensuring that our curriculum effectively embeds learning in pupils’ long-term memory while also promoting excellence in outcomes. To assess the impact of our curriculum, we employ a comprehensive approach that utilises four key tools:
- Classroom Check-ins: These evaluations focus on subject knowledge, clarity of explanations, high expectations, opportunities for learning, pupil responses, participation, and teacher-student relationships. This allows us to assess how well pupils are engaging with the content and applying their knowledge.
- Pupil Book Looks and Pupil Voice : These studies involve dialogues with pupils and reviewing their workbooks to evaluate curriculum structures, teaching methods, participation, and responses. This dialogic model helps us gauge whether pupils are knowing more, remembering more, and able to do more as a result of their learning experiences.
- Professional Growth Models: We prioritise continuous improvement in staff subject knowledge and evidence-informed teaching practices, including retrieval practice, spaced learning, interleaving, and explicit instruction techniques. This ensures that all teachers are equipped to support pupil learning effectively.
- Assessment and Achievement: We articulate learning outcomes through tasks and tests, evaluating both understanding and areas for improvement. This information informs our next steps, guiding us in adjusting teaching to meet the needs of all pupils.
In conducting these evaluations, we ask critical questions such as:
- How well do pupils remember the content that they have been taught?
- Do books and pupil discussions demonstrate progress and attainment?
- Can pupils apply their learning in more sophisticated contexts, showing that knowledge has ‘travelled’ with them?
