Subject intent

Our History department aims to create confident, diverse, analytical historians. Through our curriculum we want to challenge our students to think and speak like historians as well as inspire and enthuse students, and where possible to link to contemporary issues and discussions. 

Our curriculum has a wide breadth of topics from the mediaeval period to the present day, inviting our students to look at the past in new ways with different sources and interpretations to allow them to uncover the past as well as help them in the future.

We teach students the importance of challenging the provenance of information, evaluating different interpretations, and processing large amounts of information to create a coherent argument.

We teach empathy and tolerance and an understanding of how history has created the world we live in today.

We are teaching topics that are knowledge rich using a variety of historical matters, including more recent and challenging historical texts, that will underpin our enquires within lessons. Our students will 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. They will 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 exist.  

This will also allow them to understand the process of change, to see how we arrived ‘here’ and help them to make sense of the present. We want pupils to realise that the past is gone and history is constructed and contested. History’s unique concepts help pupils to construct arguments and support them to become analytical citizens who can question human motivation and society with skill and confidence. Students will become empowered by the knowledge they will gain, to see the links historical events have on today’s society and learn from the events of the past. 

Subject journey