History is critical to helping students 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. Our aim is to inspire students’ curiosity to know more about the past and develop their knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. The teaching of History equips pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement.

Our aims are for students to:

• know and understand the history of Britain as a coherent, chronological narrative from the development of the English Monarchy in the Anglo Saxon era to present day issues: it will focus on the key individuals and institutions that shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world
• develop knowledge and understanding of significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the rise and fall of empires and the characteristics of past non-European societies: investigating both the achievements and the mistakes made by human actions
• develop a wider vocabulary and 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
• gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts, understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history; between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history; and between short- and long-term timescales.