We follow the National Curriculum for history at Seven Sisters. It aims to help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It should inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. Teaching should equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. History helps pupils 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.
In EYFS
The children look at Understanding the world through its people and communities. One of our early learning goals is that children talk about past and present events in their own lives and in the lives of family members. With that in mind, the children are encouraged to remember and talk about significant events in their own experience. We help them to recognise and describe special times or events for family or friends.
In Key Stage 1
Pupils are taught about changes that have taken place within living memory. Where appropriate, these should be used to reveal aspects of change in national life. The children learn about events beyond living memory that are significant nationally or globally. We also learn about the lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements. Finally, the children learn about significant historical events, people and places in their own locality.
In Key Stage 2
Pupils are taught about changes in Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. They learn about the Roman Empire and its impact on Britain. We study Britain’s settlement by Anglo-Saxons and Scots as well as the Viking and Anglo-Saxon struggle for the Kingdom of England to the time of Edward the Confessor. In Year 6 the children carry out a local history study as well as studying an aspect or theme in British history that extends pupils’ chronological knowledge beyond 1066. We learn about the achievements of the earliest civilizations examining an overview of where and when the first civilizations appeared.
Thanks to our partners at HEP, we are able to provide a history curriculum that is ambitiously broad in scope, meticulous in rigour, highly coherent and very carefully sequenced. The substantive content is taught with ‘high-leverage’ activities, so that pupils think hard about the substance itself, so that they assimilate and retain material efficiently and so that they gain confidence from their fluency in foundational concepts, terms and reference points. In this way vocabulary will become extremely secure, with the range of vocabulary that pupils recognise growing all the time and creating resonance as pupils’ encounter it again and again, both consolidating that vocabulary and freeing up memory space for pupils to make sense of new material. We want our students to understand what the job of a historian is and to think like historians. Therefore, we aim to ensure that our pupils understand historical concepts such as:
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.
Each unit of work builds on from the last. The vocabulary is the core and children acquire powerful knowledge which enables them to become more knowledgeable more quickly.
To read more about our exciting HEP primary curriculum and the rationale behind it, please click here.
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