Intent, Implementation and Impact statements
Intent
Our school is situated right in the heart of the Pudsey community in a building that is steeped in its own vast history which spans over 100 years. As a result, History is held in high regard at Greenside Primary School and is a celebrated and inspiring feature of our school. This lays the foundation upon which we build our history curriculum.
We believe that an effective history curriculum should provide children with a context for their developing sense of self: understanding what has come before, in turn, helps children to understand the current world around them and subsequently develop a better understanding of themselves. Therefore, we are committed to providing a stimulating, varied and aspirational curriculum that brings this vision to life and meets the needs of all our children.
This curriculum has our five key drivers (creativity, diversity, community, aspiration and resilience) woven through it to help us achieve our goals for history teaching and learning. Additionally, as outlined in the National Curriculum’s programme of study, it equips children with the appropriate knowledge and skills associated with the subject. To effectively deliver this, our units are informed by children’s interests and the context of the local area and wider world.
We ensure history teaching and learning is carefully planned so that current learning is linked to that from previous years so that our children can build upon and develop chronological understanding and historical skills year after year. Teaching is consistently high quality and is informed by current pedagogical approaches with a focus on enquiry and skills-based learning.
Implementation
We have taken the aims, attainment targets and subject content from the National Curriculum programme of study for History and have organised them on our skills progression grids. This allows us to ensure there is clear progress in children’s skill-set, knowledge and vocabulary across the school. It is important to us at Greenside that the children develop the skill and knowledge of a historian throughout their time with us and do not rote-learn factual knowledge.
Our key concepts are:
- Continuity and change in and between periods of time
- Cause and consequence
- Similarity and difference
- Significance of events and people.
Our key skills are:
- Knowledge and understanding (to build an overview of world history)
- Understanding of chronology
- Historical enquiry (to investigate and interpret the past)
- Presentation, organisation and communication of history learning
Our curriculum is taught on a two-year cycle (Cycle A and B) within our phases (Years 1 and 2, Years 3 and 4 and Years 5 and 6). Each unit is introduced using ‘the big question’. From this, teachers refer to a timeline to develop their understanding of chronology and make use of the KWL strategy (what I know, what I would like to know and what I have learnt). This strategy allows teachers to check existing, prior knowledge and is an opportunity to ensure that the programme of study is sensitive to children’s interest. From then, the programme of study will commence with the aforementioned focus on key skills, concepts and knowledge and the detailed progression map enables staff to focus their lesson objectives accordingly. We also aim to enhance our curriculum as much as possible with the use of historical artefacts, visitors, workshops and visits in order to excite and peak our children’s interest in the topic. With regards to local history, we ensure local visits, maps and photographs are used to support contextualised learning.
In addition to standalone history lessons, we use a cross-curricular approach to further enhance children’s learning and understanding by allowing for the exploration in different contexts: we effectively link our English units to our history focus using high quality texts; we also link our foundation subjects to our history focus when the links are viable and symbiotic, thereby giving opportunity to apply historical knowledge and skill to different contexts.
Impact
The impact of high quality first teaching from our curriculum is evidenced and monitored in a number of ways.
Throughout the year, regular monitoring and evaluation of the subject is undertaken. This consists of:
- Pupil voice 2x per year where children are given the opportunity to share the knowledge and skills they have acquired as well as sharing their thoughts and feelings about the subject;
- Planning and book monitoring 2x per year to ensure a wide range of topics are covered, skills are being effectively taught and that cross-curricular links are continuing to be made in a meaningful way;
- Learning walks 1x per year to ensure high quality first teaching is evident in classrooms and to monitor the progression of skills throughout school;
- Assessment data is inputted to the school’s curriculum tracker every half term and is analysed termly (3x per year) by the subject leader.
Alongside this, the impact will be visible in the wider school environment and the community itself. The school environment will be rich in history through displays, a whole-school timeline, resources and historical vocabulary. The children are given ‘learning log’ projects where they conduct their own historical research. During this, they are encouraged to ask questions, think critically, weigh up evidence and come to their own conclusions.
In doing all of this, we are able, as a school to ensure that our curriculum drivers are deeply embedded, our curriculum serves its purpose of developing well-rounded, confident learners who are able to make their own conclusions about the world around them.