Curriculum Intent
"To remain ignorant of history is to remain forever a child”
- Cicero
Our ambition is to create confident historians who have a robust understanding of British and world history. We enable our students to critically examine an extensive range of source material and to analyse different perspectives of history. Our students gain a chronologically secure understanding of events alongside the key factors that both enable and hinder progress in society, economics and politics. This enables pupils to appreciate how history has shaped modern society. Our pupils will develop a strong moral compass by learning about both atrocious events and prejudiced beliefs and, through discussion, will understand the human nature that underpinned these. We will foster both curiosity and debate so that pupils can establish an informed opinion of historical topics. Our ultimate goal is for students to have the critical reasoning skills to challenge what they see and read about the world around them, and to have both the courage and the informed understanding of history to become agents of change or preservation in their future.
Our history curriculum has been designed to enable our learners to:
- Establish a chronological narrative of important themes and events in British history. This allows them to understand how key factors have developed British society and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world
- Know and understand significant aspects of world history, with a particular focus on the British Empire and the significant European events of the 20th Century.
- Celebrate our community’s diverse culture. This includes the development of links between the local Sherwood/Nottingham community and wider historical events and the positive representation of ethnic minority groups within significant world events. This allows our students to see themselves in the history they are being taught.
- Conduct enquiry-based investigations that evaluates a range of factors and evidence to arrive at a substantiated judgement
- Understand the fundamental concepts of historical study and how they apply to concrete historical events; namely, the concepts of continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity and difference, interpretation, inference and significance. These allow students to analyse patterns and write analytical responses to key historical questions.
- Appreciate and apply the tools of a historian, including the use of primary and secondary source material to interrogate a theme or event, and to discern how and why historians construct contrasting interpretations of the past.
- Place their understanding of historical themes into new contexts, so as to understand the connection between local, British and world history. They should be able to connect social, political and economic factors, and link together short and long term factors.
- Develop an ambitious vocabulary of historical terms and an understanding of how many of these terms can be transferred across the curriculum and apply to modern society; for example, hierarchy, reformation, and appeasement.
- Enable students to craft well-structured response to historical questions and confidently write at length about a historical theme.