Statement of Intent

At Grindleton C.E. Primary School we strive to stimulate the children’s interest, curiosity and understanding about the past. We aim to provide creative high quality History lessons to inspire and motivate our children to prepare them for their next stage of life. Pupils gain a knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. Children gain a sense of chronology and through this develop a sense of identity and an awareness of the challenges of their time.

Teaching should allow children to ask questions, think critically, weigh evidence and develop perspective and judgement. History teaching should help pupils to understand the complexity of pupils’ lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and the relationship between different groups.

Aims

We aim to ensure that all pupils:

• know and understand history from the earliest times to the present day: how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world
• know and understand significant aspects of the history of the wider world: the nature of ancient civilisations; the expansion and dissolution of empires; characteristic features of past non-European societies.
• 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.
• understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and 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.