The History Curriculum at St Robert Bellarmine 

“We are God’s work of art.”

A high-quality history education will 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.

Our Intended Curriculum

Our history curriculum is built around the aims and objectives set out in the National Curriculum. We aim for the history curriculum content to be remembered in the long term as our basic principles are that learning only takes place if there is a change in the long-term memory.

Our history curriculum takes a mastery approach. Our mastery learning approach is to ensure that all pupils have mastered key concepts before moving on to the next topic: it is knowledge-led (subject-specific) and it focuses on the development of pupils' long-term memory for fluency, which in turn, develops pupils' ability to reason and deepen knowledge and understanding in history.

History is taught as a discrete subject. Planning for learning carefully maps out the progression of knowledge and understanding, that fully covers the National Curriculum. Teachers are clear on the ‘key knowledge’ that we want our pupils to know and remember and this forms the basis of long-term planning for progression. The key knowledge is connected by reference to golden threads or substantive concepts such as: settlements and conflict, society, culture and beliefs and raw materials, tools and technology.

Substantive concepts thread through each of our history topics, tying them together into meaningful schema. The same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of topics. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, students return to the same substantive concepts over and over and gradually build an understanding of them. Our children are able to explore content in increasing depth and complexity as they move through school.  This approach allows us to make connections across the curriculum, whilst also developing the children’s understanding of what makes history distinct and unique.

Curriculum breadth for history has been planned so that each teacher has clarity of the key knowledge for each topic. These topics have been carefully sequenced to develop the substantive concepts building upon prior knowledge.

Curriculum depth in history allows for children to progress in their declarative, procedural, and disciplinary knowledge by first remembering more, progressing to knowing more which they can then draw on as they learn to reason and explain. Within each subject topic, students gradually progress through three learning stages: remembering, knowing and reasoning. Our goal is for all students to display sustained mastery at the ‘knowing level’ and provide opportunities for progression towards a greater depth of knowledge and understanding at the ‘reasoning level’.

We understand how important academic and subject specific vocabulary is in the acquisition of knowledge. Consequently, teachers ensure that this is planned for and taught rigorously throughout history topics.

We determine progress as 'remembering more and knowing more'. We believe that when new knowledge and existing knowledge connect in pupils’ minds, this gives rise to understanding.  Through consolidation of learning, and as pupils develop unconscious competency and fluency, they develop their procedural and declarative knowledge which is the capacity to perform more complex tasks, drawing on what is known. 

We look for children, as their knowledge and understanding of the history topics explored develops, to show that they can make connections, draw parallels and use increasingly sophisticated explanations and reasoning which draw upon their knowledge.

Our Enacted History Curriculum

Our curriculum design is based upon evidence from cognitive science. Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction are fundamental in the day-to-day teaching of lessons. The main principles that underpin this are:

• regular reviews and the revisiting of prior learning
• continual checking of understanding through effective questioning
• strong teacher modelling and guided practice
• carefully sequenced lessons that use ‘chunked learning’, allowing new learning to be retained
• precise feedback for our children

In addition, we also understand that learning is invisible in the short term. Research tells us that in order for pupils to have a greater depth of understanding and sustain mastery they must first master the basics, which takes time.

Daily routines ensure that we practise things repeatedly so children get better at them, and we revise things on a regular basis so that they don’t forget them.

Our Learnt History Curriculum

The impact of our curriculum can be measured through two main questions:

·  How well are our pupils coping with the history curriculum content?

·  How well are they retaining previously taught content?

The vast majority of pupils have sustained mastery of the historical content, that is they remember more and are fluent in it. Activities are planned for pupils to combine this remembered knowledge and fluency with the opportunities to reason and demonstrate their depth of understanding.

We monitor and track pupils to ensure that they are on track to reach the expectations of our curriculum. Assessment is crucial in improving learning. Formative assessment is used regularly to inform teachers of ongoing progress and allows adjustments to be made that reflect the learning needs of all children in our school. Feedback is continually given to children which leads to better outcomes in history. 

To explore how this curriculum area is taught in your child's class please refer to their class page.