History

At Combe Down, everyone is a historian! We bring the teaching of history to life through exciting interactive lessons, engaging visitors, trips to fascinating places and by delving into the depths of our own past in the local area. We make use of the amazing resources in our beautiful city and beyond to ensure that history relevant and interesting for our pupils. We follow our Trust's Curriculum Spine which lays out the order that the different elements of the National Curriculum for History should be taught in. This ensures a progressive approach which facilitates links to prior learning and provides opportunities to revisit and develop learning at later points.

We use specific key concepts to focus our teaching and learning in history; these have been mapped to all history topics throughout the school to support progression in the understanding of these areas. Our key concepts are:

• Chronology - continuity and change: Creating a sense of period and time, the sequence of when things happened, what changed and what continued, what we might see as progress.
• Cause and Consequence: Explaining why things happened in history, how people made a difference to what happened, what followed as a result. 
• Interpretations: Thinking about how and why the way that history is produced differs and whether we all understand the past in exactly the same way. How do we show what the past was like?
• Evidence: Discovering what we can use to find out about the past and considering the problems when using historical sources.
• Significance: Deciding which parts of history are the most important and judging the impact of people, civilisations and events.

Throughout Key Stages 1 and 2, the National Curriculum elements relating to British history are taught in chronological order to support pupils in developing a sense of the passing of time and an understanding of how and why events happened. Each new area of history taught begins with an investigation of where the period fits in to the overall picture of world history by exploring timelines and, where appropriate, maps too. Below you will find a general list of the history units covered in each year group; information about the core knowledge and skills covered is provided in the form of a knowledge organiser at the start of each unit:

Curriculum Lead for History: Francesca Biffen