History

Curriculum Rationale: History

Our history curriculum aims to ensure that all pupils develop the necessary academic skills and intellectual habits that will enable them to gain a thorough understanding of the consequences of past historical events in the order that they can think both critically and analytically about the political, social, cultural, economic and democratic issues that our current world faces. 

The history curriculum is a vehicle for social justice and promotes common values of diversity, tolerance, equality, and democracy. We aspire to create a new generation of skilful young historians that look at the world around them and see the historical landscape that has been shaped over the last 4,000 years, allowing them access to this treasure through a razor-sharp focus on reading, speaking, and writing. 

We aim to ensure that all our pupils have access to a carefully planned curriculum. Our curriculum aims to provide pupils with explicit systematic teaching and rehearsal of knowledge. We also ensure that these pupils have the time they need to study important subject content in history.

Curriculum Aim: History

The King’s Leadership Academy Liverpool history curriculum has been developed to ensure that all pupils:

• know and understand the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative, 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; achievements and follies of mankind

• 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 structured accounts, including written narratives and analyses

• understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims, and discern 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

Assessment

To check how well our students are learning the curriculum, teachers use a full range of assessment techniques. These include diagnostic questions to reveal your child’s historical preconceptions and common misunderstandings, questioning and summative assessments twice per year.