At Northern House Academy, our History curriculum is built around and underpinned by our School values. As such our approach is designed around understanding the needs of each individual child, is unapologetic in its high expectation, knowing that our children are not defined by their needs but instead viewed with the positivity they need in order to be nurtured both emotionally and academically, it is consistent in order to enable a safe environment where our pupils are empowered to take risks and experience success and it must be a History curriculum that promotes the simple pleasure of happiness.
We believe that a high-quality history education will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of the past, both of Britain and the wider world. Our History curriculum is designed to inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past and equip them to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. History helps our 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. We want our history curriculum to feel relevant to our pupils. As such we choose starting points that resonate with our pupils’ contemporary lives, helping them to use their own experiences as springboards for historical exploration. Their chronological narrative starts with their lives today, and tracks backwards through time.
We designed our curriculum to provide our pupils with knowledge of significant events within history, as well as exploring changes through time. They will have the opportunity to explore recurring historical themes, which promote chances to explore historical enquiry and enable our pupils to gain historical perspective. We believe that engaging with our pupils’ interests and hobbies can promote excitement and a love of learning. As such, we ensure that our topics, where appropriate, can be built around engaging ‘hooks’ which will motivate and inspire our pupils to engage with their learning. An example of this in action would be our ‘Toys throughout time’ unit of work for our youngest pupils, using their toys of today to kickstart and explore how modern toys differ from those of the past. By placing their emerging knowledge into different contexts we allow them to better understand the connections between local, regional, national and international history, in relation to both short term and longer term timescales.
We ensure that our History curriculum is well matched to the national curriculum through careful consideration of topic coverage. For example, when thinking about significant events and people, we use the topic of ‘It’s electrifying’ to make meaningful links between Science and History, whilst learning about electricity and inventors that changed the world. We also offer the opportunity to focus on themes in History that are linked to our own locality. For example, our unit of work on Castles for our youngest pupils which includes detailed exploration of ‘Oxford Castle’.
To support our pupils developing knowledge, we assess our pupils against National Curriculum Attainment Targets using the Northern House Academy ‘Learning Objective Descriptors’. These enable our teachers to choose learning objectives for their pupils that are well matched to their development and ensure progression of skills across galleries and key stages within our academy.