Trust Curriculum Intent

Our mission is to provide a cradle to career education that allows our children to enjoy lives of choice and opportunity. By the age of 18, we want every child to have the option of university or a high quality alternative. 

Subject Curriculum Intent

The History Department’s intent is based on:

• Giving every Brigshaw History student the ability to close their eyes and confidently see a representative picture of what life was like in the time periods they have studied.
• Giving every student the vocabulary to understand and communicate British and world history.
• Giving every student a rigorous and lasting understanding of the powerful substantive knowledge allowing them to explain and comprehend British and World History which allows them to engage with the concepts and narratives that have shaped human progress. This will allow our students to see connections, changes and continuities so that they can make sense of the past.
• Give every student an appreciation for the disciplinary knowledge of the subject of History through a rigorous approach to second order concepts.
• Give every student the tools to love the pursuit of history.

Curriculum Principles

• Reverse Planning is approached in the history curriculum by the careful selection and sequencing of learning outcomes and lesson vocabulary.  This is achieved through the sharing of subject specific knowledge from the Historical Association, exam board mark schemes and examiner reports.  This is carefully enacted within lesson plans and resources.  Teachers are able to explain clearly what the successful completion of lesson objectives look like.  Vocabulary is explicitly shared with students through expert teaching techniques, centrally planned to ensure consistency and regularly assessed to check understanding/memory.  Lessons are pitched for the highest ability student to be successful with effective scaffolding implemented for all learners to achieve to the top of their academic potential.
• Powerful Knowledge is developed in the history curriculum through the explicit teaching of key vocabulary which students can directly use in wider life as well as in the history classroom. Our schemes have been carefully selected to teach students a detailed story of how the past has developed to create the modern day, but also to teach students an understanding of the world that prepares them to understand the future. All of this is underpinned by the key history theme that all of history is the process of constructing an interpretation of the past which can vary from person to person based on a range of reasons.
• Cultural Capital is developed in the history curriculum by ensuring all students learn about a wide range of human experiences from many different countries and studying many different groups of people. We aim to broaden horizons through a curriculum that goes beyond students’ localised experience while also focusing on our own community in local history studies so students can have a better sense of how their area fits into a broader narrative of the past.
• Substantive (“Know That”) knowledge is developed in the history curriculum by careful planning and sequencing of key content so that students have multiple opportunities to understand key ideas in more challenging terms each year. These sometimes abstract concepts are them used to analyse varied past events to build a more complex and interconnected picture of world history.
• Procedural and Disciplinary (“Know How”) Knowledge  is developed in the history curriculum by encouraging students to challenge the views of historians and think methodically about how sources of evidence from the past can be used to create interpretations of what the past was like. History’s second order concepts are also sequenced thoughtfully to appropriately challenge students following a progression model from Year 7 to A-Level preparing them to write well informed and balanced analytical arguments.
• Cognitive Psychology informs all history lessons at Brigshaw. All lesson planning and delivery is informed by principles extrapolated from working memory theory so that distraction and overload are avoided and student’s attention can be maximised on the task at hand: being the best history student possible. Interleaving and retrieval is used in lessons and through homework to make sure the powerful content taught in the classroom has the best chance of being remembered as part of our student’s long term memory.
  

What will this look like at implementation?

Please use the links below to explore how our curriculum looks, for each year group, as a result of these guiding principles

How can you support students’ learning from home?

When travelling with your student, take opportunities to discuss and research the past through visiting museums, buying books or researching together online.

Introduce your student to varied interpretations of the past through books, documentaries, films or television shows and think about who made them, when they were made and whether what you see is likely to be an accurate interpretation of the past, or whether it has been misremembered or exaggerated to serve a particular purpose.

Access online revision resources and discuss these with your child. GCSE Bitesize has great overviews of many of our KS3 topics.

Subscribe to a History publication like History Today and discuss cutting edge Historical analysis.