History

The intent of History is to deliver a broad, balanced, and diverse curriculum which is research-informed to best support all our students.

We ensure that we utilise quality first teaching in our lessons, and set a high level of challenge for all our students. We ensure scaffolding is in place to support all students we have within our Academy (including students with SEND, English as Additional Language and Pupil Premium), so that all students access and master the challenging content we teach within History.

We explore a range of past events, stories and voices interweaved into the tapestry of our curriculum. By exposing them to narratives from a range of geographical areas, time periods and various protected characteristics, we ensure the delivery of a fuller narrative of the past which prepares our students to be global citizens. However, this also reflects the community within which we work, recognising the multicultural, international, and multi-faith community that we serve in Peckham.

Students are exposed to powerful knowledge, made up of a combination of key substantive and disciplinary knowledge, that supports previous learning and underpins future learning to develop students into independent learners. Students will master the fundamental skills of the historian, including critical thinking and analytical skills (such as causational thinking), the necessary linguistic skills of the historian to communicate their historical arguments and the use of source material and interpretations to construct accounts of the past.

We ensure that literacy and numeracy are also at the core of everything we do in History, through explicitly teaching the linguistic skills of the historian or the use of numerical skills, such as ranking, to help construct arguments.

Exposing students to multiple narratives and honing their skills as historians will equip them with a deeper understanding of the past, enabling them to contribute and interact within our local, national, and international communities upon leaving the Academy. It will also foster a love for History beyond their time at the Academy, either in a personal capacity or by moving forward in the academic field in Further and Higher Education.

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Progress in History

Our curriculum is designed to support students to make progress in history. Pupils make progress in history by developing:

• Their knowledge about the past (‘substantive knowledge’) and how this knowledge fits into a wider chronology of the past
• Their knowledge about how historians investigate the past, and how they construct historical claims, arguments and accounts (‘disciplinary knowledge’).

Students will develop their understanding of how historians investigate the past and construct historical arguments through our explicit focus on first-order and second-order concepts, which underpin our taught enquiries.

In History, the second-order concepts which we explore are:

• Cause and consequence
• Change and continuity
• Historical significance
• Similarity and difference
• Historical evidence
• Historical interpretation