History
At Penwortham Primary School, we want our children to have a knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. We want our children to be inspired and curious about the past, 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 teach children a sense of chronology, and an appreciation of how their local area has changed over time. The study of the lives of significant people supports our school ‘My Personal Best’ values through exemplifying the qualities we seek to develop in our pupils. We teach children to understand how events in the past have influenced our lives today; we also teach them to investigate these past events and by doing so, children will be equipped to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments and develop perspective and judgements.
We want our children to enjoy and love learning about history by gaining knowledge and skills in the classroom, supplemented by artefacts, fieldwork and historical visits wherever possible. The following skills are central to history learning at Penwortham Primary School. We aim for our pupils to be able to:
- Investigate and interpret the past
- Build an overview of world history
- Understand chronology
- Communicate historically
- Understand aspects of local history and their relationship to the history of the UK and the world.
The National Curriculum for History aims 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 own 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.
