Aims and Objectives 

Our main objective in the delivery of history at Whitchurch Combined School is to stimulate the children’s interest and understanding about the life of people who lived in the past. Three of our values are to ‘Be Curious’, Be Respectful’ and ‘Be Proud’. We teach children a sense of chronology, and through this they develop a sense of identity and a cultural understanding based on their historical heritage. Thus, they learn to value their own and other people’s cultures in modern multicultural Britain and, by considering how people lived in the past, they are better able to make their own life choices today. In our school, history makes a significant contribution to citizenship education by teaching about how Britain developed as a democratic society. 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 so doing, to develop the skills of enquiry, analysis, interpretation, organisation and communication.

At Whitchurch School we follow the statutory guidance for history as stated in the New Primary Curriculum 2014.

• 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.

Through the programmes of study, the children acquire and develop the key knowledge that has been identified within each unit and across each year group. Key skills are also mapped for each year group and are progressive throughout the school. The curriculum is designed to ensure that children are able to acquire key historical knowledge through practical experiences; access to primary and secondary sources of evidence, building arguments and explaining concepts confidently. The school’s approach to history takes account of the school’s own context, ensuring access to people with specialist expertise and places of historic interest as part of the school’s commitment to learning outside the classroom. Cross-curricular opportunities are also identified, mapped, and planned to ensure contextual relevance. Children are encouraged to ask questions and be curious about the past and a love of history is nurtured through a whole school ethos and a varied history curriculum.