At Sacred Heart, we believe that the teaching of history helps 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. History helps pupils to know their place in the story of the world.
History is primarily delivered as a discrete subject, however there will be opportunities for the knowledge and skills gathered during history lessons to be applied to new learning in other subjects.
We base our history curriculum on the CUSP approach. History draws upon several powerful sources of knowledge:
- Substantive knowledge – this is the subject knowledge and explicit vocabulary used about the past.
- Disciplinary knowledge – this is the use of that knowledge and how children construct understanding through historical claims, arguments and accounts.
- Historical analysis is developed through selecting, organising and integrating knowledge through reasoning and inference making in response to our structured questions and challenges.
- Substantive concepts, such as tax, invasion and civilisation are taught through explicit vocabulary instruction as well as through the direct content and context of the study.
Our teaching of history is enhanced through a range of educational experiences such as, trips to local points of interest; having experts visit classes and extracurricular activities.