History is all around us. The study of history ignites student’s curiosity about the past in Britain and the wider world.
Through finding out about how and why the world, our country, culture and local community have developed over time, students understand how the past influences the present.
History Department – Overarching Curriculum Intent (September 2024)
RFSS Curriculum Vision Statement:
To build an inclusive curriculum which is aspirational for all and empowers our students to make outstanding academic and personal progress.
History Curriculum in Context:
History is all around us. The study of history ignites student’s curiosity about the past in Britain and the wider world. Through finding out about how and why the world, our country, culture and local community have developed over time, students understand how the past influences the present. History enables students to develop a context for their growing sense of identity and a chronological framework for their knowledge of significant events and people. What they learn through history can teach them about resilience and a respect for the people and events that shaped key turning points in our past. Our intent is that our students will be offered a curriculum which is academically rigorous but also helps them to develop into curious and well-rounded young people. This has been achieved by building the curriculum around enquiry questions which allow students to examine key themes such as daily lives, freedom and rights, gender and diversity.
In creating our curriculum, the character of our school community (as below) has been carefully considered alongside the national and international context in which we live. For example,
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60% of students at RFSS are White British, compared to 65% in Secondary schools across the country.
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28% of students speak a language other than English as their home language.
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50 different languages are spoken within our school.
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After English, the most common home languages are Polish and Romanian.
In response, new topics and themes have been introduced, such as a study of Africa Before 1500, case studies of female history like Harriet Tubman and Empress Matilda. We have also introduced ‘Meanwhile Elsewhere’ Independent home learning which allow our students to consider which key historical events were occurring elsewhere in the world at the time of key areas of curriculum study, for example, the Vikings attacked England from Scandinavia…meanwhile, elsewhere…the Abbasid Caliphate was flourishing in the east. The range of ‘Meanwhile Elsewhere’ homework’s are provided to allow students to choose a particular area of either global or local history to examine alongside their classroom curriculum. The curriculum endeavors to be both inclusive and diverse and foster those opportunities for independent research and learning.
In the context of living through a global pandemic, a study of Britain after WW2 has been included to allow students to examine the formation of the Welfare State and in turn consider the key role it played during the Covid 19 pandemic.
When designing our curriculum, we were inspired by the work of Mary Myatt in designing a curriculum that contains a combination of ‘core’ and ‘hinterland’ alongside opportunities to build in powerful stories, anecdotes and all-important links to the context of the world we live in today. Our history curriculum provides and celebrates the opportunities to read the powerful stories of key individuals and events that have shaped our past but also to develop key historical skills. We have introduced a focus on, ‘Think like an historian’ where we seek to emphasise the historical skills we are nurturing alongside their literacy – For example, source analysis, inference skills, analysing cause and consequence.
Our curriculum aims to:
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Develop confident young people who have a secure knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from the historical periods covered.
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Enable the ability to think critically about history and communicate confidently through their writing and oracy.
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Foster the ability to support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using detailed historical evidence derived from a range of sources.
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Empower our students to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past.
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Nurture a passion for history and an enthusiastic engagement in learning, which develops their sense of curiosity about the past and their understanding of how and why people interpret the past in different ways.
We do this by:
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By allowing our students to engage with historical scholarship to enhance their study of the past.
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Building opportunities for our students to engage with historical evidence, both primary and secondary, to question and evaluate the utility of such evidence for a historical enquiry.
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Building a sequenced curriculum which presents opportunities for our students to engage with the disciplinary knowledge that underpins our subject, second order concepts such as cause, consequence, change and continuity.
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Providing a chronological framework to help our students make sense of the past and the key turning points that have shaped our present.
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Allowing sequenced opportunities for students to engage with different interpretations of people and events of our past. To question why interpretations can vary and what factors may influence this.
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Guided by the National Curriculum and the context of our school community, we have selected and share historical narratives which develop our pupils wider historical perspectives, we do this by carefully selecting key topics and case studies.
Curriculum Outcome:
Our curriculum is focused on the development of communication, character and cultural capital of each individual student.
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Through our history curriculum we help develop confident young people who have a secure knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from the historical periods covered.
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Students will develop the ability to think critically about history and communicate confidently through their writing and oracy.
- The ability to support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using detailed historical evidence derived from a range of sources.
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The ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past.
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A passion for history and an enthusiastic engagement in learning, which develops their sense of curiosity about the past and their understanding of how and why people interpret the past in different ways.
