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Broomfields Junior School

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History

The aim of history teaching at Broomfield Junior School is to stimulate the children’s interest, understanding and knowledge of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. 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 and problem-solving.

Historical enquiry is concerned with the development of creative and critical thought to enable children to see the differences between fact and fiction, the connections between cause and effect and how history has been shaped. To do this they need to be able to find and weigh evidence, sift arguments, reach their own conclusions and to research and put their own point of view with confidence as well as develop perspective and judgement.

intent

At Broomfields Junior School our intent is to:

To prepare children for the world in which they live and prepare them for their adult lives in a socially complex and culturally varied society.
To help children to develop a sense of chronology and time and to develop a chronological framework that enables them to sequence events and objects.
To help children to understand the ways in which the past is different to the present and that people of other times and places may have had different values and attitudes to those of people in the present.
To help children to develop an awareness and understanding of the nature of evidence and understand that because of its range and diversity, historical judgments may be provisional and tentative.
To help children to develop an appreciation of change and to understand that change is a result of human inventions, beliefs and motives.
To help the children to develop an understanding of cause and effect.
To help the children to develop historical empathy and so have an informed appreciation of the predicaments and points of view of people in the past.
To help the children to develop the ability to pose historical questions and to make informed judgments.
To help the children to develop the enquiry skills needed to use all kinds of historical evidence in order to offer explanations of past events.
To help the children to distinguish fact and fiction.
To contribute to the personal and social development of the children by helping them to develop a respect for evidence and a tolerance of a range of opinions.
To help the children to develop a range of communication skills using a wide range of media.

Implementation

The school uses a variety of teaching and learning styles in history lessons. Our principal aim is to develop the children’s knowledge, skills and understanding. We do this through a mixture of whole- class teaching and individual / group activities. Teachers encourage the children to ask as well as answer questions. The children have the opportunity to use a variety of secondary sources of information, where it will enhance learning as well as gaining first hand experiences, for example, the use of books, photographs, artefacts and ICT.

We recognise the fact that we have children of differing historical ability in all our classes and so we provide suitable learning opportunities for all children by matching the challenge of the task to the ability of the child. We achieve this by:

Setting common tasks that are open-ended and can have a variety of responses
Setting tasks of increasing difficulty (we do not expect all children to complete all tasks)
Grouping children by ability and setting different tasks for each group
Providing a range of challenges with different resources
Using additional adults to support the work of individual children or small groups
Incorporating high order questions to extend the most able children in history

impact

The quality of our History curriculum is high, it is well thought out and is planned to demonstrate progression. We focus on progression of knowledge and skills: vocabulary progression also forms part of the units of work. Children will deepen their understanding of the interaction through the opportunity to use a variety of secondary sources of information, where it will enhance learning as well as gaining first hand experiences, for example, the use of books, photographs, artefacts and ICT. We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

Imapct is measured through::

the school’s Curriculum Framework. (in line with the Chris Quigley Essentials curriculum)
INSET, staff meetings and informal discussions to share ideas, disseminate good practice, review progress and highlight areas for development.
enabling teachers to have access to each teacher’s planning so that staff can see what other year groups are doing and what their class has done in previous years.
Head teacher and Subject Leader monitoring planning files to ensure coverage of the programmes of study, the teaching of historical skills and adherence to the agreed guidelines.
learning walks with governors and SLT.
informal discussions between the history subject leader and staff to exchange opinions and ascertain needs.
observation of children’s work and display and through discussion with the children.
classroom observations that may be made by the Head teacher or subject leader of a particular aspect of the history curriculum, agreed beforehand with the class teacher.