History

History Intent

Our aim at St Teresa’s Catholic Academy is to provide all pupils with an aspirational History curriculum that ignites a curiosity to learn about the past in Britain and the wider world, and enables them to aspire, achieve and be ready for their next stage of education.

Our teaching & learning opportunities in History:

🌍 enable children to know and understand the chronological history of Britain from the earliest times to the present day

🌍 study how significant people and events have shaped our nation over time, and influence our lives today

🌍 allow pupils opportunities to study the history of the wider world, expanding out from the U.K., through Europe and into the Wider World.

🌍 understand what it means to be a historian; using a variety of methods of historical enquiry, using evidence to make claims about the past and examining how different perspectives shape opinion and reported accounts of key historical events.

The aim and purpose of History at St Teresa’s Academy is to provide high quality teaching to ensure all children make good progress and can apply their knowledge across the curriculum. Teachers promote pupils’ enjoyment of history through experiences, workshop days, role play, home learning projects and even a history museum where we invite parents to tour our museum to find out fascinating facts about the past.

We believe all pupils can succeed in History and St Teresa’s pupils are the next generation of historians, curators, archaeologists, researchers, conservators, investigators and more! Watch this space!.

Our curriculum drivers enable us to fulfil our mission of:

‘Pray Together, Aspire Together, Achieve Together.’

Curriculum Drivers: Aspiration, Knowledge of the World, Communication, Preparation for Life, Community.

Implementation

Our History planning uses and adapts some of the scheme units from PlanBee, as a starting point. Our Curriculum lead has adapted these units to make them more bespoke for our school, whilst the class teachers adapt them each lesson to suit the specific needs of their class..

Children have a weekly History lesson in alternate half terms. They are expected to recall and use historical vocabulary from previous lessons and build on a range of skills. As in many lessons, teachers ask pupils to self-assess their knowledge and skills against success criteria for that lesson. All learning objectives challenge pupils of all abilities, and are in line with National Curriculum.

We continually review our History provision because ‘Only excellence is good enough at St Teresa’s’.

Impact

We can assess the impact of our History curriculum offer by looking at the improving work children produce. At home, ask your children to use some of their newly acquired history vocabulary in a sentence for you, or ask them to explain a key concepts or knowledge fact they have gained. Their retention is a good measure of the quality of history education.