History Intent

At Oakfield Primary School as part of our History curriculum, we promote children’s understanding through curiosity about the past and its lasting impact and legacy. We have a focus on building wider substantive knowledge about different periods and their respective societies whilst weaving in the disciplinary knowledge to allow children to understand, examine and analyse the skills of being a historian within a variety of historical contexts.

Children develop an understanding of a range of historical periods and concepts and can communicate their understanding in variety of ways. They can utilise their substantive historical knowledge to create accounts and explain trends, cause and continuity and compare significance whilst taking into account disciplinary knowledge to help inform their understanding, explanations and enquiries within historical contexts.

At Oakfield Primary, in conjunction with the aims of the EYFS Statutory Framework and the National Curriculum, we provide children with the opportunity to:

• 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 History – key stages 1 and 2
• 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

Implementation of History:

Outlined are the school overview, progression of knowledge, long term plan and medium term plans for History at Oakfield Primary School.