Here is a link to the third curriculum package of a series (following science and geography). I am absolutely certain that is is the best of three curriculum packages by some considerable distance:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1o_BRvrZf-B0NrVF_RXPfD8Y1n4-qkT70?usp=sharing
What’s included?
As with the previous curriculum packages, this includes…
+ Curriculum overviews for each year group, organised to facilitate and simplify planning and teaching.
+ The knowledge and skills to be taught across the primary phase and those to be retrieved from prior topics.
+ The key concepts to be taught and built upon in each topic.
+ The vocabulary to be taught and retrieved from previous topics.
+ Cumulative revision of the scope of history taught at each stage.
+ Basic information texts, written to match each topic.
In addition, this history curriculum package includes…
+ Resources, activities and questions designed to elicit thinking and develop children’s grasp of the disciplinary knowledge and skills of history.
+ Cumulative timelines that build a sense of chronology across the school (more on this below).
+ Varied maps that situate each topic of study
How appropriate is this curriculum package for other schools?
Naturally, as with the other curriculum packages, this curriculum is made for a particular school, specifically one in the heart of Peterborough. It was put together with our community and our city in mind at all times. However, in terms of sharing this with the wider world, this is actually an advantage as it makes clear exactly how a history curriculum can and should be adapted to a specific community. Regardless, it would be perfectly possible to take this curriculum package and adapt it to suit the needs of a very different community. To this end, this curriculum package is designed to meet (and in my view exceed) the expectations of the National Curriculum in breadth, depth and ambition.
How is this curriculum organised?
In the simplest terms, Key Stage 1 is used to introduce children to the basic ideas of history as study of the past, looking at the development over time of certain aspects of society and some influential figures. Key Stage 1 ends with a study of Peterborough from the neolithic era to the modern day, sensitising children to the scope of the British history aspect of the curriculum that is to come. In Key Stage 2, the curriculum progresses chronologically, from the Stone Age to the modern day. This is only one way to organise a curriculum, of course, though the advantages of a simple chronology, the repeated retrieval of preceding topics and the cumulative development of a core timeline were all seen as advantages that made this particular organisation sensible.
This curriculum seems to cover a lot of ground. Why?
Any curriculum reflects the views of those who create it. Unashamedly, my view of primary history is that, first and foremost, children are entitled to leave primary school with a basic grasp of the broad sweep of British history and an understanding of history across the wider world. While inevitably certain aspects have to be prioritised, I think it more sensible, for example, for children to know the key aspects of several ancient civilisations (and their commonalities and differences) than for them to know a great deal about just one or two. While there are thematic studies and opportunities to look at key ideas in more depth, this curriculum attempts to show British history (and to an extent world history) as an interconnected narrative rather than just as discrete topics. The use of the time lines is key here.
Why are some parts in the curriculum overviews written in bold type?
There is a lot of information in the curriculum overviews. It is important that we recognise that some aspects of the curriculum are essential for children to remember while others are merely useful. Labelling the essential aspects in bold allows teachers to prioritise what is being learned in each topic; it also allows curriculum leaders to more effectively structure conversations with teachers and pupils that support the evolution of the curriculum.
There are some bits missing that I am surprised by. Why is this?
In all cases, decisions were based on the connections of the knowledge to key historical concepts (e.g. hierarchy) and the significance of this knowledge to children’s understanding of key events and people throughout history. This naturally involved trade-offs. For example, the names of all of Henry VIII’s wives are not included while the impact of the English reformation is explored in at least a little depth. Of course, people will have different ideas about what makes certain aspects of history more or less significant (which is another key theme of the curriculum), so I appreciate that not everyone will agree with the choices made.
Is there any way to supplement this history curriculum?
At my school, the reading of other information texts supplements all aspects of the curriculum, and this is also true of our history curriculum. For example, the French revolution is arguably one of the most important events in European history, and yet there is no mention of this in the history curriculum. Equally, the curriculum doesn’t include a study of a South American civilisation. In both cases, in my school this is remedied by the use of information texts in reading sessions. (Information texts are used to complement as well as supplement the wider curriculum.)
Tell me more about the timelines. I see 4-digit numbers for dates in Key Stage 1. Is that an oversight?
No, this is not an oversight. Children’s gradual introduction to the timelines works as follows:
In Year 1, children are introduced to their first timeline. While it looks complicated, there is no expectation that children learn any dates or grasp the scale involved. The only expectation is that children learn that a timeline shows the past and that events proceed from left to right in this representation:
To re-emphasise this point, the exact same timeline scale (with the same magnified section) is repeated for a second topic in Year 1:
Again, children are still likely to be learning numbers inside 100, so there is no expectation that children will grasp the dates involved.
The core timeline from 4000 BCE to 2000 CE introduced in Y1 then forms the spine of all the timelines to be used in the history curriculum.
In Year 2, the children are gently introduced to a sense of scale. This is achieved by relating their own age in years to the age of the school. The age of the school – which notably is within their grasp of numbers inside 100 – is then visually comparable to the core timeline:
The main aim is for children to relate their own age to something else that we make familiar, the age of the school, and to grasp that things happened before they were born and that this can be visualised on a timeline. The idea of bars showing duration is introduced and children’s growing sense of multiplicative reasoning allows them to roughly grasp the relative scale of their life to that of our school. (Notice that as they grasp this key idea of scale and of a ‘zoomed in’ section, the rest of the timeline is kept exceptionally simple.) This is then emphasised in the next topic. Notice that this is the same core timeline with the same part magnified:
In the final topic in Year 2, the same core timeline is used with the same section magnified. In this case, the entire history of Peterborough is discussed, sensitising children to all of the topics of British history that are to follow. (Not all of these are included on the timeline as there is a trade-off between complexity and visual simplicity):
All of these ways in which the history of Peterborough overlaps with the periods of British history are then retrieved in the later topics in Key Stage 2.
It is worth re-emphasising that at each stage, the expectation of what children will grasp from the timeline is specific and limited. By the end of Year 2, we want children to recognise that timelines visualise the passage of time using distance and direction (usually left to right) and to visually grasp that their life to date is short relative to the age of the school, which is also short relative to the span of history discussed so far. We also want them to recognise that events and periods can be shown on a timeline.
All of the above lays the groundwork for the timeline learning that will follow in Key Stage 2.
At the start of Year 3, the now-familiar core timeline is related to the timeline of human pre-history:
What do we want children to take from the timeline above? Only that all of history is relatively brief when compared to the time that modern humans have been recognisable as such.
After this, the process of building up the core timeline begins with the second topic in Year 3:
From now on, with every topic that is encountered, a new period is added to the core timeline so that it incrementally builds up:
Each new topic after this adds a new period to the timeline:
And so on. (Note the colour-coding of British history and history of the rest of the world.)
It is important to add that children will grasp that the periods studied are not the sum total of history, and that history didn’t begin or end at these points in these places. Instead, they will be guided to understand that these are merely the aspects we have chosen to study and that there are other fascinating and valuable periods of history in various places that we could have chosen. (In upper Key Stage 2, this leads into a discussion about the limitations of any history curriculum and the periods of time and locations that, inevitably, were left mostly unexplored in ours.) Maps are used in conjunction with the timeline in each topic to ensure that the sense of time develops alongside a sense of location.
And that’s about it for now, except to repeat…
In making this, I was indebted to the ideas and inspiration of the wonderful people of EduTwitter, especially @MrsSTeaches, @Mr_AlmondED and @ClareSealy. Any strengths in this work are credit to them; any weaknesses are all on me.
If you are wondering how I have gained permission from my school to share these, then allow me to explain: Firstly, I have the privilege of working with people who see the education system as I do (i.e. an essentially collaborative enterprise, regardless of the systemic forces that impel schools to compete with one another). Secondly, I have done a lot of unpaid work on these curriculum documents in my own time. The schools I have worked for have always been aware that part of the deal of me doing this is that I am then free to share the results as I see fit.
I hope you find this stuff to be useful. If you do, please direct other teachers you know to these resources in the hope that we might save teachers some time and support some schools in their curriculum development.
Finally, if you find this stuff really useful, and you decide you want to chuck a few quid somewhere out of a sense of unnecessary gratitude, why not give my new book on primary reading a chance? It’s available to pre-order here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Science-Teaching-Primary-Reading-Corwin/dp/1529764165/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
As with any writing I do, all royalties/fees will be going to the Malaria Consortium, a GiveWell-recommended charity. More details about the Malaria Consortium can be found here:
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You are amazing!! Thank you so much!
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