Departmental Intent:
The national and school curriculum for History aims to ensure that all pupils:
- 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 - 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.
The History curriculum overview for 2023-2024 is here:
The KS4 course specification for History can be found here: https://qualifications.pearson.com/en/qualifications/edexcel-gcses/history-2016.html. Our paper options are Medicine in Britain (Paper 1), Early Elizabethan England (Paper 2), Superpower Relations and the Cold War (Paper 2) and Weimar & Nazi Germany (Paper 3).