At The Rushmere Park Academy, we believe in providing a rich and immersive skills-based history curriculum for our learners. The strength of our creative curriculum and experienced teachers lead to history skills being taught in a meaningful and purposeful way as part of a larger whole school theme.

The Principles of History are:

• 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.

We cover a wide range of topics from Early year to Year 4 using the National Curriculum as our inspiration and guide. Each year teachers collaborate to ensure that skills that have been previously learnt can be built upon to deepen our pupils understanding of history. Please take a look at our history learning journey to see how this works in our school.