Our Christian Vision
St. Luke’s CE Primary school provides a journey to discover ‘life in all its fullness’. John 10:10. Where children flourish, are happy and succeed. Our distinct Christian values: friendship, love, trust, patience, forgiveness and respect are woven throughout the day, the learning, the gathering, the school.
Our theologically rooted Christian vision meets the specific needs of our school community we aim to remove barriers so that everyone can flourish and live life in its fullest. By the time our pupils leave Year 6 we hope to have removed barriers and enabled our them to grow in faith and recognise the wider world as they continue their journey
At St. Luke’s the children are at the heart of every decision we make to ensure that they are happy, confident and that the opportunities that are provided for them are relevant to their needs both now and in the future. We achieve this by providing an inspirational and creative curriculum, rich in opportunity and full of challenge.
Rationale
At St Luke’s we are Historians! We believe that history is an essential part of the curriculum and teachers ensure that a high-quality history education provides the foundations for understanding the world through specific disciplines of understanding chronology, historical enquiry and an understanding of political, technological and social changes over time. History has changed our lives and is vital to the world’s future prosperity. Through building up a body of key foundational knowledge and concepts, pupils should be encouraged to recognise the power of rational explanation and develop a sense of excitement and curiosity about natural phenomena. They should be encouraged to understand how history can be used to explain what has occurred, predict how artefacts were used, and analyse causes and changes over time.
At St Luke’s we use the Pearson curriculum which covers the national curriculum. The curriculum is designed to prepare children for history at KS3 and beyond. The Pearson curriculum ensures a spiral curriculum and enables children start to build schema around chronological, significant events and people and historical enquiry units from an early age. Lessons are designed with cognitive load theory in mind and they follow Rosenshine’s Princip-les of Instruction. The materials provided through the Pearson curriculum support teacher subject knowledge allowing teachers to focus on specific lesson elements to bring the enacted curriculum to life.
Intent
The History curriculum promotes curiosity and a love and thirst for learning. It is ambitious and empowers our children to become independent and resilient as in all curriculum areas.
The History curriculum at St Luke’s focuses on providing children to explore and discover the past confidently, so they can succeed in a rapidly changing world and understand it’s changes over time. Children and young people are naturally inquisitive and passionate about learning; we ensure history is stimulating, engaging and fun which fosters their natural curiosity and their on-going intellectual development. Through a hands-on, practical and enquiry-based curriculum the children will grow into the historians of the future.
We want our children to love history. We want them to have no limits to what their ambitions are and grow up wanting to be historians, museum curators, solicitors or . We want our children to remember their history lessons in our school, to cherish these memories and embrace the historical opportunities they are presented with! To achieve this, it involves exciting, practical hands on experiences that encourage curiosity and questioning. Our aim is that these stimulating and challenging experiences help every child secure and extend their historical knowledge and vocabulary, as well as promoting a love and thirst for learning.
At St Luke’s, we have a coherently planned and sequenced curriculum which has been carefully designed and developed with the need of every child at the centre of what we do. We want to equip our children with not only the minimum statutory requirements of the History national curriculum, but to prepare them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life.
Implementation
Elements of History are delivered to the reception children, through the Foundation Stage Curriculum and are incorporated into the termly topics. The Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum supports children’s understanding of time and historical changes through the planning and teaching of ‘Understanding the World.’ and ’All about us’. Children find out about changes in living memory, significate historical people and start to form a basic understanding of chronological order by using all of their senses looking at similarities, differences, patterns and change. Both the environment and skilled practitioners foster curiosity and encourage explorative play, children are motivated to ask questions about why things happen and how things have changed. Our children are encouraged to use their natural environment around them to explore. Children enjoy spending time outdoors exploring changes in seasons and their local area. Children regularly participate in using artefacts and dress up to peek curiosity and identify differences between technology today and in the past.
In KS1 and KS2 History is taught through planning linked to the new National Curriculum 2014-15 using the Pearson primary history program. Effective learning only comes from effective teaching. When teaching, we focus on motivating the children and building on their skills, knowledge and understanding of the curriculum.
The History curriculum has been carefully built and the learning opportunities and assessment milestones for each year group crafted to ensure progression and repetition in terms of embedding key learning, knowledge and skills. For example, the way monarchy is taught in our school has been adapted so that it is revisited in each phase. In KS1, the children learn about the royal family today. In lower KS2, look at the monarchy of Britain after the Roman invasion and when England was not an established country. Then in Upper KS2, Year 5 look at how the monarchy in England was established under William the Conqueror.
Impact
The impact and measure of this is to ensure students not only acquire the appropriate age-related knowledge linked to the history curriculum, but also skills which equip them to progress from their starting points, and within their everyday lives. Our aim for history is to increase the skills needed to navigate an ever-changing world of policy and technology by immersing our students with historical enquiry skills, key scientific knowledge and investigative skills. We aim to create a culture of high historical aspirations, which will allow our students a platform to develop their historical learning and careers, and to articulate their understanding of key historical concepts. We know when our curriculum provision has been successful because this will lead to excellent outcomes by all of our pupils including disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND.
Formative assessment is used as the main tool for assessing the impact of History as it allows for misconceptions and gaps to be addressed more immediately rather than building on insecure historical foundations. End points are instrumental in knowing whether pupils have been successful. We aim for our pupils to recall learning with fluidity and automaticity. We also use twice-yearly academic essays to assess children’s understanding of the topics they have studied and give them the tools to articulate new knowledge.
Summative assessments are carried out at the end of a topic and at the end of the academic year. The summative assessments enable teachers to evaluate the learning at the end of a unit and they allow subject leaders to monitor the performance of pupil cohorts. Summative assessment allows teachers and subject leaders to identify where intervention may be required to ensure pupils are supported to achieve sufficient progress and attainment. Children at St Luke’s School will:
1. demonstrate a love of history work and an interest in further study and work in this field
2. retain knowledge that is pertinent to history with a real-life context.
3. be able to question ideas and reflect on knowledge.
4. be able to articulate their understanding of historical concepts and be able to reason rationally using rich language linked to History.
5. demonstrate a high love of mathematical skills through their work, organising events, recording dates and interpreting results of historical enquiry.
6. work collaboratively and practically to investigate artefacts.
7. achieve age-related expectations in History at the end of their cohort year.
Click the link below to view our History school blog page to see some examples of how our pupils flourish in History at St. Luke’s: