HISTORY

At St Raphael’s we aim to inspire our pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past in Britain and the wider world and help them to appreciate our customs, beliefs and traditions and those of other cultures. In our Reception classes, history is taught as part of ‘Understanding of the World’, building on the child’s own experience of places, people and their local environment. Through our teaching, children learn to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement. Alongside the class teaching, we also have whole school learning of Black History and British Values and we mark memorable dates in history such as Remembrance Day and Holocaust Day.

The National 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.