History

At The Olive School, Bolton, our young historians will gain a deep, well-rounded and chronologically coherent understanding of local, national and internationally significant periods, events and historical aspects.  Our children will leave us feeling inspired and curious to find out even more.  We will support our children to do this by building awareness of both their own heritage and that of the wider world, and by equipping them with the essential disciplinary skills that can be used and applied within meaningful historical enquiry.

We will deliver an ambitious, motivating and knowledge-rich curriculum that:

• Gives children a deep chronological understanding of the UK and the local area, including its interactions with the wider world.
• Systematically develops a wide and deep understanding of historical substantive concepts, such as invasion, peasant and democracy.
• Exposes children to significant ancient civilisations, empires and non-European societies.
• Draws connections between different aspects of local, regional, national and international history.
• Uses timelines to support organisation of substantive knowledge of key events and time periods.
• Develops the disciplinary knowledge essential to developing historical understanding, including knowledge of the process of historical enquiry, understanding cause and consequence, understanding that different versions of the past exist and using a variety of historical sources of evidence.

This process of knowledge acquisition begins in Reception with a focus on local history and familiar aspects of the past.  Learning about the immediate world around them is the ideal foundation for later composite learning in Key Stage 1 and 2.  Children, in KS1, also study the example of Florene Nightingale as being a significant individual from the past who has contributed to national achievements by being the founder of modern nursing.  This component learning is undertaken whilst children also build knowledge of substantive concepts and slowly enrich their chronological schema.  Children learn to ask questions, use different sources and begin to understand that the past can be represented in different ways.

In Key Stage 2, children’ chronological frameworks are further developed, at a local, national and international level. This includes a focus, for example, on the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Scots, Ancient Greece, Mayans and World War 2.  Whilst developing this wider chronological understanding of history, our children build and add to timelines through the year groups to ensure they can reference and refer to events from prior learning.  Disciplinary knowledge also continues to be systematically developed accordingly, in tandem with this substantive knowledge.

Our knowledge-rich history curriculum is taught according to the following whole school long term plan for history:

Resources

To view our Progression Map, click here

To view our History Pathway Roadmap, click here