Curriculum Intent:

At Oakdale Junior School we believe that a high-quality history curriculum will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. It should inspire pupils’ curiosity to know more about the past. It involves understanding the process of change, the complexity of people’s lives, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and society today. History allows children to develop the following key skills: ask perceptive questions, think critically, evaluate evidence, examine arguments and understand that history can be seen differently.

Our history curriculum promotes the rich diversity of the world, Britain and an appreciation of our locality. We strive to offer a sequence of lessons that covers the skills required to meet the aims of the national curriculum.

We teach our pupils: That history is open to interpretation, that history is defined by different periods of time and that all of these have distinct features. (Chronology), That society changes over time (Change and continuity, cause and consequence), the significance of people and events in their historical context (cause and consequence political and economic) and that people move for different reasons (Invasion and migration). Through this approach we aim to support the building of substantive concepts such as invasion, empire, leadership, democracy, propaganda, trade, beliefs, settlement and conflict.

Children also learn that source work helps historians to build a narrative of the past - based on the information they can draw from the sources.  This means that it sometimes contains the views of the author of the source and that the historical narrative is created by those who construct it.