Key Stage 3: History

Curriculum Intent

History at Reintegreat will grow a generation of young people who are passionate, curious and active citizens in Teesside. Our History curriculum will help students to make sense of the world they live in, and will help them to cement their place within their region. We aim to equip students by developing their knowledge and understanding of the past and helping them understand how and why things have changed.

We want students to develop a love of learning as well as build their enquiry skills, learn to evaluate evidence so they can reach their own judgments and opinions about key historical events. Our curriculum will be enquiry-led, enabling students to experience what it is like to be a historian, trying to answer questions about the past. Our approach to teaching History is based on current thinking and pedagogy. Our curriculum evolves to incorporate new knowledge and our lessons allow students to experience real History.

A key aim of the Reintegreat History curriculum is to challenge and re-examine traditional narratives and give students the opportunity to learn about histories other than the traditional canon of British historical education. The curriculum is therefore a vehicle to promote social justice and the common values of diversity, tolerance, equality and democracy.

The curriculum will be challenging, History is hard! We don’t always have the answers to the questions we are asking, and we want our young historians to be able to manage these frustrations.

The national curriculum for history aims to ensure that all students:

● 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