St Nicolas History Intent

At St Nicolas, our high-quality progressive history education will help pupils gain a coherent knowledge and understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. We have developed an outward-looking, broad and balanced history curriculum for our ambitious children.

Through coherently planned sequential lessons, we help children to become confident, passionate and aspirational historians by developing their skills and understanding to think critically and ask questions. Subsequently, our history curriculum is experiential and exciting as we make every effort to inspire our children’s curiosity through creative, engaging and thought-provoking lessons which are accessible to all.  

We believe that our local area is critically important in our curriculum, enabling our children to make connections and become knowledgeable about how the past may shape their future so that they develop into tomorrow’s compassionate and articulate leaders.  

We demonstrate our school intent through our substantive concepts. These are golden threads that weave our knowledge and facts about individuals, events and places throughout our whole curriculum.  

Our substantive concepts are:  

• Movement of people   

• Society and culture  

• Economics  

• Governance  

• Achievements and Legacy  

Progression therefore means – knowing more and remembering more through:  

1. Use common techniques across the school.   

2. Practise the same skills at different ages over and over again.  

3. Revisit key areas of content and key vocabulary.   

4. Improve children's enquiry skills.   

5. Challenge and engage children.   

Disciplinary concepts (what to do with these facts)  

Across each historical topic that we study in school, our lessons are designed to investigate:  

• Similarity and difference – A comparison of two things.  

• Continuity and change – What changed over time and what stayed the same.  

• Significance - The importance of the event, person or time.  

• Evidence – investigating primary and secondary sources.  

• Interpretation – making our own decisions based on the evidence we have.  

All history topics begin with an enquiry question. Each enquiry question explicitly facilitates what we want to do with the knowledge we gain.