At Holywell, we use our school vision, Flowing, Strengthening, Deepening, to guide our history intent:

• Flowing – developing a secure understanding of chronology and key events.
• Strengthening – making connections across different history units. Such as understanding that both Iron Age Britain and the Ancient Egyptian civilisation ended when the Romans invaded.
• Deepening – drawing on purposeful cross-curricular links, such as rivers in Geography, to enrich and expand understanding, of, for example, the importance of the River Nile to the Ancient Egyptians, or the Yellow River to the Shang Dynasty.

The intent of our history curriculum is to provide our children with a secure understanding of the chronology and key events in British History from the pre-historic period to the Vikings, as well expanding the children’s spiritual, moral, social and cultural understanding by exploring the history of ancient civilisations from around the world, along with their achievements and impacts. We also aim to expand the children’s knowledge of British history beyond 1066 by exploring themes such as the power of British monarchs, the industrial revolution and twentieth century conflict.

In addition, rather than treat local history as a standalone item, we weave this into the history units we study to show how these periods or themes are reflected in our local area. We do this primarily by exploiting the wealth of historical sites our region of the United Kingdom has to offer. For example, when studying ‘Transport’ or ‘Homes’ in key stage one, our intention is that the children visit the Nene Valley Railway and Wimpole Hall to complement this; in key stage two the intention is that our children visit places such as Flag Fen and the Imperial War Museum at Duxford to see how what they learn in their ‘Prehistoric Britain’ and ‘Twentieth Century Conflict’ units is reflected locally. In this way we hope to bring history alive. 

This link to the Historical Association has lots of useful information about Primary History: https://www.history.org.uk/

For more information about history teaching at Holywell, please read through our history overview below. Additionally, you will also find the National Curriculum for Primary History which our own curriculum is based on.