History
Our teaching staff motivate students to build their skills and intellectual curiosity. Students learn about the past and its legacies and our teaching challenges them to be inspired by and enjoy learning about history, so they are successful in their studies.
Year 7, 8 and 9 students
At Key Stage 3, students alternate between one and two lessons of history per week on a half-termly basis. In history they extend and deepen their chronologically secure knowledge and understanding of British, local and world history, so that it provides a well-informed context for wider learning. Students identify significant events, make connections, draw contrasts, and analyse trends within periods and over long arcs of time, learning to use historical terms and concepts in increasingly sophisticated ways.
Students cover the following content in history at Key Stage 3:
Year 7
- Anglo-Saxons: How was Britain first ruled?
- Medieval: Castles & Was life in the Middle Ages as bad as we think?
- Medieval: What was it like to live in the shadows of the Black Death?
- What was the War of the Roses?
- Henry VIII & Tudor LIfe: What kind of King was he?
- Medicine through time: How has medicine changed over time?
Year 8
- Elizabethan England: Was the Elizabethan period really a Golden Age?
- Slave Trade & Civil Rights: Who was who, and what did they do?
- Industrial Revolution: How revolutionary was the Industrial Revolution?
- Jack the Ripper: Why was JTR never caught?
- India and Empire: How have interpretations of the Empire changed?
- The Titanic: Why did the Titanic sink?
Year 9
- WW1: How did the conditions in WW1 improve medicine?
- Fascism: How and why was fascism successful in Germany?
- The Holocaust: Why should we continue to remember?
- The Cold War: How ‘hot’ did the Cold War get?
- Terrorism: What is it and how has it changed?
Year 10 and 11 students
In their study of Edexcel History GCSE Level, our students are taught to:
- Extend their knowledge and understanding of key events, periods, and societies in local, British, and wider world history, and of the wide diversity of human experience.
- Engage in historical enquiry and develop skills as independent learners, and critical and reflective thinkers.
- Develop the ability to ask relevant questions about the past, critically investigate issues and make valid historical claims.
- Develop an awareness of why people and events have historical significance and how and why they have different interpretations.
- Organise and communicate their historical knowledge and understanding to reach substantiated conclusions.
Students cover the following content in history at Key Stage 4:
- Thematic Study & Historic Environment (Paper 1)
This paper assesses a long-term sweep of British history alongside a specific site study.
- Medicine in Britain, c1250–present (including The British sector of the Western Front, 1914–18 as the historic environment).
- Period Study & British Depth Study (Paper 2)
This paper combines a shorter British period with a wider world focus.
- British Depth Study: Early Elizabethan England, 1558–88.
- Period Study: Superpower Relations and the Cold War, 1941–91.
- Modern Depth Study (Paper 3)
This paper takes an intense look at a modern international society experiencing rapid change.
- Weimar and Nazi Germany, 1918–1939. This remains a staple of the history landscape due to its immense resource availability and global significance.
