History Lead:  Miss H Dean

‘If you want to understand today you have to search yesterday.’ – Pearl S Buck (1892-1973)

History at St. John the Evangelist Catholic Academy:

At St. John the Evangelist, our vision for history is for our children to be curious and critical thinkers. We want our children to develop their skills to debate, question and answer questions that are critical and thought-provoking.

We want our history curriculum to enable our children to be inquisitive thinkers by being open-minded to develop a broad understanding of the world in which they live. Empower our children to be history detectives who can examine what happened in the past and explore how the past has impacted the world that we live in today through a variety of cultures, carefully considering the social, cultural, social and economic background that influences them.

We strive for our lessons to be creative, fun and relevant to our children whilst reflecting on our children’s own history and experiences. We want our children to be historians and investigate a range of sources such as pictures, writings, stories, objects and artefacts to spark interest and answer questions about the past. As a school, we encourage the use of multiple sources and carefully consider the validity of these.

We aim to further promote a love of History by:

• educational visits
• using our local environment
• visitors
• using and incorporating a wide range of exploration and discovery lessons to deepen children’s learning and understanding.

Here at St. John the Evangelist, we encourage the use of cross-curricular links to develop our history skills through other subjects and enable children to understand that history impacts every part of learning.

We aim to:

• deliver a clear structure of progression of skills from Early Years to year 6.
• to develop a sound understanding of local, national and global events, periods, and societies
• to develop an understanding of chronology and use appropriate historical language that they have learnt about
• to ask and answer historical questions and use a range of sources to explore different periods and societies in time
• to analyse and question the validity of sources and use this to develop their understanding to understand the change within social, religious, political and cultural history and how this impacts on people both today and in the past
• to understand the roles significant individuals have played and the impact they have had
• we can ask and answer questions about the past using historical sources we understand and talk about chronology
• know and understand the impact of events and significant individuals on a local, national and world stage

For more information about the statutory requirements within the subject of History at the key stage 1 and key stage 2 levels, please see this link for the National Curriculum in England.

Year 3's visit to Pooles Cavern October 2023