History
Curriculum Lead: Matthew Douglas
Intent
At Bridge Learning Campus the intent of our History curriculum is to deliver a robust, engaging, and intellectually stimulating programme that develops students’ historical knowledge, critical thinking, and analytical skills. Our curriculum is designed to foster a deep understanding of significant events, developments, and people across different periods, with a focus on a diverse range of perspectives.
Key Objectives:
- Knowledge Acquisition: To ensure that all students acquire a comprehensive knowledge of British history, global historical events, and their interconnections, enabling them to appreciate the richness of our cultural heritage and the complexities of the world today.
- Critical Thinking: To cultivate students’ abilities to develop substantiated arguments, evaluate sources, and critically analyse historical interpretations, fostering a classroom environment where debate and discussion are encouraged.
- Cultural Awareness: To celebrate diversity and inclusivity in our teaching, ensuring that the experiences of historically underrepresented groups are recognised and explored, preparing students for citizenship in a multicultural society.
- Personal Development: To instil in students a sense of identity and purpose by connecting historical narratives to contemporary issues, encouraging them to become informed and responsible citizens who engage with global challenges.
Implementation
To achieve our curriculum intent, we employ a variety of pedagogical strategies and resources, ensuring that our teaching is both effective and engaging. We incorporate direct instruction as a core approach, using clear, explicit teaching of key concepts and modelling of historical thinking to support student understanding and retention. This is complemented by guided practice, questioning, and regular checks for understanding to promote mastery.
Every lesson is thoughtfully designed to build upon prior knowledge while introducing meaningful new content. This ensures that students are supported in making connections across time periods and themes, developing both substantive and disciplinary knowledge. Underpinned by Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction.
Curriculum Design:
- Our curriculum is sequenced chronologically, with each year group building on previous knowledge and preparing students for subsequent stages of learning, including GCSE examinations and beyond.
- Key topics are carefully chosen to ensure breadth and depth, covering periods such as Norman Conquest, African Kingdoms, The Renaissance Witch trials, Industrial Revolution, the Holocaust and other contemporary issues, thus addressing both national and global histories.
- Our decision to follow the EDEXCEL GCSE History specification reflects our commitment to providing students with a broad, balanced, and rigorous historical education. The selected units—Migration in Britain, Elizabethan England, Superpower Relations and the Cold War, and Weimar and Nazi Germany—offer a rich combination of thematic, depth, and period studies that align with our curriculum intent
Teaching Strategies:
- Direct Instruction: this ensures that core knowledge and concepts are explicitly taught and clearly modelled.
- Guided Reading and teaching through narrative: Guided reading of primary and secondary sources further supports the development of analytical and evaluative skills, while the use of narratives brings historical events to life, making content more accessible and memorable.
- Adaptive teaching: We use adaptive teaching strategies such as scaffolding, pre-teaching content and vocabulary, chunking information and presenting in small manageable steps to respond to the varying needs of our students, adjusting the pace, level of support, and teaching methods as needed. Tasks are varied and tailored to accommodate different learning styles and abilities
Assessment:
- Gateway assessments are a key part of our curriculum strategy, designed to evaluate students’ current knowledge and understanding at pivotal points in their learning journey. These low-stakes, diagnostic assessments allow us to accurately identify strengths and areas for development, ensuring that teaching is responsive and targeted.
- Regular formative assessments are conducted to track student understanding and provide constructive feedback. This takes the form of a skills test and a content test. This information informs our teaching and allows for timely interventions.
- Summative assessments are strategically implemented at the end of key units to evaluate knowledge retention and skills application, ensuring readiness for end-of-year examinations.
Impact
The impact of our History curriculum is evidenced through a variety of measures that reflect student learning and engagement, as well as their ability to apply historical understanding to real-world contexts.
Student Outcomes:
- Build – Students will have built an empathy and understanding of diverse culture, beliefs and experiences across time. Their knowledge will grow over time through the chronological curriculum design.
- Respect – By studying different societies, including those that have faced oppression, conflict, and marginalisation, students learn to appreciate complexity, challenge prejudice, and value the perspectives of others—building respect for both the past and the people around them today.
- Inspire- History is filled with stories of individuals and communities, showing resilience, courage and innovation. These narratives can inspire students to make a positive.
- Dare – A strong history curriculum encourages students to ask challenging questions, confront uncomfortable truths, and think critically. It teaches them to dare to challenge accepted narratives and engage in debate, developing confidence in their own voice.
- Graft – Studying history demands discipline—close reading, detailed writing, and sustained analysis. Students must apply effort and perseverance to understand complex ideas and construct well-supported arguments. History teaches that real understanding is earned through hard work.
- Empower – A decolonised and inclusive curriculum, in particular, empowers students by representing a wider range of voices and experiences.
In conclusion, our History curriculum is designed with clear intent, implemented through best practice pedagogy, and demonstrates a significant impact on our students’ academic and personal growth.