Our aim in history is to help pupils gain an understanding of Britain’s past and that of the wider world and aid in inspiring curiosity about the past. We equip our children to ask perceptive questions, think critically and weigh evidence to help them understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, diversity of societies, and relationships between different groups. This in turn helps our children understand their own identity and the challenges of their time. Our goal is to make history come alive for our children, create engaging units of study, and help our children apply lessons from the past in their day-to-day lives.  Seeing, touching, and experiencing history first hand makes an impression on our children. We engage our children’s interest with props, artefacts, experiences and visits. Local educational off-site visits are organised to museums for example to the British Motor Museum and we have visits from guests who are experts in their field. Our curriculum reflects the National Curriculum and Early Learning Goals and include worldwide, British and local area topics.

At Holywell, we follow the CUSP Curriculum for history. The structure is built around the principles of advancing cumulative knowledge, chronology, change through cause and consequence, as well as making connections within and throughout periods of time studied. A guiding principle of CUSP history is that pupils become ‘more expert’ with each study and grow an ever broadening and coherent mental timeline. Specific and associated historical vocabulary is planned sequentially and cumulatively from Year 1 to Year 6.