Intent: To enable pupils to make sense of the present as well as the past and to appreciate that every society is unique by exploring events, people and places in our locality.
The Hillside History Curriculum is underpinned by CUSP and follows a clear process focussing on:
Substantive concepts - The big ideas and the golden threads. These include community, knowledge, invasion, civilisation, power and democracy.
Substantive knowledge - The subject knowledge and explicit vocabulary used about the past.
Disciplinary knowledge – Thinking like a historian. Developing an understanding of chronology; cause and consequence; change and continuity; similarity and difference; evidence and significance.
Historical analysis - Applying the knowledge of a historian through selecting, organising and integrating knowledge through reasoning and inference.
In the EYFS, pupils may learn about the past and present through daily activities, exploring through change, and understanding more about the lives of others through books and visitors as well as their own experiences. These experiences are drawn upon and used to position new learning in KS1 and into KS2. 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. Specific and associated historical vocabulary is planned sequentially and cumulatively from Year 1 to Year 6.
The cumulative nature of the curriculum is made memorable by the implementation of both retrieval and spaced retrieval practice, word building and deliberate practise tasks. High volume and deliberate practise are essential for pupils to remember and retrieve substantive knowledge and use their disciplinary knowledge to explain and articulate what they know.
The foundational knowledge of the curriculum is positioned to ease the load on the working memory: new content is connected to prior learning.The effect of this cumulative model supports opportunities for children to associate and connect with significant periods of time, people, places and events. CUSP History strategically incorporates a range of modules that revisit, elaborate and sophisticate key concepts, events, people and places. A guiding principle of CUSP History is that pupils become ‘more expert’ with each study and grow an ever broadening and coherent mental timeline. At Hillside we enhance our curriculum further through specific choice to include the narratives of different communities within our locality; for example learning about the involvement of Poland whilst studying the Windrush Generation and looking at the impact of this era in our local community. Pupils experience of local History incorporates the migration of people who have formed our town.
