History

‘We are not makers of history. We are made by history.’
Martin Luther King Jr.

At Gawthorpe Community Academy, we believe that high-quality history lessons inspire children to want to know more about the past and to think and act as historians. By linking learning to a range of topics, children have opportunities to investigate and interpret the past, understand chronology, build an overview of Britain’s past as well as that of the wider world, and to be able to communicate historically. Teaching should equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgements. History helps pupils to understand the complexity of people’s lives, the process of change, the diversity of societies and relationships between different groups, as well as their own identity and the challenge of their time.

We develop children with the following essential characteristics to help them become historians:

  • An excellent knowledge and understanding of people, events and contexts from a range of historical periods, including significant events in Britain’s
    past.
  • The ability to think critically about history and communicate ideas confidently to a range of audiences.
  • The ability to support, evaluate and challenge their own and others’ views using historical evidence from a range of sources.
  • The ability to think, reflect, debate, discuss and evaluate the past by formulating and refining questions and lines of enquiry.
  • A respect for historical evidence and the ability to make critical use of it to support their learning.
  • A desire to embrace challenging activities, including opportunities to undertake high-quality research across a range of history topics.
  • A developing sense of curiosity about the past and how and why people interpret the past in different ways.