History

Overview:

Key Stage 3

Students in Year 7 are introduced to the essential Historical skills and features whilst exploring concepts in greater depth through thematic studies of particular periods of British History across Years 7 to 9. They will become confident in recognising and discussing the characteristics of different historical periods, analysing historical interpretations and working with sources of historical information to make well reasoned judgements. Areas of study are set out below:

Year 7 units of study include a focus on the key concepts of:

• Life in Pre-Norman England

• Power and Conflict: Normans and Medieval Power and Control

• Individuals and Society: Lives in the Middle Ages

Year 8 units of study include a focus on the key concepts of:

• Individuals and Society: The English Reformation

• Power and Conflict: The English Civil War and The British Empire with a depth study on India

• Local Study: Bristol and the Transatlantic Slave Trade and The Industrial Revolution in Bristol 

Year 9 units of study include a focus on the key concepts of:

• Power and Conflict: The Struggle for the Right to Vote and Britain at War in the 20th Century including The Cold War

• Ideas and Beliefs: Anti-Semitism and The Holocaust

Key Stage 4

At GCSE students build upon and reinforce the sequence of learning from their Key Stage 3 studies. Our curriculum follows the Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9-1) History qualification.

The curriculum has been constructed so that students can understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence (sources and interpretations) can be used to make historical claims, and discern how and why contrasting arguments and interpretations of the past have been constructed. They should also gain an increasing historical perspective by being able to place their growing knowledge into different contexts understanding the connections between local, regional, national and international history, and between cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history, and between long and short term timescales, with a consideration of change and continuity over the last 1000 years.

Students sit three papers at GCSE:

• Paper One: British Thematic Study: (20%) Medicine Through Time c1250 – present and Historical Environment: The British Sector of the Western Front; Injuries, treatment and the trenches.

• Paper Two: (40%) Early Elizabethan England 1558 -88 and The Cold War 1941-1991.

• Paper Three: (30%) Weimar and Nazi Germany 1918 – 1939.