Listen below to Emily Oakes, Curriculum Director of History, and many other colleagues across the Trust below to find out more about how we inspire and educate our pupils about our past and how the learnings from History have helped to shape our future.
In this video, we catch up with Curriculum Director, Emily Oakes, who tells us more about the History curriculum and the sharing of best practice across Meridian Trust.
In this feature of our History curriculum focus, we speak to Ross Perkins and pupils from Ely College.
Ross shares the importance of diversity and all students being able to see themselves in the curriculum they are taught.
A commitment to “depth of learning and breaking the mould of primary History” is at the heart of Meridian Trust’s innovative subject curriculum.
Five substantive concepts – Cultural Developments, Co-operation and Conflict, Religion, Science and Technology, and Individuals in History – are embedded in each unit of learning, through the children’s History journey, from Key Stage 1 (KS1) to Key Stage 2 (KS2).
The curriculum is led by Frances Sturgeon, a Year 6 teacher at Histon & Impington Brook Primary School, who studied BA Ancient History prior to completing a PGCE and taking up a position at the then Junior School six years ago. She was asked to be the school’s History subject lead after two years in post, and subsequently became Trust primary History curriculum lead for both CPET and Meridian Trust.
“I have always loved history, always been curious about the past,” Frances said. “Having studied most of the time periods of our curriculum at A-Level and in my degree I have in-depth knowledge of what we need to do to support children and help inspire them to go on to be historians.
“The substantive concepts we chose underpin our curriculum. These enable the children to gain an understanding of progress and change over time and to be able to talk confidently about chronology as they make comparisons between eras. Recognition of the same themes from different times and places prompts and gives them the tools to be able to continuously revisit previous learning. What’s more, the disciplinary concepts (Change/Continuity, Significance, Evidence, Interpretation, Consequence, Similarities/differences) we have in place play a fundamental role in the medium-term planning to ensure that we are getting fair coverage of all of the concepts. The lessons then equip children with the ability to make observations and construct historical arguments.
“With the primary History curriculum now set up as a two-year rolling programme, with three modules per year rather than two as previously, this has enabled the inclusion of more focused modules aligned to the five overarching themes.”
Examples include ‘Changes within living memory: How have people’s lives changed?’ and ‘Explorers and Adventurers: How have different people impacted the world?’ in Year 1/2; ‘Anglo-Saxons: How did Alfred the Great change England’ and ‘Local History Study: How has my local city changed and stayed the same over time, and why?’ in Year 3/4; and ‘Fashion over Time: What role has fashion played on societies over time?’ and ‘Windrush: How did the Windrush impact on 20th century Britain?’ in Year 5/6.
“Not only do we provide the required breadth of curriculum, we also offer enhanced depth by bringing more focus to our units, working to know aspects of these really well,” Frances explained. “The new units bring a little difference, not what children may already know by watching Horrible Histories, for example. We find that specific and obscure is more interesting for children and we also vary learning, so it is not solely reading and writing, though children enjoy writing opportunities as it allows them to showcase their historical opinion. In every lesson, though, we encourage them to investigate sources to support their thinking.”
Roxanne Scott speaks about inclusion and diversity in the Meridian Trust History curriculum. This includes extra emphasise on the role of women in History.
Our History curriculum is enriched by excursions and trips to sites of historical and archaelogical importance.
As an example, more than 130 Year 8 students from across the Meridian Trust took part in our history enrichment day in the summer term 2023.
The day was hosted by Chester House Estate in Northamptonshire and was run by archaeologists from the University of Leicester and members of the learning team at Chester House Estate.
The day was focused on archaeology and the students experienced a live archaeological dig of a Roman cemetery where so far the archaeologists have uncovered 97 skeletons!
It was an action-packed day as students learned all about the Roman town of Irchester by walking inside the old Roman walls and learning about landscape archaeology and by looking at artefacts from across the Roman period including floor mosaics.
Students experienced what archaeologists actually do by handling artefacts like pottery and plant seeds in the ‘lab’ and learning about what they can tell us and by looking at how artefacts are conserved and stored in the state-of-the-art Archaeological Resource Centre (ARC) that houses all of Northamptonshire’s archaeological finds.
Emily Oakes, Curriculum Lead for History at Meridian Trust, said: “The students thoroughly enjoyed their day and where able to learn more about the modern technologies used in archaeology like LiDAR landscape surveying and 3D modelling of archaeological sites.”
Asked about their day and what students felt the most important thing they had learned:
“How you can use the inside of pottery to determine where it comes from.”
“The most important thing I learned was how to relate different artefacts to different time periods.”
“What the archaeologists did and how they found the sites, how they dug things up and how they analysed them afterwards.”
“Why it’s important to preserve this history but also sometimes leave it for future generations analyse with more advanced equipment in the future”
One student added: “It was a really fascinating experience, learning about how archaeology works and how different disciplines fit into it. There were lots of opportunities for both thinking and for handling things too”.
Below is a selection of images for the day.
