At Abbey, we nurture a love of learning. We open windows of opportunity by creating memorable moments. Learning with meaningful relationships supports our children to become valued members of the community. We embed the core subjects within an expansive and challenging curriculum. We develop and nurture young minds, creating memorable moments and events. We promote and celebrate equality and diversity.

Intent

At Abbey Primary, our history curriculum is built on the belief that every child deserves to understand the world they have inherited — where it came from, how it was shaped, and what their place is within it. We use the Ark Mastery curriculum as our foundation, which provides a carefully sequenced, knowledge-rich programme of study that takes pupils from their own immediate past in Year 1 all the way through to global conflict in Year 6.

Our curriculum is designed around 19 substantive concepts — including society, power, trade, democracy and conflict — which pupils encounter repeatedly across all 15 units, building richer and more complex understanding with every visit. Alongside this, pupils develop six disciplinary skills — cause and consequence, continuity and change, similarity and difference, significance, evidence and chronology — which are explicitly taught and progressively deepened across both key stages. This dual focus on substantive knowledge and disciplinary thinking means our pupils are not just accumulating facts but learning to think like historians. We have carefully aligned our curriculum to the National Curriculum, ensuring all statutory requirements are met while going significantly beyond them. Our units span British history, ancient world history and non-European civilisations, ensuring pupils gain a genuinely global perspective. We have made deliberate choices to ensure our curriculum is diverse and representative — studying figures such as Rosa Parks, Malala Yousafzai, Mary Seacole and the scholars of the Islamic Golden Age alongside the traditional British narrative. This reflects our commitment as a Rights Respecting School to ensuring all children see themselves and others represented in what they learn, and to developing their understanding of human rights, justice and the actions of individuals who have fought for a fairer world.

Our intent is also that pupils learn to communicate historically, both through talk and through writing. We want pupils to speak like historians, using precise vocabulary and structured argument, and to write like historians, constructing disciplined responses that are grounded in evidence and organised around historical thinking. This is not writing about history: it is writing as a historian. Our intent is for every pupil to leave Abbey Primary with a coherent, chronological understanding of the past, a rich historical vocabulary, the ability to ask and answer perceptive questions about evidence and significance, and a genuine curiosity about history that will sustain them into secondary school and beyond.

Implementation

History is taught for one and a half hours each week, giving pupils sustained time to engage deeply with historical content rather than skimming the surface. Each unit is approached through an overarching enquiry question which gives lessons focus and direction, and which pupils return to at the end of the unit to construct a substantive response drawing on everything they have learned.

Every lesson has a clear main disciplinary focus alongside its substantive content, so that pupils are always doing something with their knowledge — evaluating evidence, identifying causes, comparing societies and assessing significance. Key vocabulary is explicitly introduced, displayed and returned to throughout each unit, and pupils are expected to use historical language with precision both in writing and in discussion.

Oracy is central to how we teach history at Abbey. We are a school that places exceptional value on spoken language, and history provides rich and frequent opportunities for pupils to develop their oracy skills. Pupils regularly engage in structured discussions, debate historical questions, justify their thinking out loud, and build on each other's ideas. From Year 1, where pupils talk about what they can observe in a historical object, to Year 6, where pupils argue about the causes of the World Wars or the significance of Alexander the Great, spoken language is treated as a thinking tool as much as a communication skill. Talk partners, cold calling, sentence stems and Socratic questioning are all used to ensure all pupils can access and express historical thinking. Speaking like a historian is taught explicitly: pupils learn to use connectives of causation, vocabulary of significance, and the language of evidence and argument in their spoken responses before they are expected to deploy them in writing.

Each unit contains two dedicated opportunities for disciplinary writing (extended written tasks in which pupils write as historians rather than simply about history.) These tasks are carefully designed to match the main disciplinary focus of the unit: a pupil studying the Great Fire of London might write a causal explanation; a pupil studying the Romans might construct an argument about significance; a pupil studying Ancient Greece might write a comparative analysis of Athens and Sparta. Both pieces receive meaningful written feedback, allowing pupils to understand not just what they got right but how to strengthen their historical thinking and expression. This disciplinary writing progression runs from simple, scaffolded sentences in Year 1 to extended, independently structured historical arguments in Year 6.

Core substantive facts that pupils must secure in long-term memory are identified for every unit and revisited regularly through retrieval practice at the start of lessons. This ensures that knowledge does not simply accumulate and then fade but is genuinely embedded over time.

Our Rights Respecting Schools status shapes the way history is taught as well as what is taught. Pupils are encouraged to consider the rights of people in the past — who had them, who was denied them, and what happened when individuals stood up for them. This lens is particularly powerful in units on People Who Made a Difference, Ancient Greece (exploring who was excluded from Athenian democracy), the Romans (slavery and power) and Conflict and Resolution (human rights abuses in both World Wars and the formation of the United Nations). Teachers are supported to facilitate these discussions sensitively and confidently.

Impact

By the end of their time at Abbey Primary, pupils have a secure, chronological understanding of British and world history from the Stone Age to the Second World War. They can place the periods they have studied in sequence, explain connections between them and identify how events in one period shaped what came next. Pupils use historical vocabulary with confidence and accuracy — words like invasion, democracy, empire, hierarchy, significance and evidence are not just terms they have encountered but concepts they can apply in new contexts. They can explain not just what happened in history but why it happened, what its consequences were, and why it still matters.

Pupils at Abbey can evaluate historical evidence, understand that sources have limitations and perspectives, and begin to appreciate that history is not simply a fixed set of facts but an ongoing process of interpretation and argument. By Year 6, pupils can hold and articulate a historical argument, weigh up competing causes, and make substantiated judgements about significance. The impact of our disciplinary writing is visible in books across the school. From Year 1 to Year 6, pupils produce two pieces of disciplinary writing per unit, showing a clear progression in their ability to write as historians — from simple causal sentences in KS1 to extended, evidence-based arguments in upper KS2. Feedback on these pieces is evident and acted upon, demonstrating that pupils are not just writing but improving as historical thinkers and communicators. The oracy emphasis is equally visible — in the quality of pupil voice interviews, in the confidence with which pupils discuss historical ideas, and in the way pupils use historical language naturally and precisely when talking about what they have learned. Pupils do not simply know historical facts; they can argue with them, question them and communicate them effectively to others. The impact of our Rights Respecting Schools ethos is visible in the way pupils talk about history — with empathy, with a sense of justice, and with an awareness that the people they study were real human beings with rights, feelings and agency. Pupils understand that history contains difficult truths and that studying them honestly is part of what it means to be an educated, compassionate citizen.

Pupils from all groups — including those with SEND, those eligible for pupil premium and those with English as an additional language — access the full history curriculum. The use of oracy strategies, visual supports, vocabulary scaffolding and the enquiry-based approach means that history is inclusive, and that all pupils can make progress regardless of their starting point.

PROGRESSION OF SUBSTANTIVE KNOWLEDGE – KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THE PAST
Y1	Y2	Y3	Y4	Y5	Y6

EYFS

Adults in the EYFS will be: 

• Presenting children with pictures, stories, artefacts and accounts from the past, explaining similarities and differences.
• Offering hands-on experiences that deepen children’s understanding, such as visiting a local area that has historical importance, including a focus on the lives of both women and men.
• Showing images of familiar situations in the past, such as homes, schools, and transport.
• Looking for opportunities to observe children talking about experiences that are familiar to them and how these may have differed in the past.
• Offering opportunities for children to begin to organise events using basic chronology and recognising that things happened before they were born.

Children at the expected level of development will:

• Talk about the lives of the people around them and their roles in society;
• Know some similarities and differences between things in the past and now, drawing on their experiences and what has been read in class;
• Understand the past through settings, characters and events encountered in books read in class and storytelling.