Featured good practice resources

Local and Community History Month: May 2013

To celebrate this event, we are featuring good practice materials about history this month.

The survey report, History for All, published in March 2011 sets the context. The report evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of history in primary and secondary schools. It is based principally on evidence from inspections of history between April 2007 and March 2010 in 166 maintained schools in England.

By the time they leave Fox Primary School, pupils have outstanding historical knowledge and understanding. Crucial to this success is a determination to develop historical thinking at every opportunity by first-rate teaching, an outstanding curriculum and excellent planning.

At Harris Academy Crystal Palace, an outstanding two-year Key Stage 3 history curriculum ensures that strong foundations are laid in students’ historical knowledge, understanding and thinking. The Key Stage 3 history curriculum is also distinctive and highly imaginative at Copleston High School. It meets students’ needs, aspirations and interests exceptionally well, and twice as many students opt to study history in Key Stage 4 than is seen nationally. Students at Cape Cornwall School also develop excellent understanding of their local heritage and the area in which they live through regular, high-quality opportunities to study local history.

Incisive teaching and comprehensive planning, combined with a highly engaging history curriculum, ensure that students develop perceptive and sophisticated thinking at Cottenham Village College. Among other things, students explore the views of historians and this aids not only their knowledge and understanding but also the way in which they think about the issues they study. At Farlingaye High School, outstanding teaching and learning in 100-minute lessons is underpinned by a clear vision for developing historical understanding. An enquiry-based curriculum, regular subject-specific professional development and comprehensive planning and preparation combine to ensure lessons are active, engaging and enjoyable. By putting inclusion at the heart of its approach to teaching and learning, history reflects students’ needs and their context at Lampton School Academy. It responds to their aspirations and it prepares them for their future as citizens in a diverse multi-cultural, multi-faith and multi-ethnic society.

If you are a history teacher or a head of department, professional development resources have been produced to help teachers in primary and secondary schools evaluate their current provision for history, using History for All as a starting point. There are accompanying notes designed to be used in conjunction with the presentation slides. And history teachers in secondary schools in Hampshire are supported well through the county’s secondary history network . By working together in an effective partnership structure, history advanced skills teachers (AST)s, leading teachers, subject leaders and teachers from across the local authority are engaged in actively and successfully supporting each other to help improve teaching and learning in history in secondary schools.