AQA (KS4)
KS3 & KS4 History
Overview
Curriculum explainer
Our history curriculum is anchored in both substantive and disciplinary knowledge. By exploring British, European, and World history chronologically, it equips students to comprehend not just what transpired across extensive spans of time and geography, but also the intricate connections that link the events, civilizations, and developments they encounter.
We embrace the core objectives of the national curriculum and place a specific emphasis on knowledge, vocabulary, and diversity. Throughout our curriculum, we employ rigorous historical enquiry to shape students' disciplinary and substantive journeys. By incorporating a rich array of historical narratives, we secure knowledge retention and coherence across phases. Broad themes unite the curriculum, grounded in universal concepts that extend across its entirety.
Subject principles
- The overall selection and blend of content should match or exceed the ambition of the national curriculum for history, represent the diversity of the past and display responsiveness to evolving historical scholarship.
- Pupils’ substantive and disciplinary journeys are shaped by rigorously historical enquiry questions, so that they can learn, systematically, to recognise and carry out differing types of historical argument, and so that medium-term analytic and narrative journeys are well-blended.
- The curriculum incrementally introduces a wide range of interpretations of the past, showing pupils how such interpretations arise and how they are constructed as well as their diverse forms, frameworks, origins and effects in the present.
- Historical narrative is used to secure coherence and retention, on micro and macro levels: from world-building and hinterland secured by rich stories in individual lessons to seeing possible temporal and spatial relationships between societies, civilisations, trends and contrasts, across time.
Our curriculum partner
Future Academies Trust have consistently shown a commitment to rich academic rigour in the curriculums developed at their dedicated curriculum centre. Future Academies Trust’s previous curricular work has prioritised coherence, sequencing and the roles of knowledge and vocabulary as powerful drivers of pupil progress, making it incredibly exciting that we are able to work with them to develop our secondary history curriculum.