History
“We are not makers of History. We are made by History” - Martin Luther King Jr
At Ellesmere Park High School, our history curriculum should inspire students to be curious and ask questions of Britain’s past and that of the wider world. We want our students to think, read and speak like historians and to develop their cognitive skills to write as a historian. We want them to be independent learners using literacy to help them to understand the world they live in and become autonomous, deploying historically grounded understanding of terms such as peasantry, empire, and parliament.
We want our students to develop a chronological framework of British history that will enable them to make sense of the new knowledge they acquire. We want them to understand the process of change and to see how we arrived ‘here’ and help them make sense of the present. We want students to realise that the past is gone but history is constructed and contested and are able to use History’s unique second-order concepts to construct arguments and support them to become analytical citizens who can question human motivation and society with skill and confidence.
Our teaching will equip students with knowledge of people who live in societies that are and have been divided in different ways by wealth, class, gender, and race, understand the methods of historical enquiry, including how evidence is used rigorously to make historical claims. This in turn will allow them to be inquisitive learners who will ask perceptive questions, view history from multiple perspectives and see connections between social, political, religious, and cultural history, as well as viewing history on different time scales.