History and Politics

Ethos and Aims

History helps us to understand and wrestle with complex questions and dilemmas by examining how the past has shaped and continues to shape global, national and local relationships and issues between societies and people.  At the Bewdley School, we encourage students to make historical sense of past worlds, through imaginative and compelling stories, chronological understanding, source evaluations, concepts and theories alongside disciplinary knowledge. We focus on embedding facts of the past in stories, and express the importance not just of memorising facts but appreciating history as a scholarly discipline (Counsell in Cuthbert and Standish, 2021), our curriculum at Bewdley goes beyond what is taught in lessons;  we believe that the transferable skills gained in our subject are essential for life in the 21st century. 

Our curriculum is sequenced to achieve a balance between a sense of historical period/ chronology and the essential metacognitive skills that are required to encourage a lifelong curiosity and learning. A good historical and political educational experience encourages a student to come “into presence” with the world (Biesta, 2010:76).  Our aim is to ensure that our rigorous, planned and sequenced History and Politics curriculum encourages students into the presence of the past through stories and sources whilst becoming skilful in the discipline of academic history to develop a sense of chronology that enables them to understand the process of change, causation, consequence, significance, similarity and difference and wider cultural links so that they can begin to make sense of the present.

We are also acutely aware that “representing history is bound up with power in the present” (Counsell 2022: Teaching history 188) and are therefore ever mindful of ensuring that our curriculum in both history and politics, is revisited and revised to ensure that we select and include wider social distributions of historical judgements, historical interpretations and political evaluations.  When the DFE publishes their non statutory Model history curriculum, we will ensure that our practise is again revisited to ensure that our curriculum complies and contains (as we believe it does) the essential residual substantive and disciplinary knowledge for a rich, ambitious and rigorous curriculum that is coherent and effectively sequenced to ensure that students succeed and can apply their historical and political understanding to current global issues.

Staffing

Mrs S Barnes – Head of Department

Mrs K Howard – Teacher of History and A level politics

Mrs E Meredith – Teacher of History

Ms N Schmidt  – Teacher of History and A level politics

Mr. J Willets – Teacher of History

Mr. C. Bromley – Teacher of History

The department is made up a dedicated team of full and part time members of staff that are passionate about ensuring that good history is taught and students enjoy the subject; this passion is partly shown by the fact that all of the part time staff work regularly on their days off to ensure that there is consistency across the department, in lesson structure and planning, delivery, assessment and marking.  Staff follow a scheme of work that is continually being updated and evaluated, with improvements made.  Staff reflect on lesson and assessments and adapt teaching accordingly.  All staff work very closely together and all resources are shared and discussed.  We have a corporate membership to the Historical Association to ensure that our professional teaching and learning is up to date and as rigorous as possible.   

Intention

We teach students the importance of challenging the provenance of information, (IT curriculum framework),  evaluating different interpretations, and processing large amounts of information to create a coherent argument. We teach empathy and tolerance and an understanding of how history has created the world we live in today.  We do this by a consistent rigorous approach across the department ensuring all students develop the range of skills needed to become confident in their own opinions, make well supported judgements and the ability to express them articulately using key historical vocabulary.

Substantive knowledge underpins and enables the application of skills; both are entwined. As a department we define the core knowledge our students need and help them recall it with staff who know the content thoroughly.  We therefore build on student’s memory continually.

We intend that our Key stage 3 students have a good understanding of chronology.  Substantive knowledge and second order concepts are similarly imbedded throughout the KS3 curriculum with regular opportunities to revisit and enhance the skills.  Over the course of the curriculum students build up a wide appreciation of how historians incorporate each of these disciplinary skills to analyse effectively and ultimately construct their own rigorous analysis of events.

Students will have and will build upon from KS3 to KS5:

Cause and consequence:  Students to build up knowledge over sequence of lessons to enable them to make valid judgements about complex causation.  This is to build with complexity over the year groups to show how historians effectively analyse causation.  Disciplinary knowledge will also be embedded; students will study specific examples of how historians have analysed the past and how they have constructed and presented their accounts of the past.

Change and continuity: Student to be taught over a number of lessons how historians make judgments about the extent, nature or pace of change across time.

Similarity and difference:  Students will be taught to focus and delve into the similarities and differences between individual, groups or societies but from within the same time periods.  Staff will clearly identify and explain the difference between similarities and differences and change and continuity concepts.

Historical significance:  Students will learn about how historians ascribe significance to people and events.  The concept of how significance can alter depending upon current events will also be explained and identified.

Sources and evidence:  Students will be encouraged to investigate the past in line with an enquiry question.  Students will synthesise knowledge of how historians make claims about the past. This becomes far more prominent at KS4 and into KS5.  Students also evaluate the reliability and usefulness of sources; incorporating the use of film, documentaries and websites to support the IT curriculum framework.

Historical Interpretations:  Students will develop knowledge about how particular historians have interpreted the past and learn about different reasons for interpretations.  Students will be exposed to this from KS3 with a view to building complexity to this this concept throughout the key stages.

We aim to build and extend the Cultural Capital of our students through everything we teach as history and extra curriculum trips , visits and speakers we invite.  For example, having run a successful trip to Berlin in 2024, we are intending to run our next trip to Berlin for Years 9-13 in 2026 where we intend to run some of the tours ourselves so students delve into the Cold war, rise of Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust.  After Covid many of our external opportunities for visits were stopped, however, we are proposing to re-introduce previous trips and develop greater opportunities to invest in the wider cultural capital of our students.  For example, we intend to run a trip to the Bristol docks and slave museum for yr 8 and a trip to Worcester Cathedral for Yr 7 to investigate how King John has been interpreted.  We have an opportunity for yr 8 students to attend an online seminar about the role of diverse peoples in the campaigns for women’s rights.  Alongside the teaching of life in Nazi Germany, year 9 students, we also intend to use the medium of film where we will show the film JO JO Rabbit as to explore the complexities of propaganda, discrimination persecution.  We also intend to show the film Schindler’s list to all yr 9 students having taught the Holocaust to them at the end of year 8.  This will be done after school.   At GCSE, all history students are given the opportunity to attend a site visit to Kenilworth Castle, to explore the military and palatial features over time.  For key stage 5 we are proposing to run a trip to RAF Cosford where students will investigate the key Cold War debates.

With the impacts of Covid still very visible we intend as a department to bridge the gap of our RADY learners.  We also intend to stretch and challenge and introduce greater motivation and aspirations for the G&T so that they along with our RADY students, are inspired to take history further.  For example, we intend that the foundations of strong history curriculum lends itself to greater opportunities at A level; we intend to see an increase in A level History and Politics students.

Support for these groups will be in the form of specialist organised trips as outlined above, but also Quality First Teaching will ensure that all staff can identify and support and challenge these specific group of learners.

Our choices of GCSE and A-Level exam boards ensure students study a wide range of history and politics and are able to make comparisons within and across periods thus being fully equipped for the study of history and or politics at a higher level or industry related employment.

To support all students in raising achievement and greater aspirations, we have also incorporated the UNIFROG further education and careers programme into our SOW.  All students have opportunities to investigate careers involving history.  Emphasis is very much given on the skills that history delivers.  In both history classrooms there are displays exploring the types of careers studying history can take you.  There is also a board dedicated to the academic study of historians.

Implementation

Collaborative curriculum planning lies at the heart of what we do in the department. We have been developing our schemes of work for all age groups; embedding challenge, metacognition, memory techniques and literacy into our departmental curriculum alongside our schemes of work, we have developed knowledge organisers for all topics throughout all age ranges.  These are consistently under review.  This has enabled us to define the core knowledge our students need to master. In both history and politics, we also implement our curriculum through a range of teaching approaches including role play, games and creative tasks as well as more traditional source based questions and essay writing. Discussion and debate are a regular feature of lessons, as well as regular layering of knowledge back to ensure key content is secure.

Our carefully planned curriculum builds on previous knowledge and is sequenced to help students understand topics in a wider context.  Lessons are crafted so that enquiry led questions frame the content to enable students to shape their knowledge into effective historical analysis.   Low stakes quizzes and starter activities in lessons and formative assessment of longer written answers are scaffolded and regular features of history lessons.  2023-2024 has seen us start to use ‘Hinge questioning’ for frequently at KS3 and we hope to implement this across KS4 moving forward.  Various revision and memory aids also feature throughout our lessons, teaching students how to revise and remember.  Lessons are further supported by homework using Satchel One.  The history department have created subject specific quizzes to again aid with memory and recall.  Other reading and comprehension tasks are also set regularly to supplement student’s understanding and wider contextual knowledge.  This is something that we are currently developing across Key stage 3.

Learning is embedded through the development of knowledge and skills over time and through overlapping concepts and the interleaving of ideas and historical skills. There are 3 data collections point per year in KS3 and KS4. Key stage 3 assessments cover all subject matter. Students at KS3 enjoy studying history in a chronological structure that helps builds the connections needed to fully analyse key themes at higher levels. In yr 7 students will be introduced to key historical skills, these will be assessed and built on throughout Key Stages 3 and 4 to ensure a progressive learning journey. Year 7 will act as a cornerstone for skill development and knowledge understanding, the spiral curriculum and assessment will allow for further levels of depth and understanding added through the learning journey.  This progression allows for effective adaptive teaching, marking and feedback and stretch for more able pupils. Regular extended writing allows pupils to develop their language and vocabulary. Through debate and discussion, small group and bigger group work students develop oracy skills to be fully confident and articulate in their verbal responses.

To support RADY and SEND intake in history we have incorporated many tasks and activities to support learners.  All our KS3 and 4 sequenced schemes of work have been created as booklets.  This enables many learners who struggle with organisation to keep everything in one place.  This helps especially when students move to GCSE.  Scaffolded sheets are provided for learners who need extra support in various areas and these are stuck in their booklets.  The adaptive teaching of chunking information throughout the lessons with variable tasks and teacher support also ensures that RADY and SEND learners are supported and stretched.  Similarly, opportunities for stretch and challenge are incorporated into the booklets and more able students are encouraged to ‘be brilliant’ with these tasks.  The booklets and supporting lessons ensure that there is a rigorous consistency across the department.  Each lesson will have a variety of different options and suggestions which enables each staff to adapt and change the lesson according to the needs of the students in their lessons.  Staff are encouraged to further adapt, add and amend their quality first teaching and delivery of lessons if students are unclear or the lesson objective has been unsuccessful.  The booklets and lesson resources are reviewed and adapted continually but also annually, for improvement.  If learners are not clear on content, or skills, extra lessons are added in and work is stuck in their booklet or kept in their work folders to ensure that learning is at the forefront and lessons are not dictated to just because there is a booklet.  To promote independence and ownership for KS4 all booklets, knowledge organisers and lesson ppt are shared on the school system once taught, so that students can revisit learning and support in revision.  This is also to enable students who have been absent opportunities to catch up missed learning.  Teaching staff work hard to try to keep students up to date with missing work; however, if attendance is a key issue for an individual, staff will ensure that copies of work missed can be provided to avoid adding further stress and anxiety.    Key stage 4 revision sessions are available from September on a weekly basis as drop-in support sessions.  These evolve to become sequenced planned revision seminars which reflect the chronological nature of our GCSE from January until exams are sat.

Across KS3 students are taught a coherent narrative of British history from before 1066, they examine the interrelations between Britain and the wider world as well as connections between local, regional, national and international history and concepts.  The complexity and diversity of society and people’s lives as well as the cultural, economic, military, political, religious and social history are explored throughout the key topic areas:

Year 7 

• A Local study – ‘Bewdley Big Dig’ – chronological understanding of Bewdley through the ages and it’s interconnection with the region, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally – with links to the Roman era and Anglo Saxon Britain.

• A study in British history before 1066 – Anglo Saxon Britain and the Vikings

• The development of Church, state and society in Medieval Britain 1066-1500 I,e

• Norman invasion – claimants, events

• Life under Norman rule, Peasants, Feudal society, Domesday, Harrying of the North, castles

• Challenges to Kings, church and state:  Murder of Becket, King John and Magna Carta, Black death, Peasants revolt

Year 8  

• Development of Church, State, society 1509-1745 AND significant study in world history i.e

• European reformation and international impacts – Tudor religious changes, case studies of the Spanish Armada, Gun powder plot, the English Civil war, trial and execution, Rule of Oliver Cromwell, Restoration, the Glorious Revolution.  Encompassing Personal Development – Citizenship – history of parliament, modern political processes and democracy.

• Ideas, political power, industry and empire; Britain 1745 – 1901

• The British Empire and it’s reach, international consequences, diversity and movement of people to and from Britain, industrial revolution, Trans Atlantic slave trade, plantations, abolition.

• Challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world 1901 to present day:  The holocaust.

• The holocaust – definitions, life in Europe for Jews pre WW2, escalation of persecution – including ghettos to the final solution, survivors testimonies, moral complexities and dilemmas.

Year 9 

• KS3 Challenges for Britain, Europe and the wider world 1901 to the present day and a significant study of world history and it’s interconnections with other world developments.

• WWI – causes, events, Soldiers, recruitment, conditions, homefront, impacts of WW1.

• Inter war years – Treaty of Versailles

• Rise and consolidation of Hitler and the Nazis

• Life in Nazi Germany

• Steps to war – Hitler’s actions, appeasement

These topics allow for students to make links with previous knowledge of topics they have done in earlier years in the school, to build upon layers of knowledge and understanding and there are opportunities to make connections to the modern world, so that students see how history effects the world around them. This allows students to build up cultural capital and citizenship values.

GCSE: OCR Explaining the Modern World 

Course sequencing outline for 2024-2025 

• YR 9 :  Non British Depth study.  The USA 1945-1974: The people and the state 1945-1975, Civil rights in the USA 1945-1964, government and dissent 1964-1974

• War and society from 793AD – to 2010 ,  Viking and medieval conflicts.  It is hoped that we may get onto some of the Elizabethan and Early modern conflicts before the start of year 10.

• Yr 10  War and society from 793AD – to 2010 ,  Early modern Elizabethan conflicts,  plus personal rule of Charles I to the start of the Civil War   (Hoping if possible to visit and complete the teaching of Kenilworth castle in September 2024 – to align with either the end of the Medieval period or Elizabeth.

• Personal rule to restoration – Trial to restoration.  War and Society Early modern conflicts Jacobites to Modern conflicts and war on terror.  International relations 1919 – 1939 and appeasement.

• Yr 11 – International relations 1919 -1975 Historical interpretations – Appeasement through to Cold War and cold war confrontations ending with Vietnam.  USA depth study 1945 – 1970.

Course sequencing outline for 2025-2026 

• YR 9 :  Non British Depth study.  The USA 1945-1974: The people and the state 1945-1975, Civil rights in the USA 1945-1964, government and dissent 1964-1974

• War and society from 793AD – to 2010 ,  Viking and medieval conflicts.

• Yr 10  War and society from 793AD – to 2010 ,  Early modern Elizabethan conflicts,  plus personal rule of Charles I to the start of the Civil War   (Hoping if possible to visit and complete the teaching of Kenilworth castle in September 2024 – to align with either the end of the Medieval period or Elizabeth.

• Personal rule to restoration – Trial to restoration.  War and Society Early modern conflicts Jacobites to Modern conflicts and war on terror.

• Yr 11 – International relations 1919 -1975 International relations 1919 – 1939 and appeasement. Historical interpretations – Appeasement through to Cold War, we will then teach the Post – war challenges in the USA 1945 – 1954 – (Red scare etc as students will have a better grasp and understanding of cold war ideology) plus cold war confrontations ending with Vietnam.

A level history 

• 1C The Tudors: England, 1485 -1603

• 2Q The American Dream:  reality and illusion, 1945 – 1980

• Non Examined assessment

A level politics 

• Government and politics of the UK

• Government and politics of the USA with comparative politics

• Political ideologies

Impact

By the end of Key Stage 3 students will have a chronological understanding of world history from Early medieval period to modern day. They will have developed their communication skills to produce verbal responses and extended pieces of writing varying from the causes of the English Civil war to the historical debate around the policy of appeasement. Students will be able to compare key events of the past with events happening around the world today. As students move through the course they will be introduced to source and interpretation skills. They will also explore how to explain the significance of events such as the Slave Trade and individuals like Harriet Tubman and her influence in challenging slavery. They will leave KS3 having begun to study and understand the various concepts and will have had exposure to some of the events of the GCSE course. By the end of Key Stage 4 students will demonstrate a deeper understanding of British and world history. They will be able to independently describe, explain and evaluate a greater range of key individuals and events across the historical timeline, whilst also being able to draw links and connections between them.  Students will have developed skills to evaluate historians on appeasement and the Cold War, being able to analyse why historians view the same events differently.  Students will also advance their analysis skills so that they are confident at evaluating complex historical and political sources and interpretations on into A level history and politics and beyond.  The culmination of sequencing, layering, revisiting, memory tasks and revision combined with student’s resilience and organisation skills, will also support them through their NEA.   

RADY students will continue to opt for GCSE history due to support and relationships with teachers.  Our new curriculum is designed to inspire and motivate all learners, we aim to see the attainment gap between PP learners and non-PP learners lessen. Similarly, we expect a continued rise in the number of students opting to take GCSE history and A level history and politics. 

Many of our alumni have gone attended Russell Group universities and supported us in recruiting for A level history. We have a Fellow at St Edwards school in Edgbaston, an alumni who is studying his masters degree in Archaeology at Oxford, having previously studied for his degree at Cambridge.  Another is currently studying archaeology at Oxford university.  Another works for the Ministry of Defence and we have a number of students who have gone to on to become history teachers themselves.   We aim to continue to have this impact on future students through our engaging and rigorous curriculum. 

Quality of teaching and learning in History has always been praised during learning walks by both external and internal observers. History has always remained a popular choice for GCSE and even though there are now greater options choices for students the numbers remain healthy. We are also beginning to see a revival in the number of students returning to stay and study A level.