Aims
The history curriculum is carefully mapped out so that all pupils leave primary school equipped with an understanding of the past that paves the way for their future.
Throughout their journey in history, pupils will acquire a breadth of knowledge: of places and people, and significant events through time. Pupils will be given the
opportunity to develop their ability to ask perceptive questions, think critically, analyse evidence, examine arguments, develop judgement, and understand
differing perspectives.
There are four core pillars underpinning the discipline of history:
1. Historical enquiry exposes pupils to key questions and gives them the opportunity to ask their own questions.
2. Historical enquiry relies on pupils acquiring sufficient substantive knowledge.
3. Alongside this knowledge, pupils are given the opportunity to develop disciplinary knowledge: cause, consequence, change and continuity, similarity and
difference, historical significance, sources and evidence, and historical interpretation. Historical concepts provide the structure that shapes the practice of history.
These will be revisited multiple times throughout the year and progress across year groups.
4. Finally, pupils learn to communicate historical findings in a sequenced, coherent manner both in verbal and written form.
Identifying and combining these core pillars work towards the overall goal of history education—gaining clear historical perspective. With clear historical perspective
pupils will be empowered to be active global citizens: understanding the connections between local, regional, national, and international history; between cultural,
economic, military, political, religious, and social history, and between short- and long-term timescales.
Substantive and disciplinary content in history
Every subject is unique and includes its own substantive content (SC) and disciplinary content (DC). The simplest way to think about the difference between the content is: the substantive knowledge is the ‘what’ and the disciplinary knowledge is the ‘how’. The Ark Curriculum Plus history curriculum ensures that pupils not only have broad and strong substantive knowledge—a coherent picture of the past—but also have understanding of the discipline of history. The content of the Ark Curriculum Plus history curriculum is structured so that pupils learn substantive content (the ‘what’) and disciplinary content (the ‘how’) at the same time; pupils learn both historical ‘facts’ and how to make sense of them simultaneously.
Substantive knowledge
Substantive knowledge not only transforms what pupils see in the world and how they see it but also enables pupils to build a ‘big picture’ of the past within which they can embed new historical knowledge. It is the substantive knowledge of the past which also plays a role in helping people interpret the world today. Pupils’ knowledge of what we often call substantive terms such as ‘empire’, ‘peace’, and ‘monarchy’ come up time and time again in the curriculum. If pupils are able to build up richer and richer schemata of these concepts and terms over time, this can help them access increasingly complex material throughout the curriculum. This helps pupils to learn, understand, and remember more—meaning they make more progress.
There are 19 substantive concepts that we want our pupils to gain understanding of by the end of Key Stage 2. They learn these substantive concepts through repeated encounters, with meaningful examples that develop in depth and complexity as the years progress.
We have provided a table below which shows where you can find the progression of the main substantive concepts across the year groups. The main substantive concepts highlighted for each unit show the overarching main focus of that lesson but within each lesson there are many examples of multiple substantive concepts touched and built upon. To look at each substantive concept in more detail, please use the Unit Planning Guide for each unit.
