St Martin's Catholic Primary School

At our school, we deliver a broad, balanced, and engaging history curriculum that is both knowledge-rich and rooted in disciplinary thinking. Our approach draws upon the structured content and progression provided by the Kapow Primary History scheme, while also incorporating school-selected topics tailored to our unique context, local heritage, and the interests of our pupils. 

The Kapow curriculum forms the backbone of our historical learning, ensuring coherence, coverage of the National Curriculum, and a clear progression of substantive and disciplinary knowledge. Lessons follow a carefully sequenced structure that revisits and builds upon prior knowledge, enabling pupils to develop a secure chronological understanding, historical vocabulary, and an awareness of key concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, and significance. 

In addition to Kapow, we enrich our curriculum through a number of bespoke history units chosen by our teaching team. These topics are designed to reflect the local history of our community, align with whole-school themes or values, or respond to particular cohort interests. This blend allows us to foster a genuine curiosity for the past, while also strengthening links across subjects and enhancing cultural capital. 

Our implementation is regularly reviewed to ensure full curriculum coverage, progression, and pupil engagement. Teachers adapt resources where necessary to meet the needs of all learners, including those with SEND and EAL, ensuring history is accessible, inclusive, and inspiring for every child.  

We have identified the following disciplinary concepts at the core of our curriculum: 

These concepts will be encountered in different contexts during the study of local, British and world history. Therefore, children will have varied opportunities to learn how historians use these skills to analyse the past and make judgements. They will confidently develop and use their own historical skill set. As children progress through the year groups, they will create their own historical enquiries to study using sources and the skills they have developed.   

Throughout their time from EYFS to Year 6, the children will gain a further understanding of History through the lens of our five key substantive themes which we develop and expand year on year in different contexts. The themes are explained in detail below 

At St Martins, children’s learning is consistently monitored through a range of formative and summative assessment opportunities. We start every unit by allowing children to capture what they know about the topic using a quiz. We then revisit this at the end of the unit to see how much the children have retained. We recap previous learning at the start of every lesson and pupils are assessed against the learning objectives in every lesson. Teachers marking allows children to see what they have been successful at in each lesson and addresses misconceptions. Children are confident in explaining what they have done well and what they could improve, as well as being able to retrieve prior knowledge from recent learning and linking previous units to current ones.  

We are able to see the impact of our History curriculum through: 

• -Children’s enthusiasm for the subject and ability to talk with confidence about their learning 

• -Children’s understanding of a range of historical vocabulary  

• -Children’s classwork, which shows their ability to ask and answer questions, evaluate evidence and draw conclusions 

Children should leave St Martins ready to begin their secondary education confident in their ability to understand how the worlds history has shaped our world today, have an understanding of the history of the wider world, have a secure understanding of substantiative concepts, understand how historians learn about the past and be able to form historical arguments based on their knowledge of the disciplinary concepts studied.