History

Our curriculum at Headlands is designed to scaffold pupils to success at GCSE and A Level, as well as equipping pupils with verbal and non-verbal communication skills and the ability to respect the viewpoints of others.

We aim to improve pupils’ emotional intelligence and also their problem solving and decision making skills.

The KS3 curriculum provides breadth and depth, with consideration of changes over time and also the study of key focus points. Our KS3 curriculum is in line with the National Curriculum and is aimed to give pupils a genuine interest and enjoyment in History.

Our KS3 curriculum creates a strong foundation in key historical skills such as knowledge and understanding, explanation and analysis, analysis of interpretations and sources and comparison of factors and judgement making, and our lessons are sequenced to deliver content and skills over the course with the chance to revisit skills on more than one occasion each year.

Our KS4 curriculum builds on our KS3 curriculum. We follow OCR B at GCSE – the School’s History Project. This offers a wide course which is also academically rigorous.

We choose to teach the course, from September 2021, in the order of:

Year 10

• The People’s Health
• The Growth of America
• Local Study – Scarborough Castle

Year 11

• The Elizabethans
• Revision

This allows us to give our pupils a variety each year in terms of knowledge and understanding but also the skills base that they are developing. It also allows us some time in Year 11 to work on just exam technique at the end of the course.

Lessons are carefully sequenced and planned and differentiated in order to allow access to the course for all ability levels.

At KS5 we follow OCR History, teaching:

• Early Tudors
• Germany in LVI
• The witchcraze and popular culture
• Personal study

This allows pupils to build up a strong knowledge base in Year 12, which is more effective in terms of embedding and revisiting in Year 13. The interpretation element and the source-based work in Year 13 lend themselves more to the level of maturity that is attained by most pupils.

The success of our curriculum is evident in our uptake for GCSE and in our GCSE and A Level results. The majority of pupils enjoy their learning and value History as a subject and option.

Find out more information about our History curriculum by clicking the links below.

Get more detailed information on what students look at on a term-by-term basis in each year group by clicking on the links below.

Click on the links below to see how students are assessed in Years 7, 8 and 9.