At Tollgate Primary school we aim to stimulate children’s love and curiosity to allow them to develop a coherent chronological understanding of Britain’s past and the wider world. Throughout the primary curriculum, we teach children a deep understanding of chronology and the impact of different time periods on our society today. This allows children to understand the complexity of peoples lives in the past through the achievements of significant individuals, civilisations and empires from the past which allows them to understand the democratic multicultural society they live in today. Through teaching History, we promote out children to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments and develop perspective and judgement in order to develop the skills of enquiry, analysis, interpretation and problem solving.

The aims of history in our school are:

• To develop an understanding of the history of these islands as a coherent, chronological narrative from the earliest times to the present day explaining how people’s lives have shaped this nation and how Britain has influenced and been influenced by the wider world.
• To develop an understanding of how significant aspects of the wider world such as the Ancient Civilisations of Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome and the Mayans have influenced Britain.
• To gain and deploy historically grounded understanding of abstract terms such as ‘empire’, ‘civilisation’, ‘parliament’ and ‘peasantry’.
• To understand and apply historical concepts such as continuity and change, cause and consequence, similarity and difference and use them to make connections, draw contrasts, analyse trends, frame historically valid perceptive questions and create their own structured accounts from the perspective of significant individuals in the past.
• To understand methods of historical enquiry thinking critically about the how the interpretation of the evidence to make historical claims contrasting arguments to how the evidence has been constructed.
• To gain historical perspective by placing their growing knowledge into different contexts through different periods of time to make connections between local, regional, national and international history as well as understand its impact on cultural, economic, military, political and social history; between short and long term timescales.