Our vision

At Henleaze Infant and Junior Schools, we aim to inspire a curiosity about and fascination for the world around them. Our curriculum is ambitious and is designed to ensure that they gain knowledge and understanding of Britain's past, as well as that of the wider world. As children progress through the schools, they develop the ability to think like a historian . Alongside a body of knowledge which covers the national curriculum, we also aim to equip children to become citizens of a complex world, able to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement.

Our Curriculum

At Henleaze Infant and Junior Schools, we follow the CUSP curriculum. It is cumulative, coherent and connected. Across the CUSP Early Foundations and Primary History sequence, what pupils will know and be able to do across the curriculum has been carefully mapped. This ensures that learning builds cumulatively and helps students to make connections between concepts that they have learned. Prior learning has been identified and mapped to the curriculum so that teachers can build new knowledge. 

We define knowledge as being substantive and disciplinary. 

• Substantive concepts focus on community, knowledge, invasion, civilisation, power and democracy.
• Substantive knowledge is the subject knowledge and explicit vocabulary used to learn about the content.
• Disciplinary knowledge focuses on skills such as chronology, cause and consequence, change and continuity, similarity and difference, evidence and significance.

A guiding principle of CUSP History is that pupils become ‘more expert’ with each study and grow an ever broadening and coherent mental timeline. This guards against superficial, disconnected and fragmented understanding of the past. Specific and associated historical vocabulary is planned sequentially and cumulatively from Year 1 to Year 6.

Impact

Each year group has clear cumulative end goals – these are identified for teachers. Each block identifies the core foundational knowledge pupils are to learn. Disciplinary knowledge and opportunities are mapped across the curriculum to a granular depth with learning questions in blocks identifying the precise skill pupils will apply. Monitoring is carried out through unit quizzes and pupil book studies.

History overview