The History Department
Welcome to Presdales History department webpages. The History department is a team of expert historians with specialist interests in particular areas of History: Miss Workman (Head of History), Mrs Inwood, Miss Mockett and Miss Martin.
The History department teaches across all of the key stages, and lend their particular expertise to the design and delivery of a curriculum spanning Ancient, Medieval, and Modern periods of History, and covering topics that encompass the local, History of the British Isles and of the wider world.
As a department we offer a range of extracurricular activities which further develop students’ interest in and enjoyment of the subject. Residential trips to the Battlefields of the First World War and a GCSE Study Tour of Berlin support students’ engagement with the lived-experience of the past. Our team of 6th form History prefects support the learning of students in the lower school and at GCSE through lunchtime sessions offering a range of activities, from support with particular historical skills to showing historical films linked to the curriculum.
Our Vision
The History department aims to inspire all students with a fascination for the past. Through engaging students with the human experience of people in past times and cultures, we encourage students to develop a sense of their own identity and an ability to engage with issues from different perspectives.
Our Aim
We seek to create enquiring minds, equipped for the challenges of life in the 21st century. Students are taught to apply a process of historical enquiry and reasoning: forming hypotheses and analysing and evaluating evidence to reach and support independent conclusions. Learning in History focuses on establishing a secure foundation and framework of knowledge of the past and of history as a discipline. This includes how historians communicate their ideas and arguments, in spoken and written form. These skills are highly valued in all careers and walks of life, and thus our students are successful not only in examinations at school and in higher education, but also in the workplace.
Our curriculum is based upon the National Curriculum within which we approach History in a chronological framework. Within that framework, we develop the story of the past with a particular thread throughout Key stage 3.
Our focus lies with the key theme of power and control and how people in the past assumed power and lost control. In Year 7 we start with the early settlers to Britain making connections with Europe and Asia along the Silk Roads and to Baghdad.
This theme is then further developed in Year 8 with how people reacted to the changes in power and control from the Reformation to the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution.
Finally we end our Key Stage Three study with how people in the 20th Century seized control in order to have power over others, for example through the First and Second World Wars.
By adopting a chronological and thematic approach, students are exposed to a mixture of local, national and global history. Themes such as the political, social, economic and cultural helps students to recognise and use substantive concepts. By having a good understanding of the past through the lens of people, places and events, students are able to illustrate how people have changed over time and with what consequences. It is with these skills at KS3 that we prepare the students for both GCSE and A-Level study.