Keystage history - Imaginative History Teaching in Primary and Secondary Schools
About Keystage History
Keystage history is the home of best practice in primary and secondary history teaching and learning. You can totally trust the up-to-date, authoritative, cutting edge, expert advice on issues such as deep dive inspections and you will be inspired by all the creative planning and teaching ideas. Subscribers love the hundreds of fully resourced history lessons, all judged outstanding by a vastly experienced LA history adviser who has observed over 2,000 primary and secondary lessons and has carried out 60 national inspections for OFSTED. Every aspect of leading history 5-19 is covered in detail from rationales for curriculum planning, through to raising standards, assessment, progression and inspiring colleagues. This site is a must for any forward-looking subject leader.
Recently Added
Terror of the Tramp: Why did vagrancy become such an important issue in Elizabethan England?
GCSE lesson in which students work through a range of differentiated clues to work out 8 reasons which help answer the lessons’ enquiry question before evaluating how well a recent textbook explains it. So often I have seen this lesson taught...more
How close to World War Three has the world come since 1945. A Year 9 enquiry.
Just as the United Nations is marking its 75th anniversary, so the world peace it was set up to maintain is yet again under threat. The United States and China are at loggerheads over a number of issues and this...more
OFSTED’s view of deep dives in history
Recently Matthew Purves , the Deputy Director for Schools, set out OFSTED’s latest thinking on deep dives in primary schools. He makes reference a number of times to what that means in history. Here are some of the highlights for...moreReport on leadership of primary history 2020
One of the key features underpinning the high quality of history learning was that history has a high status throughout the school, recognised by the headteacher. The subject leader attended local network meetings and time was made available for feedback from these meetings to be...moreMeeting OFSTED’s criteria for a good history curriculum at KS1 and 2 during extended transition period
Now that schools have an extra year’s grace from OFSTED to refine their curriculum that is being worked on, it is worth reminding ourselves of the key indicators that inspectors will be exploring.morebroadening the curriculum to make sure that...
Deep dive issues: progression and assessment in primary history
One of the features of deep dive subject inspections is that the two hardest areas of a primary history leader’s role are in danger of being painfully exposed. One is the thorny issue of progression. How do you plan to make the...moreOFSTED’s early EIF (2019) primary history deep dives
moreWhat do the first 3 months’ of reports tell us?
Although there is even less detail in the new shorter OFSTED reports than in the previous ones, there are still some clear indicators of what OFSTED is expecting-whether they care to...
How to get KS1 pupils into history-13 ideas
If you haven't already come across this School Run website offers 13 different ideas for making history come alive with your pupils, including games, story books, visits, history re-enactments etc. What i like about the list...more
Common assessment tasks in history at KS1
It is often difficult knowing how to assess pupils’ historical thinking at KS1. Are we simply testing literacy and /or recall? But what about historical understanding? Faced with this problem, I have been working with two large London primary schools....more
Medium-term planning for history at Key Stage 1
This part of the site contains a dozen detailed fully-developed enquiry-led, key question-driven medium term plans for all the major KS1 history -led topics. They have all been judged to be outstanding by an experienced OFSTED history inspector. All the...more
KS1 Medium Term Planner for Spreading the Word: Caxton to Bell
The ‘significant people’ element of the KS1 history curriculum now requires pupils to compare achievements of individuals within a linked theme - in this case communication in a topic called ‘spreading the word’. We have chosen Caxton and Bell, rather...more
KS1 Medium Term Planner: Louis Braille
The current history curriculum at KS1 asks schools to provide a little more coherence in their choice of significant people to study, suggesting that they might be linked by theme. I agree with this improvement. Here we have a possible...more
KQ1 Why do you think Louis Braille is remembered today: Smart task
moreStep 1
Start by showing the image of Louis Braille on slide 1 of the PowerPoint. Explain that he is a very famous man who lived 200 years ago and that what he invented is still used today, even though he...
KS1 Medium Term Planner for Spreading the Word: Caxton to Bell
The ‘significant people’ element of the KS1 history curriculum now requires pupils to compare achievements of individuals within a linked theme - in this case communication in a topic called ‘spreading the word’. We have chosen Caxton and Bell, rather...moreKS1 Medium Term Planner: Louis Braille
The current history curriculum at KS1 asks schools to provide a little more coherence in their choice of significant people to study, suggesting that they might be linked by theme. I agree with this improvement. Here we have a possible...moreKQ1 Why do you think Louis Braille is remembered today: Smart task
moreStep 1
Start by showing the image of Louis Braille on slide 1 of the PowerPoint. Explain that he is a very famous man who lived 200 years ago and that what he invented is still used today, even though he...
Victorian poor and the workhouse; what does Martha’s story tell us? NEW September 2020
more
NB This is an additional lesson that does not appear on the planner.
This topic couldn’t be more relevant to today. We frequently hear it said that the poor are always with us:... 
Medium Term Planner for Thematic unit Beyond Face Value Year 6
This end-of-key stage unit fulfils the post-1066 thematic requirement of the National Curriculum, but it does so in a particularly imaginative way. Instead of looking at just one period, here we look at three. Each has been deliberately chosen as...more
From Caesar’s invasions to Claudius’ conquest. KQ1 part 1
This first part of the first enquiry links to earlier work on the Iron Age and takes pupils from Julius Caesar’s two short-lived invasions through to anticipating Claudius’ invasion and conquest just under 100 years later.moreStep 1
It is important that...
Indian Mutiny/rebellion of 1857
This lesson is aimed at Y9/GCSE students. It addresses three principal aspects of history teaching:more- How to be thoughtful and discriminating when selecting evidence that is relevant to answering two different questions on the same topic.
- How to explore the...
British Empire – How can we infer so much about the empire from a study of just one map and the person who created it?
This session starts by looking at the information to be gleaned from a well-known 1886 map of the empire and ends with them writing an evaluative expert caption to accompany a textbook image which refers explicitly to the provenance Objectivesmore- Students...
Richard I: Lionheart or loser should we keep his statue – SMART TASK
This short task puts pupils in the role of spin doctors who have to ‘big up’ the reputation of Richard the Lionheart. There is a lobby of people who feel that his statue outside the Houses of Parliament should be...more
Terror of the Tramp: Why did vagrancy become such an important issue in Elizabethan England?
GCSE lesson in which students work through a range of differentiated clues to work out 8 reasons which help answer the lessons’ enquiry question before evaluating how well a recent textbook explains it. So often I have seen this lesson taught...moreRichard I: Lionheart or loser should we keep his statue – SMART TASK
This short task puts pupils in the role of spin doctors who have to ‘big up’ the reputation of Richard the Lionheart. There is a lobby of people who feel that his statue outside the Houses of Parliament should be...more
Medieval Britain: The Crusades
Great lesson on the reasons for the First Crusade which uses a Zone of Relevance activity to show students how to answer the question set, not the one they want to answer. This is followed by a critique of a...more
Follow Us
About Me
Neil acts as an educational consultant for history for schools throughout the country. After teaching for 12 years, during which time he ran two departments and was a member of the Senior Leadership, Neil moved into advisory work,
For 18 years, he supported 70 secondary and 450 primary and special schools in Hampshire during which time he carried out over 60 national OFSTED inspections. More recently he has been heavily involved in running about 40 highly acclaimed national training courses a year for primary and secondary history teachers, as well as bespoke whole staff INSET days in primary schools.
