A lot of you have been tasked with trying to specify what progression looks like in history in your school. Better people than you have tried and failed. Any attempt to create a neat ladder has found that the rungs just don’t hold. We need to build a scaffold not a cage. In doing so there are perhaps 6 key ideas that I think are worth sharing so that you keep these at the forefront of your mind when you begin to lose heart and finding the task too daunting.
Key idea 1 – You will expect to see progression in both disciplinary and substantive knowledge
At KS1 and 2 you might expect a heavier emphasis on substantive knowledge as pupils build their picture of the past. After all, there is precious little point in pupils explaining, for example, why Henry VIII broke from the Catholic Church if the pupils
