Struggling to define the disciplinary knowledge in your history curriculum?
 
This resource helps you to define exactly what a historian is and does - the disciplinary characteristics of a historian - and provides a progression of curriculum statements for each primary phase to add to your curriculum.
 
**See the video for a scroll through of the resource**
Notes on the progression statements:
 
The included progression statements describe what pupils should know about what historians do at each of the primary stages. These statements can be added to your existing history curriculum to boost the amount of disciplinary knowledge that is taught.
The purpose of these statements is not primarily to get pupils thinking in the same way as a historian, but to help them to understand how historians work, what they do, and how they have learned the information that they are learning elsewhere in each historical study (or unit of work/topic). Learning about what historians do may then lead to procedural (skills-based) work, with pupils carrying out some of the processes that they historians carry out.
Although some statements are contained within a particular stage and not repeated afterwards, that is not to say that pupils shouldn’t continue to learn these disciplinary ideas. These ideas should be revisited. The statements included at each stage represent a suggestion of when pupils could first be introduced to these ideas.
Over the course of the primary stages, different aspects of the characteristics of a historian are covered in different levels of detail. For example, in upper key stage 2 you will notice an increased focus on how historians consider and challenge theories and ideas.
Some of the progression statements include examples of how these might be exemplified by particular historical studies (or units of work/topics). These can be edited to reflect your curriculum, or you may choose to leave examples out of your curriculum statements when adding these to your own curriculum documentation.
The statements are not definitive – please feel free to add to the ones I’ve included here! It also may be the case that you think some of the statements would be better taught in another phase – again, change it to suit your needs!