We currently have 3 members of department who all have a range of responsibilities.

Mr P Lyons: Deputy Head of the Senior School & Head of History- all key stages

Mrs K Smith: Senior Pastoral Co-Ordinator- Key stage 3 / 4

Ms C Hemmings: Head of Learning Support – Key stage 5

 

Departmental Ethos

Our principal aim is to encourage an interest in the past that will last beyond the school classroom. We hope to engender excitement in our students about the past and provide a local, national and international framework within which they can discover a sense of identity. We encourage our students to pursue their own interests with a flexible approach, broadly based on the National Curriculum at KS3 and with a wide range of topic areas at KS4 and KS5. We believe it is important to stimulate intellectual curiosity and debate and to provide the foundations for wider historical knowledge. History should be open to students of all abilities and within our curriculum we adopt a broad toolbox of teaching methods to ensure that everyone finds something that develops their curiosity and potential.

As a department we believe in the importance of trips and visits, and we offer a wide range of enrichment activities to support the work we do in the classroom. These range from the Worsley walk for Y9, which encourages our students to see the contribution of the local environment to our local history, to visits to Eyam, Styal Mill, Leeds Armouries, the battlefields of WW1, or our bi-annual trip to the USA, where we have taken in such sites as Gettysburg, Salem, Boston harbour, Ellis Island or the American Senate.

Curriculum Map

• At GCSE we study the OCR Modern World syllabus in Y10 and 11.
• At A Level we follow the OCR specification A at both AS and A Level.

Year Group	Autumn Term	Spring Term	Summer Term
Year 7	What is History? Romans	Norman Conquest	Medieval Life
Year 8	Slave Trade Reformation	Elizabethan England	English Civil War and Restoration
Year 9	Industrial Revolution	World War One	World War Two
Year 10	USA depth study 1919-41	USA depth study Cold War	Cold War
Year 11	Russia Controlled Assessment Britain 1906-18	Britain 1906-18.	Revision   GCSE examinations
Year 12	American Revolution   Churchill	American Revolution   Britain 1945-90	Revision External exams Project work
Year 13	Personal Study Civil Rights in the USA 1865-1980	Personal Study Civil Rights in the USA 1865-1980	Revision and external exams