Key Stage 3 History
“What’s past is prologue” William Shakespeare, The Tempest
The intention for history at Key Stage 3 at Cedars is for students to access content (outline below) which is broadly in line with what is covered in mainstream schools. We aim to encourage students to understand the key role that history plays in shaping our understanding of the world today and to develop their use of key skills, such as inference, evidence analysis and written communication. We teach discrete lessons, which form part of a wider scheme of learning; we use a combination of formal and informal assessment and use a variety of media to deepen students’ understanding of past events. When students leave Cedars, we want them to have a good understanding of historical topics and an emerging knowledge of subject-specific terminology which is used at Key Stage 4, such as significance, analysis and interpretation. Above all else, we want students to engage and enjoy their history lessons.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana.
Topics covered at KS3:
- The Romans, including their impact on life in Britain
- The Norman Conquest
- The building of castles
- King John and Magna Carta
- Relations between England, Wales and Scotland
- The Black Death
- The succession problems of Henry VIII
- Elizabeth I
- The causes of the English Civil War
- Migration to Britain
- The transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans
- The changes to transport
- The change to an industrial country
- Life in Victorian Britain- public health
- The campaign for votes for women
- The causes of WW1
- What was life like on the Western Front?
- The causes of WW2.
- The Home Front in WW2
- The atom bomb
- The Cold War
- International terror and the impact on Britain
Key Stage 4 History
Students at KS4 study the OCR Modern World History GCSE syllabus A.
The examination code is J410/02 (Germany)
This includes the following units:
- International Relations 1919 to 2010
- Germany depth study 1925 to 1955
- Migration to Britain 1000-c.2010
- The British Empire 1688-1730
The International Relations Unit forms the first half of the Paper 1 exam and looks at the following in detail:
- The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the treaties that ended WW1
- The League of Nations in the 1920s and 30s
- The failure of appeasement in the 1930s
- The origins of the Cold War
- Cold War crises, including Berlin, Cuba and Vietnam
- The end of the Cold War
Historical interpretations of appeasement and the causes of the Cold War are also studied and form part of the examination.
The Germany depth study looks at the following in detail:
- Weimar Germany 1925-29
- The rise of the Nazi Party
- Reasons why Hitler became Chancellor in 1933
- Nazi dictatorship in Germany
- Life in Nazi Germany, including the persecution of minority groups
- The impact of war on the German people
- De-nazification and the post-war period in Germany
The Migration topic is a thematic study looking at the broad sweep of immigration to Britain from the Norman Conquest to the early 21st Century:
- Jewish migration
- Flemish and Dutch weavers
- Huguenot bankers and financiers
- African migration and the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans
- Lascar sailors and arrivals from India
- Irish, Italian and German migrants
- People fleeing persecution
- Post-war Caribbean, African and Asian arrivals
- Free movement under the EU
- Reaction to immigration throughout the period and the experiences of migrant people.
The British Empire looks at the formation of links between Britain, the Caribbean and India and how this impacted on people.