Knowledge, skills, and understanding

The KSU (chronology; knowledge and understanding of events, people and changes; interpretations of history; historical enquiry; and organisation and communication of knowledge) form the focus of the curriculum. They provide a good description of what doing history entails. If you plan your history topics and evaluate your teaching and the children's learning in relation to the KSU you won't go far wrong.

Underlying concepts

Within the KSU are eight underlying concepts central to history:
• time
• historical situations/events and characteristics (a sense of period)
• continuity
• change
• cause
• consequence/result
• interpretations/points of view
• historical evidence

Doing history as described in the KSU involves:
• learning and understanding historical vocabulary, including that of time (for each unit taught, identify the vocabulary children need to understand - that you will consciously teach)
• understanding historical people, situations and events, their diversity and complexity
• identifying reasons, results and changes
• asking and answering questions: questioning is the key to doing history (key question words: when, where, how, what, who, why)
• investigating sources
• making connections
• recalling, selecting, recording and organising information
• giving reasons for different points of view
• communicating knowledge and understanding gained, in a variety of ways.

Organising concepts

A second set of concepts are those which help us make sense of institutions or ideas. Without these organising concepts we can't fully understand historical situations. Organising concepts include words such as: parliament, monarchy, the Church, invasion. Find out what understandings your pupils have about these words, as their historical (or modern) meaning may be very different from the mental pictures children have of them. Children may well believe parliament to be a place where members roar rudely at each other, without any idea that it is a law-making body. If new learning is to take place, you need to be aware of, and build on, children's prior learning.

Specific concepts

Third are concepts specific to a particular period in history, such as the Reformation (Tudor Britain), the Blitz and the Home Front (Britain since 1930).

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The history curriculum in schools