In History at Co-op Academy Florence MacWilliams, students develop a range of skills to help them become great historians. The curriculum is centred on the PACE principles and the promotion of these features prominently in all lessons and enquiry questions. Central to the delivery of history is a sense of Pride in the local community of Stoke and our shared past, the curriculum itself is high challenge and Ambitious making use of current scholarship and debate, we aim to foster a Caring  and tolerant attitude towards both people in the past and Stoke’s diverse population, above all we strive to encourage Excellence in all we do and academic rigour is a key priority here at Florence MacWilliams. Alongside this, students are supported in developing their understanding of second order concepts or disciplinary knowledge. The complexity of these skills develops over time, for example pupils might look at cause in its most basic sense in Year 7, categorising by long term and short term and making a judgement on which is the greatest cause. By Year 8 their analysis will begin to increase in nuance, i.e. classifying causes into social, economic and political. Then, in Year 9 pupils are encouraged to make connections between causes and understand how and why some historians may place emphasis on one cause over another.

Key concepts: chronology, cause and consequence, similarity and difference, evidence, interpretation, change and continuity, and significance.