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Brief outline of the subject

  • To equip students with an overarching chronological understanding to frame their studies and provide them with the skills necessary for deeper study.
  • To enable students to study key historical themes and address the way these have changed and altered over time.
  • To enable students to understand wider world history and their place within it.

Year 7

Invasion and Conquest

  • Pre-history including the diversity of early Britain
  • Celts, Romans, Saxons and Vikings overview
  • How place names can tell us about the past
  • The wider world in the year 1000

Contested Power and Land in the Middle Ages

  • The succession crisis of 1066
  • The Battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings
  • The impact of the Vikings on the world
  • The Normanisation of England
  • Constantinople and Baghdad
  • Power and gender in the Middle Ages

Religion in the Medieval World

  • The structure of the Medieval Church and monastic life
  • Thomas Beckett
  • The Crusades
  • The Islamic World
  • Religious persecution in Britain

Early Empires and their fall

  • English expansion within the British Isles
  • Mongol expansion, including the destruction of Baghdad
  • The Angevin Empire

Late Medieval Britain

  • The Black Death and its impact
  • The Peasants’ Revolt
  • Gender in Late Medieval Britain including the Paston Letters
  • The 100 Years War
  • The War of the Roses
  • The Later Medieval Economy

A time of change – the Early Modern Period

  • New discoveries and inventions
  • The reformation and dissolution of the monasteries
  • The Pilgrimage of Grace
  • Diversity in Tudor Britain
  • Gender and Sexuality in Tudor Britain
  • Conflict with Spain, including the Spanish Armada and early empires

Year 8

Changing Ideas

  • An introduction to the ‘idea of ideas’
  • The Reformation and its impact
  • The Renaissance and its impact
  • The Enlightenment and its impact

Empires in Africa

  • The development of the British Empire
  • European colonisation of Africa
  • Individuals and Empire e.g. Cecil Rhodes
  • Resistance to Empire in Africa
  • Interpretations of Empire
  • The impact of the British Empire on Lancashire

Slavery

  • Pre-modern slavery e.g. the Romans
  • The trans-Atlantic slave trade
  • The Middle Passage
  • Life on plantations
  • The Abolition of Slavery
  • Slavery and Lancashire

Power and  Revolution in the Modern World

  • The British Civil Wars
  • The French Revolution
  • The Industrial Revolution
  • The extension of the franchise and the road to democracy
  • Local history case studies
  • The development of rights in 20th Century Britain

Empire in India

  • Pre-European Empires in India
  • Background: The East India Company and British Empire in India
  • Gandhi and Indian independence
  • Indian partition
  • Modern India and links to Britain/Lancashire

Year 9

Why was the Russian Revolution a turning point in world history?

  • Political ideologies and concepts
  • The causes of the Russian Revolution
  • The murders of Rasputin and the Romanovs
  • The Russian Civil War
  • Stalin and control in Russia

How and why did the Nazis rise to power in Germany?

  • Germany at the end of World War One, including the Treaty of Versailles
  • Life in Weimar Germany, including hyperinflation, experiences of women and LGBT+ people, cultural changes
  • The rise of the Nazis in Germany
  • Life in Nazi Germany

The Holocaust and Genocide

  • Historical anti-Semitism
  • Escalation of persecution in the 1930s
  • The ‘Final Solution’
  • Jewish Resistance
  • Other groups targetted
  • Genocide after the Holocaust

British Politics in the Twentieth Century

  • The political system in the United Kingdom
  • The extension of the franchise
  • The development of political parties
  • The Welfare State

The Cold War

  • The origins of the Cold War and political ideologies
  • Nuclear weapons
  • The Space Race
  • Conflict in the Cold War in Asia
  • The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism

Year 10

AQA Power and the People c. 1170 to present day

  • Medieval challenges to the King’s authority: Magna Carta, de Montfort and the Peasants’ Revolt 1381.
  • Early modern challenges to monarchical power: Pilgrimage of Grace, the English Civil War and the American Revolution.
  • The campaign for suffrage: Chartism and female suffrage campaigners.
  • Eighteenth century social reform: Corn Law, slavery abolition and social reformers, such as Titus Salt.
  • Trade Unions and strike action e.g. Match Girls’ Strike, General Strike and post WW2 trade unionism.
  • Race relations and modern rights: Windrush to race relations legislation, Brixton Riots and Stephen Lawrence.

AQA Conflict and Tension 1894 -1918

  • Causes of WW1: alliances, imperialism, pre war crises, militarism and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
  • War of the Western Front: Verdun, Somme, Passchendaele.
  • War at Sea: Jutland and the naval blockade.
  • War on the Eastern Front: Gallipoli
  • Ending of the war: arrival of the USA and exit of Russia, Ludendorff Offensive, Allied Offensive, signing of the Armistice.

Year 11

AQA USA 1920-1973 – Opportunity and Inequality

  • 1920s: economic boom, social and cultural changes, inequality, racism and prejudice, Wall Street Crash.
  • 1930s: 1932 election, Roosevelt and the New Deal.
  • 1940s and 1950s: Impact of WW2 on the economy, on Black Americans and on women, consumer society, McCarthyism.
  • Black Civil Rights: Brown vs. Topeka, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Little Rock, Martin Luther King, sits in, freedom rides, voting rights, Malcolm X and the Black Power Movement.
  • 1960s: Kennedy and Johnson, women’s’ rights and Roe vs. Wade.

AQA Elizabethan England c. 1568-1603

  • Elizabeth’s Court and Parliament: government, ministers, relations with Parliament, loss of power towards end of reign, Essex Rebellion.
  • Everyday life: living standards, fashion, rise of the gentry, theatre, poverty, sailors and exploration.
  • Troubles and home and abroad: religious differences and re-establishment of the Church of England, Northern Rebellion, excommunication and role of Catholic missionaries, Catholic plots and Mary Queen of Scots, Puritanism, conflict with Spain.
  • Students will also study a specific historic environment site which changes each year. This will be examined in a 16 mark essay question.

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child

Cicero