📜 History at Ryton-on-Dunsmore

At Ryton‑on‑Dunsmore, we teach History through the Primary Knowledge Curriculum (PKC). The PKC History curriculum enables children to develop a chronologically secure knowledge and understanding of local, British and world history. The knowledge pupils encounter has been carefully selected and coherently sequenced, following a largely chronological structure. This ensures that children have rich opportunities to learn, apply and strengthen the skills required for investigating, interpreting and critically analysing key events, people, civilisations and historical concepts.

History stimulates children’s curiosity about the past and deepens their understanding of how previous lives, decisions and events have shaped the world they live in today. By exploring the complexity of human experience, pupils begin to recognise their own potential to shape the future. 

Through the PKC curriculum, children learn about fascinating ancient civilisations, the rise and fall of empires, and the achievements and atrocities of humankind across the ages. The curriculum is deliberately balanced to allow pupils to study local, national and global history in depth, encouraging them to explore how significant events and individuals have influenced the modern world.

Each unit of work is not treated as a stand‑alone topic, but as a chapter in the wider story of Britain and the world. This narrative approach helps pupils to build a meaningful understanding of how different periods connect, contrast and influence one another.  Within each unit, pupils develop a secure chronological understanding, making links within and across the periods they study. Regular opportunities to revisit prior learning enable pupils to reflect on and strengthen their historical knowledge- ensuring they know more and remember more over time.

Lessons also provide structured opportunities for pupils to develop key historical skills, including:

• making connections, contrasts and comparisons
• asking and answering historically valid questions using appropriate historical vocabulary
• researching, selecting, using and evaluating a range of historical sources

Through this approach, our pupils become thoughtful, analytical and curious historians who understand the past and its significance for the world they will help shape.

In February 2026, children in Years 1-6 went on a trip to the British Museum in London.