Local

Local history
From 2014 the National Curriculum for history reinforces the mandatory obligation on schools to teach local history at Key Stage 2. What is not made clear is whether local history needs to be offered in pill or powder form: as just one blocked unit of work or as parts of other British history units. There are arguments for both. Featuring soon in the site will be planning for two contrasting approaches. the first, based on work done by Belleville school in Clapham,shows how a school can diffuse local history through at least two other history stuydies. In this case they look not only at the growth of Clapham junction as an adjunct to a study of Victorian transport, they also teach a unit called They came to our shores which looks at evidence for the movement and settlement of people in the area of Wandsworth and Battersea. They study this within a context of already knowing about Roman , Saxon and Viking Britain. Whilst Y6 revisit these periods they studied as Y3/4, they also learn new periods of history e.g. the arrival of silk weaving Huguenots ( many children have French origins) or 19th century navvies.
By contrast, pupils at Springwell school in Hounslow explore the changes in their local area since the building of Heathrow since the Second World War and link this to a really well informed debate about the expansion of Heathrow.
It is really important not to assume that there is one fixed way of studying local history. Many schools simply nest it within a period of history that was very significant in the history of locality. In Eastleigh in Hampshire a railway town, schools use databases to explore census material on the impact of the railways as a major part of their detailed topic on the Victorians.
As schools continue to improve their local studies we will be featuring examples of the planning, in particular.