Enquiries

A key cornerstone of history is historical enquiry. Quality history provision has historical enquiry at its heart. Through historical enquiry children can be shown how to ask questions, select and evaluate evidence and to make judgments about the past. It can also be a vital way of showing them that there is often more than one side to a story and that history is multi-perspective. Historical enquiry is all about asking questions or hypothesising  about the past that we hope the evidence will help us to answer, but getting the enquiry question right is not always easy. In this section you will find resources and guidance that will help you to plan challenging enquiries for your children that will help them to develop as historians.

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  • Learning what a place does and what we do for it

    Article

    Please note: This article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references may be outdated. Why teach children about architecture and the built environment? Because they shape the future and because they already change our architecture and define the public realm everyday through their actions. Learning about architecture and the built...

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  • Children's thinking in archaeology

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Young children enjoy prehistory Tactile, Physical and Enactive engagement with archaeological remains stimulates, excites and promotes children's logical, imaginative, creative and deductive thinking. Through archaeology there are infinite opportunities for ‘reasonable guesses' about sources and...

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  • Here come the Vikings! Making a saga out of a crisis

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. What are your first impressions when you think of Alfred the Great? Perhaps it's the story of the heroic individual being humbled by burning the cakes or for those of a certain age, it may...

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  • Thinking through history: assessment and learning for the gifted young historian

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may be outdated. Historical enquiry requires reasoning. Even historical imagination depends on being able to evaluate a number of possible responses to an hypothesis and mastery of detail and argument. The high levels of thinking in history of...

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  • Stories about people: narrative, imagined biography and citizenship in the key stage 2 curriculum

    Article

    Please note: this article pre-dates the current National Curriculum and some content and references are outdated. For children history is a story, and a story mainly about people.(Schools Council, 1969, p12) It is interesting that Grant Bage (1999) used this quote to begin his chapter on Making Meaning of Story and History in,...

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  • Promoting talk during history lessons

    Article

    There are various reasons why pupils should be offered the opportunity to converse together during history. It can definitely be enjoyable for pupils to talk together and it helps to teach children how to share ideas. Pupils talking while working in a group may also use their peers' talk to...

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  • Looking at buildings as a source for developing historical enquiries

    Article

    Please note: this article was written before the the 2014 National Curriculum. The section on using computers in particular is now outdated.  Buildings offer a fascinating insight into history. We live, work and shop in buildings of various descriptions. Some of these buildings are very new, others are very old. Frequently...

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  • Keeping the content manageable in Key Stage 2

    Article

    This section offers guidance on how Key Stage 2 history can be organised through the use of a number of key investigative questions for the most commonly taught areas of study.

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