Transition KS2-KS3

This section contains examples of projects and advice on securing continuity and progression across the primary-secondary divide.  This is the responsibility of both primary and secondary school history teachers.  Pupils need to be ready, by the end of Year 6, for history in Year 7, and courses for Year 7 need to build properly on the primary experience. This is extremely challenging because secondary school history teachers have and to take into account (currently very diverse) primary school starting points.  Read more

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  • How cruel were the Victorians?

    Multipage Article

    Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum. This unit centres on Victorian crime and punishment. This resource is free to everyone. For access to hundreds of other high-quality resources by primary history experts along with free or discounted CPD and membership of a thriving community of teachers and...

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  • Living Museums and Victorian Britain

    Multipage Article

    Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum. This unit centres on ways of portraying life in Victorian Britain. While factual knowledge of aspects of Victorian life in Britain are a vital component of the unit, the main focus is on exploring the way living museums present the period,...

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  • Myths and War Evacuees

    Multipage Article

    Please note: this resource pre-dates the 2014 National Curriculum. This unit centres on the evacuation of children during the second world war. While the factual knowledge of evacuation is an essential component of the unit, the main focus is on exploring the varied feelings and experiences of children sent to...

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  • Nutshell 121

    Article

    This edition of 'Nutshell' concentrates on primary history.

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  • It's like they've gone up a year!' Gauging the impact of a history transition unit on teachers of primary and secondary

    Article

    Year 7 history teachers frequently bemoan the lack of historical learning in the primary sector. Pupils may be well versed in suffixes and similes, but their study of history can be limited. This group of history teachers decided that things could be different. Not only did they bring enquiry methods...

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  • Working with Boudicca texts - contemporary, juvenile and scholarly

    Article

    Please note: this article was written before the the 2014 National Curriculum and some content may now be outdated. Robert Guyver describes a model for teaching Boudicca’s rebellion to pupils aged 7 to 13. Drawing on the tradition of critical source evaluation, he nonetheless shuns aspects of that tradition in favour of...

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  • Learning to love history: preparation of non-specialist primary teachers to teach history

    Article

    Rosie Turner-Bisset describes a systematic attempt to teach non-specialist trainee primary teachers to understand how the discipline of history works. She reports encouraging results. The training methods described here are based on a working assumption that teachers must be passionate and excited about a subject in order to teach it...

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  • Telling and suggesting in the Conwy Valley

    Article

    Thelma Wiltshire applies a ‘telling' and ‘suggesting' strategy to an enquiry involving an historical site. Getting beyond more simplistic approaches to ‘fact' and ‘opinion', she describes how a pack of curriculum materials was designed to give pupils a precise language to talk about layers of certainty and uncertainty in their...

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  • The Evacuee Letter Exchange Project: using audiencecentred writing to improve progression from Key Stage 2 to Key Stage 3

    Article

    Jenny Parsons' work in primary-secondary liaison in history is nationally acclaimed. She is often asked to share her department's practice at courses and conferences. Readers of Teaching History are already familiar with her work in another area: in the ‘Triumphs Show' of Teaching History 93 (the ICT edition in November...

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  • Chata in a Nutshell

    Article

    OK, so it's another acronym. What's it mean? Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches at Key Stages 2 and 3. Chata tried to get a picture of 7 to 14 year-old kids' ideas about history (just over 400 of them in all). That's their ideas about the discipline and how...

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