Year 7 History: What to Teach (England)

Non-statutory Notes and guidance – schools don't have to teach this

• This could include:
  • the Norman Conquest
  • Christendom, the importance of religion and the Crusades
  • the struggle between Church and crown
  • Magna Carta and the emergence of Parliament
  • the English campaigns to conquer Wales and Scotland up to 1314
  • society, economy and culture: for example, feudalism, religion in daily life (parishes, monasteries, abbeys), farming, trade and towns (especially the wool trade), art, architecture and literature
  • the Black Death and its social and economic impact
  • the Peasants’ Revolt
  • the Hundred Years War
  • the Wars of the Roses; Henry VII and attempts to restore stability
• This could include:
  • Renaissance and Reformation in Europe
  • the English Reformation and Counter-Reformation (Henry VIII to Mary I)
  • the Elizabethan religious settlement and conflict with Catholics (including Scotland, Spain and Ireland)
  • the first colony in America and first contact with India
  • the causes and events of the civil wars throughout Britain
  • the Interregnum (including Cromwell in Ireland)
  • the Restoration, ‘Glorious Revolution’ and power of Parliament
  • the Act of Union of 1707, the Hanoverian succession and the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745
  • society, economy and culture across the period: for example, work and leisure in town and country, religion and superstition in daily life, theatre, art, music and literature
• the Enlightenment in Europe and Britain, with links back to 17th-century thinkers and scientists and the founding of the Royal Society
• Britain’s transatlantic slave trade: its effects and its eventual abolition
• the Seven Years War and The American War of Independence
• the French Revolutionary wars
• Britain as the first industrial nation – the impact on society
• party politics, extension of the franchise and social reform
• the development of the British Empire with a depth study (for example, of India)
• Ireland and Home Rule
• Darwin’s ‘On The Origin of Species’
• women’s suffrage
• the First World War and the Peace Settlement
• the inter-war years: the Great Depression and the rise of dictators
• the Second World War and the wartime leadership of Winston Churchill
• the creation of the welfare state
• Indian independence and end of Empire
• social, cultural and technological change in post-war British society
• Britain’s place in the world since 1945
• a depth study linked to one of the British areas of study listed above
• a study over time, testing how far sites in their locality reflect aspects of national history (some sites may predate 1066)
• a study of an aspect or site in local history dating from a period before 1066
• the changing nature of political power in Britain, traced through selective case studies from the Iron Age to the present
• Britain’s changing landscape from the Iron Age to the present
• a study of an aspect of social history, such as the impact through time of the migration of people to, from and within the British Isles
• a study in depth into a significant turning point, for example, the Neolithic Revolution