Our Lady Queen of Peace · Worcester
Our children start with their own families and toys, travel back to the Stone Age, then come forward through Romans, Saxons, Tudors and two world wars to a thousand years of kings and queens. Worcester's own story runs right through the middle. Every unit is planned to stand on the ones before it, and every lesson reaches back to remember.
Why this order
Each phase gives the next one something to stand on. Complex vocabulary and disciplinary skills arrive gradually, so no year is overloaded.
Pupils begin with lived experience: family memories, old toys, nurses, explorers and the castles and battles of their own city. They learn what a timeline is and how pictures and objects can be clues.
BC and AD arrive. Pupils travel from the first humans in Britain to the earliest civilisations, learning how people settled near water, buried their dead and worshipped their gods.
A sweeping chronological narrative: Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Tudors, industry and the Second World War, with the Maya as a non-European contrast. It ends with a 1,000-year study of kings and queens that pulls the whole story together.
The heart of our sequencing
Each gold thread is a planned link written into our unit planning: a unit deliberately builds on knowledge, vocabulary or skills from an earlier one. Choose any unit to see what it draws on and what it prepares pupils for later.
Every unit, to scale
Rows run in teaching order, Year 1 at the top. Watch the curriculum start in recent memory, leap back thousands of years in Year 3, then march forward to today.
Sticky Knowledge
Every lesson opens with three retrieval questions, colour-coded so they reach across time. Pupils keep returning to earlier units, so knowledge is remembered long after the unit ends. These are real questions from our planning.
Reaches furthest back, often to a unit from a previous year.
Recalls the most recent unit, so it stays secure while new learning begins.
Checks the current unit and the words pupils need for today.
Disciplinary progression
Seven ways of thinking like a historian, each planned to grow in a clear step every year. Each step shows the expectation and the unit where pupils practise it.
Vocabulary progression
Each unit teaches its own subject-specific words. Key terms are deliberately met again in later units, so pupils use monarch, empire and artefact with growing precision.
Unit explorer
Choose a year, then a unit, to see every lesson in order and exactly what pupils already know when they arrive.
How every unit is built
Every unit follows the same narrative logic, so teachers know why each lesson sits where it does and pupils always know what kind of thinking comes next.
Who the story is about and when it happened, before any complex events.
The why. Exploring motives so later events make sense.
The what. Sequencing the events or mapping the era.
The legacy. Bridging the past to its long-term impact on our world.
The evidence. Acting as historians and testing what we have learned against sources.
Golden threads
Power, Belief and Conflict bind the units together. Each time pupils meet one again, it is bigger and more complicated than before.
Substantive concept
From a plot to blow up King James I, to Roman emperors ruling a vast empire, to how the monarchy and Parliament share power today.
Disciplinary skill
From comparing what different people say about Boudicca or a castle, to weighing the pros and cons of British rule in India, to spotting how wartime messages were designed to persuade.
Our city in our curriculum
Worcester's past is woven into the curriculum so pupils study real places they know, and meet them again when they are older.
Year 2 · Autumn & Spring
Year 6 · Autumn