How trade affected life in Roman Britain

The Ofsted Research Review: History highlights the importance of developing children’s understanding of key substantive concepts, ideas that are woven through historical content such as settlement, invasion, power. Children’s understanding grows more complex as they encounter these ideas in different contexts, enabling children to grow increasingly sophisticated schemas that support future understanding. Ofsted refers to this as generative learning. The meaning of these concepts will be different in different contexts and therefore, as teachers, we need to consider how to use our substantive subject knowledge to identify and develop understanding. Ofsted suggests that ‘Planned, systematic encounters with substantive concepts in specific contexts are likely to be highly generative.’ (Ofsted 2021:8). As teachers therefore, we need to consider which substantive concepts will be developed through our different units of study. As subject leaders we need also to identify how these concepts may be experienced across the school curriculum so that this generative learning can develop...