CURRICULUM SUBJECT

History

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

Martin Luther King, Jr.  

Facilities

The department teaches in a suite of 3 rooms in the main building and specialist Sixth Form rooms at Pier House. All spaces are equipped with interactive white boards and audio-visual facilities.

Curriculum

Lower School

We follow a programme of study covering history from the Norman Conquest to Civil Rights in America. The key focus is the role of individuals and how they shaped Britain and the wider world.

GCSE

We follow the OCR Schools History Project specification covering Crime and Punishment c1250-Present Day, The Elizabethans 1580-1603, The making of America 1789-1900, Living under the Nazis 1933-1945 and History Around Us which is a site study.

Sixth Form

We follow the OCR specification studying The Early Stuarts and the Origins of the Civil War 1603–1660, International Relations 1890–1941 and Russia and its Rulers 1855–1964. There is also a coursework unit, the focus of which is decided by the student.

Click here to learn more about the sixth form.

Co-curricular Activities

Super-Curricular

The department offers a range of activities to engage pupils in the lower school such as competitions, essay and creative writing tasks. At GCSE and A level, students are provided with activities, lectures and opportunities that will provide them with an excellent foundation for those wishing to study history at university or who are preparing for Oxbridge entry.

Super Curricular Sixth Form 2026

Trips and Visits

In the lower school, pupils will make local visits and in recent years this has included Hampton Court, Kensington Palace and the Clink Museum.

At GCSE, pupils will visit Greenwich Park as part of the ‘History Around Us’ unit and other sites such as the Imperial War Museum and the London Dungeons.

In addition, the department runs international trips for Year 8,9  and Sixth Form to the battlefields of the First or Second World War. In recent years this has included Gallipoli-Turkey, the Somme and Ypres, Normandy and more recently Thessaloniki- Greece. Kew House School were the first school in the UK to take pupils for a First World War battlefields trip to the region.

In Year 10 the pupils have the opportunity to visit Germany or Poland as part of their GCSE study of ‘Living under the Nazis’ and in recent years this has included Munich and Nuremberg, Berlin and Krakow.

Destinations

In recent years students have gone on to read History or related courses at Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Manchester and Bristol amongst other universities.