OCR SHP GCSE B
British thematic study20%• The People’s health• Crime and punishment• Migrants to Britain
British depth study20%
• The Norman Conquest• Elizabethan England• Britain in Peace and War
History around us20%
• Any site that meets given criteria
World period study20%
• Viking expansion• The Mughal Empire• The Making of America
World depth study20%
• The First Crusade• Aztecs and the Spanish Conquest• Living under Nazi Rule
Paper 11 ¾ hours
Paper 31 ¾ hours
Paper 21 hour
Meaningful history
Deliberate diversity
Clarity and coherence
History around us
Enjoyable, rigorous learning
Recent scholarship
OCR B (SHP) Principles
Carole Rawcliffe
Living under Nazi Rule, 1933-1945
•Dictatorship
•Control and Opposition, 1933-1939
•Changing Lives, 1933-1939
•Germany in War
•Occupation
Historical Enquiry
• The headings for the four sections in the thematic studies and the five sections for the period and depth studies are the starting point for planning.
• Turn the section headings into rigorous and engaging enquiries to provide a clear focus for students’ learning.
1. How did the Nazis take total control of Germany so quickly?
2. How tight was the Nazi grip on German people?
3. How can we best summarise the changing lives of German people, 1933-1939 ?
4. Germany in War5. What did the Nazi occupation
mean for different people?
Outline and Depth
• The bullet points in each section have been carefully constructed to indicate the knowledge which students should develop. Some bullet points cover a sweep of time while others focus closely on a particular event or situation.
• Make sure each bullet point receives broadly the same teaching time. Students should develop outline knowledge through some bullets and detailed knowledge through others.
Medieval Britain c.1250-c.1500
• The characteristic features of medieval Britain: an overview
• Living conditions: housing, food, clean water and waste
• Responses to the Black Death: beliefs and actions• Approaches to public health in late medieval
towns and monasteries
1 23
4 5 6
7 8 910
Your own stuff!
• Bullet points deliberately do not try to pin down the content in too much detail. In the exams, students will be rewarded for any valid knowledge which they deploy in response to a question.
• You therefore have the freedom to focus on people, places, events and situations which are of particular interest to you and your students.
Keith Wrightson
It is all too easy to homogenise past societies and people, sometimes to the point of caricature, for the purpose of constructing neat paradigms to compare and contrast with, and flatter, our own ‘modernity’. But that is a product of narcissism rather than of history. Their lives were as complex as our own, their emotional palettes as rich, and their range of responses as varied.
Keith Wrightson, Ralph Tailor’s Summer, p. 159