Key Stage 1 history · Significant individuals

KS1 significant people: Caxton, Berners-Lee, Bruegel and Lowry

In Key Stage 1, children learn about a few people from the past who changed the world or the way we see it, and they compare them with one another. Many schools choose William Caxton and Tim Berners-Lee, who each changed how information is shared, and the painters Pieter Bruegel the Elder and LS Lowry, who showed ordinary working people in very different times and places. The aim is not to memorise dates but to place each person on a timeline and notice what has stayed the same and what has changed.

Communicators and artists from the past, explained

The National Curriculum asks children in Years 1 and 2 to learn about the lives of significant individuals who contributed to national and international achievements, and to use some of them to compare aspects of life in different periods. The programme of study only suggests examples, and they are non-statutory, so schools choose who to teach. Caxton and Berners-Lee, and Bruegel and Lowry, are one popular selection. If your child’s school has picked other people, the same skills apply: who was this person, when did they live, what did they do, and why do we still talk about them?

William Caxton was an English merchant who learned about printing while living abroad and brought a printing press to England. He set it up at Westminster in 1476, so he lived more than five hundred years ago. Before printing, every book had to be copied out by hand, which took months and made books rare and expensive. A press could make many copies of the same page quickly. Tim Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist who, while working at a science laboratory in Switzerland, suggested in 1989 a way of sharing linked pages of information between computers. The first websites followed in the early 1990s. Children can compare the two: both found a way for far more people to read the same information, but they lived about five hundred years apart.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was a painter from the Low Countries, the area that is now Belgium and the Netherlands. He worked in the 1500s and is famous for lively paintings of villagers working, feasting, skating on frozen ponds and playing games. “The Elder” tells him apart from his son Pieter Bruegel the Younger, who was also a painter. LS Lowry lived from 1887 to 1976 and spent most of his life in and around Salford and Manchester. He painted mills, chimneys and crowded streets, filled with small, simply drawn figures. Both artists chose to paint ordinary people rather than kings and queens, which is why teachers like to compare them.

Underneath the names, children are practising three historical skills. They place people in order on a timeline, using words such as before, after, long ago and a hundred years ago, and in Year 2 they often meet the idea of a century. They notice similarities and differences between ways of life. And they begin to see that we find out about the past from sources, such as a printed page, a painting, a photograph or a website, and that each one shows the past in its own way. A painting is one person’s view, not a photograph, so children are encouraged to ask what it can tell us and what it cannot.

Words your child will hear

Significant: Important enough that people still remember and talk about them or their work.
Timeline: A line that puts events and people in the order they happened.
Century: A hundred years. The 1500s are the sixteenth century.
Printing press: A machine that presses inked letters onto paper so many copies of a page can be made.
Website: A set of linked pages that you can look at on a screen.
Source: Anything that helps us find out about the past, such as a book, painting, photograph or object.
Compare: To look at two things and say what is the same and what is different.

What the National Curriculum says

The programme of study for Key Stage 1 says:

Pupils should be taught about the lives of significant individuals in the past who have contributed to national and international achievements, some should be used to compare aspects of life in different periods
Pupils should know where the people and events they study fit within a chronological framework and identify similarities and differences between ways of life in different periods.
Pupils should understand some of the ways in which we find out about the past and identify different ways in which it is represented.

Objectives from the National Curriculum in England, © Crown copyright, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

A worked example: comparing two paintings

Look at a Bruegel painting of villagers in the snow and a Lowry painting of workers walking home from a mill. How are they the same and how are they different?

Look carefully first and say what you can see. In the Bruegel painting there are hunters with their dogs, villagers skating on frozen ponds, steep roofs and snow. In the Lowry painting there are tall chimneys, long rows of brick houses and many small dark figures walking along a street.
Find what is the same. Both paintings show ordinary people rather than kings or queens. Both show people outdoors, and both show how people worked and spent their time.
Find what is different. Bruegel’s people live in a snowy countryside village and are hunting and playing. Lowry’s people live in an industrial town and are going to or from a factory. Bruegel painted in the 1500s and Lowry in the 1900s, so the paintings are several hundred years apart.
Ask what the paintings cannot tell us. An artist chooses what to show, and Lowry often made up scenes from things he had seen, so a painting is not the same as a photograph. We would need other sources to check what life was really like.

Both artists painted ordinary people, but Bruegel showed villagers in the countryside in the 1500s, while Lowry showed workers in a northern town in the 1900s. The paintings help us find out about the past, but they only show what each artist chose to paint.

Common mistakes and how to help

“The internet and the World Wide Web are the same thing”

Adults use the two words as if they mean the same, so children do too.

What helps: Say that the internet is the network that connects computers, a bit like roads, and the web is the collection of pages and links that people travel to along it. Berners-Lee invented the web, which runs on the internet, not the internet itself.

“William Caxton invented printing”

A story about the first person to do something is easy to remember, so “brought printing to England” turns into “invented it”.

What helps: Explain that printing with metal letters was already used in Europe before Caxton, and printing of other kinds was used much earlier elsewhere in the world. Caxton’s part was bringing it to England and printing books in English.

“Lowry painted matchstick figures because he couldn’t draw people”

His figures look simple, and children measure skill by how realistic a picture is.

What helps: Lowry was a trained artist who chose this style on purpose. Ask your child why an artist might paint tiny, similar figures: to show how crowded a street was, or how alike the workers’ days were.

Putting everyone from the past into one lump called “long ago”

At this age a hundred years and five hundred years can both feel like “ages”.

What helps: Make a physical timeline and keep returning to it. Caxton came first, then Bruegel, then Lowry, then Berners-Lee, and the gaps between them are very different.

How to help at home

Make a washing-line timeline. Peg pictures or names of people from the past along a piece of string, in order. Add family members and your child’s own birthday at the end. Moving a card to the right place is better practice than being told the order.
Spot printed words. Look at a book, a cereal box and a leaflet and talk about how each was made. Ask your child how long it would take to copy a whole book by hand, and why people were pleased when printing arrived.
Paint a busy street. Paint or draw your own street, filled with small figures doing different jobs. Then ask your child what someone in 500 years’ time might learn from it, and what they might get wrong.
Stamp your own page. An adult cuts a potato in half and carves a simple letter, such as L or F, into the flat side. Your child presses it into paint and stamps it on paper. Notice that the letter has to be carved back to front to print the right way round, just as a printer’s metal letters were. Stamping the same shape again and again shows why printing was faster than writing every letter by hand.
Compare two ways to share news. Ask your child to tell a relative something by posting a hand-written card and by sending a message on a screen. Talk about which is quicker, which lasts longer and what each one is like to receive.