Measuring historical significance

This half term, I’m going to work with my Year 7 class on historical significance.  As a starting point, I’ve been revisiting Partington’s criteria for measuring historical significance and thinking about how they might be meaningfully applied by twelve year olds.  As a result, I’ve developed the chart below which I hope the students will be able to use to measure the significance of the Norman invasion.  The possibilities for this approach go much further though.  There is ample scope to use it to measure and compare the significance of different events in the past, key individuals and discoveries.  It could even be used to measure and compare the significance of an individual or event at different points in history – perhaps somebody like Alfred the Great, whose perceived significance has varied over time.