Intent

Our geography curriculum strikes a balance between being knowledge rich and also having a skills based approach. We want our children to develop incredible outcomes in geography but we want them to achieve this by being intellectually curious and pushing and overcoming their own boundaries to become more well rounded geographers. We want to produce geographers who are individualistic, risk taking and have an inquisitiveness about local and wider geographical issues. We firmly believe that our children should have access to a deep, exciting geography curriculum which allows them to explore and talk about wider geographical and social issues linked to geography like climate change.

Aims of the curriculum

The overall aim of our geography curriculum is to inspire a curiosity about the world and the people who inhabit it. To achieve this we aim to give a diverse range of places, people and environments to enhance that curiosity. With these examples we hope that children begin to understand the knowledge and the complicated relationship between human geography and physical geography that changes regularly over time. This is to highlight people and environments working in tandem and when treated fairly both can benefit.  

We also strongly believe that for our children to deeply develop their geographical skills, they need to be out doing fieldwork. This will allow them to apply what they are learning in the classroom and apply it to the real world. Using fieldwork is a great way of getting our children to think like a geographer and how this can affect their local area and expand it to more global issues. We want our children to have experiences with different ranges of geographical sources like maps and diagrams. With these experiences it allows our children to communicate their geographical information in a variety of ways. 

Implementation

When it comes to implementing geography into our school curriculum we are striving for our children to be the best version of themselves. We want to celebrate their successes and help them grow into independent geographers by the time they leave us. We believe that the best way to achieve this is having a knowledge based curriculum and with our mode of creative learning. With creative learning it allows our children to build upon the knowledge they already know and is constantly building up their knowledge banks which they can link back everytime they do a geography based activity.

For this to be achieved we follow the CUSP curriculum for geography that is used from Year 1 to Year 6. In EYFS we follow the ‘understanding the world’ strands of development matters for geography.

One of the key strengths of CUSP which fits within our vision for geography is it has a clear focus on making connections to prior learning as children go through the school. This helps our children build upon the foundational knowledge which then allows them to retrieve and use this geographical knowledge in other contexts. A good example of this is in Year 1 where they learn about the countries and capital cities of the UK, this sets the children in good stead for Year 2 where they compare an area of the UK with another area of the world.

At the heart of our geography curriculum is the cultural capital, we feel this to be incredibly important for our children to become important ambassadors and members of our community. In geography this is achieved mainly through field work, this allows our children to get a better understanding of their local area and the geographical impact around them. It also brings the learning that has been done in the classroom to life which makes it more relevant and meaningful to them.

Impact

In key stage 1 and EYFS, we use a virtual portfolio programme called evidence me. The teachers put up evidence of the children’s work along with comments about what the activity is and comments made by the children. This is a good source of evidence for the younger years and we hope to include more comments made by the children about their work to ensure they have learnt the learning objectives of that geography activity. In key stage 2, the children collate evidence in their learning journey books, these with the knowledge notes from CUSP make it clear what they work is about and what knowledge are the children learning from this.

We try to do a lot of points of impact with the children as in the moment we get the best outcomes for geography and encourage the children to have those geographical discussions with their peers and teachers. We also use other methods to measure the impact, we use the curriculum outcomes to assess the success of the learning opportunities for our children. We use the end of topic quizzes to assess their knowledge in the moment and can be used to see if that knowledge has been retained.

When children leave our school, we aim for them to be ready to go into high school, armed with the appropriate geographical knowledge and skills for them to succeed. Children will be able to work independently and with their peers and also be reflective in how they view their work. We want our children to be inquisitive learners, with a respect to all communities and people and become a significant part of a growing global community that will combat the growing global problems.