Geography

“The study of geography is about more than just memorizing places on a map. It’s about understanding the complexity of our world, appreciating the diversity of cultures that exists across continents. And in the end, it’s about using all that knowledge to help bridge divides and bring people together.”

– Barack Obama

Key Stage 3

Our Geography curriculum is designed to develop children’s curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. We aim to teach them powerful geographical knowledge and skills in order to enable them to become responsible global citizens. In Key Stage 3 we focus on developing student ability to “think like a geographer.”

We specify the geographical knowledge we expect students to know, this are in the context of broader topic enquiry we undertake.

Year 7

• How do I investigate the world like a geographer?
• How are populations changing?
• Should we control migration?
• How do rivers shape the landscape and lives?
• Is earth running out of natural resources?
• FW: Investigating Rivers

Year 8

• What is an economy?
• What are development and inequality?
• What happens where land meets the sea?
•  What are the challenges and opportunities facing Africa?
• How is Asia being transformed?
• FW: Investigating coasts

Year 9

• Can we ever know enough about natural hazards to live safely?
• Why is solving climate change going to be difficult?
• What is the future of our food supply?
• How significant is the US, Mexico border?
• How does ice shape the world?
• Why is the Middle East an important world region?
• Big Geography question investigation

To create conceptual coherence across the curriculum we return and ask students to reflect on four big Geography questions?

1. Why is place important?
2. How are people, place and processes interconnected?
3. What are the geographical impacts of current events/actions?
4. How can we use data to investigate people, places and processes?

 NB: “Geographical impacts mean social, economic, environmental, short term, long term, local, national global, impacts and views on different groups of people. We look at events (e.g. earthquakes) and actions (deforestation) through “Geographers goggles”- training students to think like geographers.

Our curriculum is challenging however through sharing resources and embedding differentiation into lesson we ensure everyone can access and feel challenged by the curriculum. Through specifying the knowledge we expect students to know we can revisit key geographical processes over time e.g. migration is introduction in Year 7 – rural to urban migration and then we build through complexity e.g. mass migration in North Africa in Year 8 and climate refugees in Year 9.

We are ambitious creating a breadth of knowledge about the world beyond the remit of GCSE- e.g. we examine blood diamonds in Sierra Leone and Piracy in Somalia as impacts of inequality. We also teach subjects that we chose not to at GCSE e.g. “What is the future of our food supply?” and “How has ice shaped the world?” We focus on learning processes and issues affecting places rather than a country by country perspective because the theme of interconnection between people, place and process is at the heart of our KS3 curriculum.