Intent

A high-quality Geography education should inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Teaching should equip pupils with knowledge about diverse places, people, resources and natural and human environments, together with a deep understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes. As pupils progress, their growing knowledge about the world should help them to deepen their understanding of the interaction between physical and human processes, and of the formation and use of landscapes and environments. Geographical knowledge, understanding and skills provide the frameworks and approaches that explain how the Earth’s features at different scales are shaped, interconnected and change over time.

Aims

The National Curriculum for Geography aims to ensure that all pupils:

• Develop contextual knowledge of the location of globally significant places – both terrestrial and marine – including their defining physical and human characteristics and how these provide a geographical context for understanding the actions of processes  
• Understand the processes that give rise to key physical and human geographical features of the world, how these are interdependent and how they bring about spatial variation and change over time
• Are competent in the geographical skills needed to:  collect, analyse and communicate with a range of data gathered through experiences of fieldwork that deepen their understanding of geographical processes,  interpret a range of sources of geographical information, including maps, diagrams, globes, aerial photographs and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) 
• communicate geographical information in a variety of ways, including through maps, numerical and quantitative skills and writing at length

Implementation 

The Geography curriculum is carefully and coherently sequenced to enable our children to develop a growing knowledge of the themes outlined above. Pupils’ knowledge builds towards clearly defined end points so everyone knows what we expect our pupils to achieve by the end of each topic, each year and each key stage. To meet the educational needs of our school community we have selected the following core knowledge concepts as a focus for our teaching. These are explored in increasing depth as pupils move through the school.

•   Location, mapping, human (including land use) and physical features, changes over time, capital cities, continents, oceans, weather & climate, industry, field work

In Reception class Geography is taught as part of the ‘Understanding the World’- ‘The World’ area of learning within the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum. Further details of how the Early Years curriculum is organised can be found on our Early Years policy.

In Years 1 to 6 Geography is taught as a discrete subject, though meaningful links are made with other subjects in our curriculum, for example, Maths-Mapping skills, Science-The Water Cycle.  The topics we teach are outlined in the curriculum map for Geography (see Appendix 1). This is published on our website.

To support high quality knowledge rich lessons, the school subscribes annually to Digimap-A digital mapping service. All teaching materials are adapted to meet the requirements of our Christian vision and curriculum intent.