Geography – Intent, Implementation and Impact

Intent:

Through our geography curriculum, we aim to expand our children’s geographical vocabulary, promote a deep understanding of their local environment and increase their knowledge and curiosity of the diverse wider world and its people.

We deliver a curriculum that:

• Inspires curiosity and fascination about the wider world and its people.
• Equips our children with an understanding of diverse places, people, resources and environments around them.
• Allows our children to build upon their prior learning.
• Provides subject specific language so that they can describe, question and discuss the world around them.
• Encourages exploration of their environment through human and physical processes and challenges children to make connections between their local surroundings and that of a contrasting area.
• Uses the local area and community to develop geographical skills and knowledge.

Implementation:

The Geography programme of study provided by the National Curriculum has been broken down to ensure both progression and coverage across EYFS, Ks1 and KS2.

The teaching and learning of the curriculum follows:

• A geography progression of skills for each year group, that is organised into locational knowledge; place knowledge; human and physical; and geographical skills and fieldwork.
• An exciting theme with an ‘Enquiry’ question to build knowledge and skills and links to other curriculum areas.
• Motivating experiences to further engage our learners, including visiting experts; outdoor learning in our local area; and fieldwork trips.
•  Continuous CPD for teachers to ensure their skills and knowledge are developed to teach the skills confidently and accurately.

Impact:

• Assessing children’s understanding of the geographical vocabulary before and after the unit.
• Measured through a variety of ways: questioning during lesson time, adult marking of children’s written work, children’s view on how well they have understood and met the objective and child-led discussions.
• Our children will be confident geographers, able to clearly discuss their learning from past and current topics with appropriate geographical vocabulary.
• Clear progression of skills across KS1 and KS2 that builds on prior knowledge that can be demonstrated in the children’s work.
• Continued training and support for teachers ensuring they are experts in the subjects that they teach.
• Subject coordinator will monitor, evaluate and review the teaching and learning through learning walks, book scrutinies and discussions with the pupils frequently across the academic year.
• Assessments and monitoring will show standards in Geography will be high and will match standards in other subject areas.
• The school environment will be geography rich through displays, resources, vocabulary, etc.
• Geography is assessed at the end of each geographical topic, using the specific year’s end points, stating whether children are working towards or exceeding age-related expectations. This is then used to make sure all children are continuing to make progress and any children whose levels drop, or increase can be addressed accordingly.