Geography

Trust Curriculum Intent

Our mission is to provide a cradle to career education that allows our children to enjoy lives of choice and opportunity. By the age of 18, we want every child to have the option of university or a high quality alternative. 

Subject Curriculum Intent

Geography at Brigshaw teaches pupils to engage and care for both their local and global environment, giving them an understanding of their role as a global citizen.  An appreciation and understanding of the natural world is vital in order for them to become future decision makers.  

Geography is unique in that it investigates the role humans play in changing their environment on both local and global scales.  Therefore, geography at Brigshaw to build a curiosity and fascination of the world immediately around them and far further afield. Through the carefully-sequenced accumulation of knowledge, a deeper engagement and understanding of the wider world and our place within it is reached.  Exciting trips and activities along with engaging subject content challenge students to understand complex ideas and academic concepts in a dynamic and unpredictable world.  This includes tackling common misconceptions such as “Africa is poor” or challenging and questioning perceptions and perspectives. Through their understanding of themselves as powerful global citizens they grow in their understanding and appreciation of others, and build upon their self esteem. 

Curriculum Principles

• Reverse Planning in Geography means that the knowledge required by students at GCSE, A Level and in Higher Education is catalogued and positioned as the end goal so that lessons right from the very beginning of Year 7 build towards it. The curriculum journey follows key strands which allow for breadth of content and contexts but also depth of conceptual understanding as each unit builds on the knowledge used in the ones before.

• Powerful Knowledge is developed in the geography curriculum by highlighting the key concepts that feed through all units of work and encouraging students to apply what they learn to local contexts (such as considering local council planning and policy) and global concerns beyond their current experience (such as the developing economy of Indonesia and what this means for the rest of the world). 

• Cultural Capital is developed in the geography curriculum by exploring current affairs both at a local and international levels across our curriculum, to ensure students are learning about real time events locally, nationally and internationally.  Additionally, students have the opportunity to participate in a range of field trips both locally and internationally during their time as Brigshaw geographers.

• Substantive (“Know That”) knowledge is developed in the geography curriculum by developing knowledge of place, of human and physical processes, of location and of what geographers do (including the tools they use to do it.) This has been mapped carefully through our curriculum to ensure knowledge strands from Year 7 feed into lessons up into A Level lessons and the complexity of the content which students engage with increases cumulatively. Key words are highlighted and collected along the way to signpost the development of this knowledge. Our curriculum is ambitious and allows students to study diverse places, people, resources and natural and human environments. Through this, our students will know more and remember more over time. 

• Procedural and Disciplinary (“Know How”) Knowledge is developed in the geography curriculum by developing our students to think like geographers. They consider a variety of scales, levels of development, perspectives, interactions and interdependencies and ethics. Students are encouraged, from Year 7, to think critically and evaluatively to make informed conclusions and formulate reasoned opinions. 

• Cognitive Psychology is developed in the geography curriculum by planning lessons which check for prior learning and use the information gathered to integrate new knowledge more successfully. We embed the same strong lesson stages and routines as our colleagues in other subjects to free up working memory capacity to take on that new knowledge and we interleave curriculum content so that it gets revisited at key points where otherwise, if they didn’t use it, they would lose it. 

What will this look like at implementation?

Please use the links below to explore how our curriculum looks, for each year group, as a result of these guiding principles

How can you support students’ learning from home?

When travelling as a family, have discussions about the environment: how rural or urban is it? How affluent? Why might this be?

Take day-trips to local tourist attractions: Brimham rocks or the coast, for instance.

When geographical issues arise in the news, ask your young person whether they know much about what might have contributed towards them - can they recall and apply any knowledge they have gained in school?

GCSE Bitesize offers excellent support for KS4 geography

National Geographic offer publications for all age groups in order to broaden exposure to what geographers do.

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