Curriculum

• Geography prepares young people with the knowledge, skills and understanding to make sense of their world and to face the challenges that will shape our societies and environments at the local, national and global scales.’ Dr Rita Gardner

In geography we aim to deliver a curriculum that is broad and balanced in order for students to have the knowledge they need to succeed in life.

Though their study of geography we want:

• To provide students with the knowledge and skills to understand both the human and physical processes which shape and impact their daily lives at a range of scales (local and global)
• To develop students enquiry skills by deepening their reasoning, data interpretation, justification of viewpoints and undertaking of fieldwork.
• To build an environment where pupils become active learners who have the confidence to question and debate their view with other members of the school community.
• To ensure that when students leave our care they are global citizens who have a deep understanding of how their actions can have a lasting effects on both the natural and human world.
• To prepare students for the next stage in their education by creating resilient learners who can reflect on their own successes and failures.

Our geography curriculum will:

• Place the concept of interleaving at its core with the eight key themes of landscapes, weather and climate, ecosystems, hazards, climate change, natural resources, population, development and sustainability (which all feature heavily at GCSE). By removing conventional topics and replacing them with enquiry questions students can build on prior learning at multiple points throughout the course, deepening students understanding whilst not simply just bring down knowledge.
• Be challenging focusing on the concepts at KS3 that students traditionally find the most difficult.
• Focus on deepening students understanding of their local environment. This allows students to have comparative context when studying new places. As students generally are not widely travelled at Moorside, their locality, at a range of scales (Stoke, Staffordshire and UK), can act as a levelling base for all students.
• Provide students with a more comprehensive understanding of place by not only focusing on the key geographical events but the context behind them, thinking synoptically about both human and physical geography.
• Constantly evolve with staff to teach the most contemporary geography in terms of academic theory and place specific examples. As a result CPD will be a continual focus for all staff within the department.

A new KS3 curriculum was introduced in September 2020 that was designed to take students through a story of the Earth. Historically students within the school have struggled to contextualise places outside of their own lived experiences. As a result their understanding of the geography within a place is only superficial which makes place comparison difficult. To this end the new KS3 curriculum has been ordered by place, interleaving themes to give students a deeper understanding of the human and physical geography within an area (city, country or continent). 

At the start of year 7 students will look in detail at their own locality of Stoke-on-Trent and how this fits in to the UK. Within the first topic all students will revisit skills which should have been covered at KS2 (previous baseline assessments have shown that these vary between pupils) to provide all students with the same foundations. The curriculum then moves onto the impact of the EU, changes in the Arctic, human and physical interactions in the US before ending in year 7 on environmental issues in Borneo. All of these stories all contain geographical issues which are current and impactful on students’ lives. 

Year 8 continue to build on the knowledge, understanding and skills previously learnt. 8 key themes have been chosen which mimic the themes found at GCSE and are evenly split between human and physical geography to make the curriculum both broad and balanced.