“Geography is a subject that which holds the key to our future.”

Michael Palin

Intent

At Runnymede St Edward’s Primary School, we aim to provide an ambitious geography curriculum that inspires, challenges and supports children’s understanding of the world around them. Our curriculum is centred around the 8 Edmund Rice Essentials and teaching key concepts such as place, space, scale, environment, interconnections, physical and human processes. Our curriculum provides our Young Edwardians with core knowledge, fieldwork opportunities and geographical skills that inspire a love for learning. The intent for geography at Runnymede St Edward’s is to deliver the national curriculum in an engaging and exciting way. Runnymede will begin Phase 1 of the Opening Worlds Humanities Curriculum for Years 3, 4  and 5 to ensure a knowledge rich and high-quality geography curriculum. Our aim is to roll this out to remaining year groups in the foreseeable future.

Implementation

Our school focuses on developing the skills necessary for children to understand the changes of the world around them and the impact that they have on the world. Taught as an independent subject, we will deliver a progressive curriculum that builds on key knowledge and skills from Understanding the World in Early Years Foundation Stage through to the primary curriculum. Geography is a thriving subject in our school. Our teaching and learning instil a sense of awe and wonder of the world and enables our pupils to become life-long learners and citizens of our planet, with a responsibility to care and protect this precious gift. We aim to live out the ‘Education and Justice for All’ essential by teaching our children to ‘care for each other and our world’. 

Teachers become a catalyst and role model through their appreciation and enthusiasm for the subject, sparking the children’s love of learning. We stimulate children ‘s minds by asking them challenging questions and encouraging them to retrieve core knowledge to demonstrate a deep understanding of current issues and topics. From Y1 to Y6 our Young Edwardians revisit previous learning and are encouraged to make connections across subjects and year groups in order to deepen their knowledge and understanding. This is implicit in our planning and evident through our rigorous assessment. Furthermore, fantastic enriching experiences through our educational learning visits help pupils apply classroom learning in real contexts and are a great opportunity for children to talk about what they have learned.

Impact

Children at Runnymede St Edward’s will be able to know more and remember more as they progress through the geography curriculum. We assess the children’s knowledge of geographical language and concepts by setting retrieval tasks at the beginning of new units of study and low stakes quizzes midpoint during the unit of work. At the end of each year group, teachers use the curriculum to assess children against key objectives that we would like each child to have mastered before moving on to the next year group or phase of learning. All the objectives form part of our teaching throughout the year.

Children will gain a good understanding of geographical concepts and develop an understanding of the environment that shapes the world that we live in today. They will develop skills such as problem solving, asking and answering questions, collecting data, testing and evaluating hypotheses as well as developing a sense of intrigue. The children will be well equipped to use these skills across other areas of learning that will allow them to progress in their learning as they move away from primary education into Key Stage 3 and for life in the wider world. We are beginning to develop a strong working relationship with our preferred feeder school, St Edward’s College and collaborate with the Geography department to develop common curriculum goals and aspects of fieldwork. This enables Geography leaders in both schools to plan for progression across key stages and ensure children are well prepared for their transition into Year 7.

At Runnymede St Edward's Primary School, we follow the Opening Worlds curriculum for Geography and History in Years 3, 4 Year 5. Children in the Summer term of Year 2 are introduced to the History Curriculum 

In 2023-24, Years 4 and Year 5 will be following the same Opening Worlds curriculum schemes of work. This is because the Opening Worlds curriculum is carefully sequenced, knowledge rich and contains so much high quality vocabulary. 

Pupils need to have the accessed the previous year group's learning in order to be successful and rise to the challenge of the understanding the content and using geographical skills. This curriculum ensures that clear links are made between each of the two subjects and that the knowledge and skills learned are thoughtfully retrieved in each session.