Geography

In Geography at Broughton, we want to inspire in pupils a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with them for the rest of their lives. Our aim is to provide a rich and knowledge-based Geography curriculum which allows our pupils to have an improved knowledge of the world, a better understanding of how it works and the geographical skills to support their understanding. Ultimately, we want our pupils to be thoughtful global citizens, understand what is going on around them and understand how they can choose to make a difference.

In Geography at Broughton pupils will:

• learn the processes that change the physical world around them and the resulting landforms.
• learn how people make space into places and how we organise space and society.
• learn how we make sense of others and ourselves in our locality, country and the world.
• learn about the connections between the human and the physical worlds.
• begin to understand their position in the world.
• begin to understand their rights and responsibilities as a global citizen.
• look at the world through different “lenses”.
• acquire knowledge and skills through experiences such as fieldwork which will serve to boost Cultural Capital.

Approaches to Teaching and Learning in Geography

The Geography curriculum follows a spiral approach with geographical language, skills, understanding and application ever evolving and developing over time. Our approach ensures that threshold concepts are taught early and revisited frequently.

Human and Physical Geography are as equally weighted as possible and pupils are to develop learning from both sides of the discipline. This is applied through KS3 and GCSE to provide over time a varied and balanced curriculum.

We understand the tension between wanting pupils to have an in-depth understanding of given examples or a broad knowledge of different places around the world, but if we focus on the latter, we risk creating poor geographers. By returning to the same location in different contexts, we allow for retrieval practice to strengthen recall. We have included a limited number of case studies at KS3 that we do not study at GCSE, as we believe they provide the pupils with a different perspective and comparison of an event that they are very unlikely to have first-hand experience of.

Fieldwork is crucial part of Geography and we have a developed a number of opportunities in our curriculum for pupils to gather their own data first-hand. We believe it is vital that all pupils have the opportunity to investigate the world around them.

Geography Department Staff

Mrs R Wortley - Head of Geography
Mr M Florentine - Specialist Teacher of Geography
Miss K Wright - Specialist Teacher of Geography/Travel & Tourism

Lessons

Year 7 ... 2 hours per week ... approx. 72 hours

Year 8 ... 1 hour 20 minutes per week ... approx. 52 hours

Year 9 ... 1 hour 20 minutes per week ... approx. 52 hours

Year 10/11 GCSE 2/3 or 3/2 hours per week ... approx. 170 hours