We believe that our children deserve a broad and ambitious geography curriculum, rich in knowledge and skills. Our curriculum is designed to provide our children with the subject specific language they need to describe, understand and formulate meaningful questions about landscapes, climates, elements of human geography and cultures and their impact on the world. The curriculum is sequenced to ensure that pupils revisit concepts with increasing sophistication as they move from year to year and from EYFS to KS1 and KS2. Key concepts and themes such as climate, physical geography, human influence and the impact of geography on human culture are interwoven. The curriculum offer is suitably challenging and carefully adapted to ensure that all pupils can secure the core knowledge and skills required for future learning.    

Implementation

The Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum supports children’s understanding of geography through the planning and teaching of ‘Understanding the World.’ In the early years, children acquire the building blocks of an understanding of place, space and scale; they describe their immediate environment using knowledge from observation, discussion, stories, non-fiction texts and maps; ​children are taught to explore the natural world around them, making observations and drawing pictures of animals and plants;​ they begin to know some similarities and differences between the natural world around them and contrasting environments drawing on their experiences and what has been read to them in class; they start to understand some important processes and changes in the natural world around them, including the seasons and weather.  

In Key Stage One, pupils develop an awareness of the world as a diverse place, using common words and phrases relating to the passing of time, building on their prior learning in the EYFS. They enrich the complexity of their use of maps starting to understand different scales. Pupils use a constantly increasing vocabulary of geographical terms and a range of sources such as maps, texts, videos and realia to develop their understanding of the diversity and connectedness of the world. They learn about a range of distinctive places and environments around the world.     

Key Stage Two builds on the foundations constructed in EYFS and Key Stage One. At Black Torrington Primary School we use a four year rolling programme to enable children to have access to a high quality curriculum in each year group. 

The curriculum is deliberately ambitious. It challenges pupils to make connections across time and place and sets up pupils for, we hope, a life-long love and understanding of an important subject, enables students to:

• Discover new ways of thinking
• Better explain and understand the natural and social worlds
• Think about alternative futures and what they could do to influence them
• Have some power over their own knowledge
• Be able to engage in current debates of significance
• Go beyond the limits of their personal experience 

(Mark Enser in ‘Powerful Geography’ 2021)​​​​​​​

Impact
Outcomes in topic booklets and literacy books, evidence a broad and balanced geography curriculum and demonstrate children’s acquisition of identified key knowledge. Children review their successes in achieving the lesson objectives at the end of every session and are actively encouraged to reflect upon previous terms learning. Children also record what they have learned comparative to their starting points at the end of every topic – through end of unit assessment tasks.

​As children progress throughout the school, they develop a deep knowledge, understanding an appreciation of their local area and its place within the wider geographical context. Where possible, children are offered opportunities to learn about careers related to geography from members of the local and wider community with specialist skills and knowledge, ensuring that they are well prepared for the next steps of their education.