At Northern House Academy, our Geography curriculum is built around and underpinned by our School values. As such our approach is designed around understanding the needs of each individual child, is unapologetic in its high expectation, knowing that our children are not defined by their needs but instead viewed with the positivity they need in order to be nurtured both emotionally and academically, it is consistent in order to enable a safe environment where our pupils are empowered to take risks and experience success and it must be a Geography curriculum that promotes the simple pleasure of happiness.
At Northern House Academy we believe that a high-quality geography curriculum should be one that inspires pupils’ curiosity and fascination about the world around them. We believe that geography teaching should provide our pupils with knowledge and skills about the world, its places, resources, diverse cultures and the people who inhabit it, and to enable our pupils to develop an inquiring mind and a love of geography. Our Geography curriculum is taught through our thematic approaches to learning to ensure that our pupils incorporate their learning of natural and human environments into their existing understanding of the world. This will enable them to apply their knowledge of the world around them in a meaningful and robust manner. We ensure that our pupils use their own locality and understanding as key starting points to support them in broadening their experiences of the world. We enrich our geography curriculum with a range of activities, field trips and visits designed to both support our pupils developing cultural capital, but also enhance and strengthen their practical geographical skills and knowledge .
Pupils are taught geography in line with the full depth and breadth of the national curriculum. We make good use of our geographical location. For example when exploring the Thematic Learning Topic of ‘Our Street’ pupils in the top end of the Academy can spend time visiting local areas such as Cowley Road in Oxford to explore the impact of human and physical geography by undertaking a local area study. We can then also link this to our artwork exploring ‘street art’ and the murals that are so Iconic to ‘Cowley Road’. We have also thought about how to make meaningful connections to communities that differ from our own by establishing links to rural village primary schools and comparing their experiences to that of our own in an urban setting.
Coverage includes:
Location and place – The location of the world’s continents, countries and places, and the key physical and human characteristics of each.
Geographical scale – Considering the local, national and global scale and understanding how causes and effects occur at all scales.
Interconnections – How are the human and physical worlds connected? How are different locations connected at different scales?
- A balanced view of the countries of the world, to address misconceptions and negative stereotypes.
- Explicit teaching of core disciplinary knowledge, and the ability to approach challenging, geographically-valid questions.
- Geographical enquiry skills have sequenced across the year groups and, where appropriate, review and build on relevant knowledge that is first taught in mathematics or science, such as interpreting line graphs or setting hypotheses.
- Opportunities to undertake fieldwork, outside the classroom and virtually. Fieldwork is purposeful, and either gives pupils the opportunity to explicitly practise relevant disciplinary knowledge or to reinforce substantive knowledge.
To support our pupils developing knowledge, we assess our pupils against National Curriculum Attainment Targets using the Northern House Academy ‘Learning Objective Descriptors’. These enable our teachers to choose learning objectives for their pupils that are well matched to their development and ensure progression of skills across galleries and key stages within our academy.