Intent

At St. Leonard’s Primary School, our geography curriculum aims to fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum for geography; providing a broad, balanced, ambitious and inclusive curriculum whilst also ensuring the progressive development of geographical concepts, knowledge and skills. We aim to inspire a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people that will remain with our pupils for the rest of their lives. Our curriculum will equip pupils with a knowledge of diverse places and people, together with a deep understanding of our planet’s key physical and human processes. We want our curriculum to empower children with a deep understanding of local, national and global ecological issues and provide them with the necessary knowledge to make positive change.

Implementation

Learning knowledge is not an endpoint in itself, it is a springboard to learning more knowledge. Each unit in our overview is underpinned by rich, substantive knowledge and ambitious vocabulary, whilst also ensuring children are developing their disciplinary knowledge (geographical skills). Each unit of work is planned carefully to ensure concepts are taught in optimal order to support children's understanding. As well as developing a breadth of geographical knowledge, we want our children to become skilful geographers. Each unit of work has an emphasis on geographical enquiry where children investigate geographically framed questions. In addition to substantive and disciplinary knowledge, children will develop their experiential knowledge through carefully planned fieldwork. 

Some units are essentially human geography; others physical geography, but most are holistic geography. Place studies start local and increase in scale to regional, national and global, allowing for revisiting, developing and challenging ideas and concepts. Similarly, consideration of the weather and seasons progresses to a more in-depth study of the importance of climate and finally addresses protecting environments from global warming and combating climate change. Knowledge and key geographical concepts sit at the core of our curriculum to ensure the defining characteristics of the subject are ever-present.

Geography is taught each term and alternates with history.