Geography

Subject Knowledge Overview

Subject Roadmap

How do we teach Geography?

Intent:

"The best education in geography is found on the ground, not just in the classroom."
– Doreen Massey, British geographer and social theorist

At Bromham CofE Primary School, we are committed to delivering a Geography curriculum that is inclusive, engaging, and accessible to every child. Our aim is to fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum for Geography by providing a broad, balanced, and differentiated curriculum that ensures the progressive development of geographical concepts, knowledge, and skills. We strive to instil a lifelong love and curiosity for Geography, inspiring our pupils to explore the world around them with confidence and enthusiasm.

We want every child to develop a passion for Geography—to be excited about discovering new places, understanding different cultures, and interpreting the world through a geographical lens. By building locational knowledge and the ability to identify key physical and human features of their environment, our pupils are equipped not only to understand their local area but also the wider world.

In line with the 2014 Primary National Curriculum in England, our teaching aims to equip pupils with knowledge about diverse places, people, resources, and natural and human environments, alongside a deep understanding of the Earth’s key physical and human processes.

We also place emphasis on building pupils’ confidence and encouraging them to strive for high levels of understanding, enabling them to appreciate how people live in different locations and apply their knowledge to real-life contexts.

As part of our Geography curriculum, we provide regular opportunities for children to take part in fieldwork investigations. These hands-on experiences allow pupils to observe, record, and analyse the world around them, helping them to make meaningful connections between classroom learning and the real world. Fieldwork plays a vital role in developing their enquiry skills, spatial awareness, and ability to ask and answer geographical questions based on first-hand evidence.

The aims of teaching Geography in our school are to:

Inspire pupils’ curiosity and fascination about the world and its people.
Enable children to develop locational knowledge, including continents, countries, cities, seas, and oceans.
Foster the ability to interpret a wide range of geographical sources such as maps, globes, atlases, and aerial photographs.
Help children understand how human and physical features shape places and how these features can change over time.
Provide opportunities for pupils to write geographically—to answer lines of enquiry, reflect on their learning, and communicate their understanding effectively.
Enable children to carry out fieldwork investigations, enhancing their understanding through practical exploration and observation.

Special Educational Needs Disability (SEND) / Pupil Premium / Higher Attainers

At our school, we are committed to ensuring that all children receive Quality First Teaching. This includes pupils with identified Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), those in receipt of Pupil Premium funding, and higher attaining pupils.

We recognise that some children may require learning that is additional to or adapted in order to fully access the Geography curriculum. Provision is tailored to meet individual needs, ensuring that all pupils are supported, challenged, and included.

Our Geography curriculum is designed to be ambitious, broad, and accessible, offering rich and varied learning experiences for every child. We provide opportunities for all learners to reach their full potential, make strong progress from their individual starting points, and consistently achieve highly.

Whether through targeted support, adaptive teaching strategies, or enrichment opportunities, we ensure that every pupil can engage with geographical concepts, develop key skills, and foster a genuine curiosity about the world.

Implementation:

To ensure high standards of teaching and learning in Geography, we implement a progressive curriculum that builds knowledge and skills consistently from Early Years through to Year 6. Geography is taught discretely as a subject, allowing pupils to develop a strong understanding of key geographical concepts. However, meaningful cross-curricular links are made where appropriate to enrich learning and deepen understanding. For example, studying The River Nile in Year 4 Geography and locating where in the world Egypt is during their longitude and latitude topic, which links to their History lessons on the Ancient Egyptians. The curriculum focuses on the key knowledge and skills stated in the National Curriculum. At Bromham Primary, we place the same importance on Geography as we do on the core subjects, recognising its vital role in helping all children develop a broad base of knowledge. We are committed to providing every pupil with the opportunity to succeed, acknowledging and nurturing their unique potential across all areas of the curriculum.

Our Geography curriculum is rooted in the 2014 Primary National Curriculum for England, which provides a broad framework outlining the essential knowledge and skills for each Key Stage. Building on this foundation, we have developed a curriculum informed by educational research to enhance long-term retention, understanding, and progression.

Our approach is underpinned by Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory and Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve, which support our focus on effective curriculum design and retrieval practice. To manage cognitive load and promote memory retention, Geography is taught in discrete, carefully sequenced blocks throughout the year. These units are deliberately revisited at regular intervals to help pupils move information from working memory to long-term memory, supporting the development of robust schema across topics.

Our teaching is also aligned with Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction (2012). Teachers model new learning clearly and break content into manageable steps. Learning is scaffolded and guided, with frequent opportunities to check for understanding and adapt teaching accordingly. We return to key knowledge weekly, monthly, and yearly, ensuring concepts are revisited and reinforced over time.

To support knowledge retention and recall, we use dual coding strategies such as knowledge organisers and learning strips, combining visuals with key facts to aid memory. In addition, our curriculum places strong emphasis on essential geographical vocabulary and concepts. Each unit includes vocabulary pages highlighting Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary, which are explicitly taught and revisited to support pupils’ ability to read, write, and speak like geographers.

Through this research-informed approach, we aim to ensure that all pupils build a deep, connected understanding of Geography, and are well-equipped to apply their learning across contexts and year groups.

Geography teaching at our school is focused on enabling children to think and behave like geographers—to question, investigate, and develop a deep understanding of the world around them. Teachers use a range of teaching approaches, adapting their strategies based on professional judgement and the needs of their pupils, to ensure lessons are engaging, inclusive, and purposeful.

The subject offers rich opportunities to challenge and extend more able learners, particularly through independent investigations, analysing a variety of sources, extended writing tasks, and meaningful fieldwork experiences.

At Bromham Primary school, we provide a variety of opportunities for geography learning inside and outside the classroom. Fieldwork investigations are another opportunity for the teachers to plan for additional geography learning outside the classroom and bring Geography to life. The children have explored the local area including orienteering within the school grounds and visiting The River Great Ouse to conduct river studies. As well as trips to local woods and using map reading skills during residential trips. During the Year 4 Rivers unit, pupils visited the River Great Ouse to observe and identify the different parts of a river they had studied in class. This hands-on fieldwork experience helped bring their classroom learning to life by connecting their classroom learning with real-world observation. Year 3 also took part in an overnight residential where they took part in orienteering around a country park.

Impact:

In Geography, we strive to foster a supportive and collaborative learning environment where pupils are encouraged to develop their curiosity through investigative and enquiry-based learning opportunities. Each lesson is carefully designed around clear learning questions that initiate and guide pupils’ lines of enquiry, promoting critical thinking and deeper understanding. To support the embedding of knowledge, children are provided with Knowledge Organisers and learning strips, which use the power of dual coding to aid retention and help build robust schema. We also use end-of-unit quizzes to highlight and consolidate key learning points, which are introduced early and revisited throughout the topic to reinforce understanding. Teachers use data from these quizzes to identify misconceptions and target areas for further focus and clarification. In addition, we strategically revisit units throughout the year, weaving key concepts back into learning to strengthen pupils’ long-term retention.

Each lesson includes a focus on key vocabulary, with particular emphasis on Tier 2 and Tier 3 terms essential to geographical learning. To enrich both knowledge and literacy, core texts from Curriculum Visions and other relevant resources are incorporated into the Geography curriculum. New information is carefully introduced and systematically revisited throughout the year, allowing pupils to deepen their understanding of the complex interactions between physical and human processes and their impact on landscapes and environments.

We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods:

End of unit quizzes, which are also revisited later in the year through revisit sessions with these questions being assess accumulatively as the lessons go on.
Assessing children’s understanding of topic linked vocabulary throughout their learning.
End of unit essays to show they can recall their learning and apply it to answering an enquiry style question.
Images of the children’s practical learning.
Pupil book studies, where children are interviewed about their learning, and what they can recall. (Pupil Voice)
Learning walks of the environment and photographs of sequences of learning are taken, this is then discussed during staff meetings, where sequences of learning are scrutinised and there is the opportunity for a dialogue between teachers to understand their class’s work.
Annual reporting of standards across the curriculum.
Marking of written work in books.
Teacher assessment of each lesson, identifying those who have excelled in the lesson and those that needed support.

Eternal measures are also used to moderate the learning taking place, such as attending CPD events to learn about different geography curriculums in other settings, and use this to provide feedback to staff and continue to improve the geography provision at Bromham Primary.