At Southmead Primary School, Geography is a valuable part of our curriculum. All children from Year 1 to Year 6 are provided with many opportunities to engage in diverse aspects of the subject, while early years are afforded opportunities to experience relative facets which encourage interest and engagement in Geography.

Our intention is for students to be able to become confident, independent and eager learners who in turn will become active, aware and engaged global citizens. To be able to achieve this, students will focus on the key skills of identifying, locating, describing and understanding. These will be applied to the key areas of locational knowledge, place knowledge, human and physical geography, and geography skills and fieldwork.

Geography is linked to other areas of the curriculum, which creates an engaging, creative and diverse learning experience.

At Southmead Geography is taught bi-weekly as part of a two-week timetable of foundation subjects. We believe this approach allows a consistent and thorough exposure to Geography throughout the year, allowing our children to steadily develop their ideas and achieve depth in their learning.

At Southmead we follow a bespoke curriculum designed to expose our children to both local and global communities and cultures. The Southmead Primary School Key to the National Curriculum Geography units provide easy to use subject knowledge, geography activities and related resources. The units cover The School, The School Grounds, The Local Area. Additional units consider Global Citizenship, Globally Significant Places and a range of geographical skills both for the classroom and for fieldwork. The units of work cover both known (e.g. London) and unknown environments (e.g. Serrekunda, California, East Anglia, Naples and Campania, the Amazon and Paris Basins, the Isles of Scilly and South Wales).

Each unit of work is designed to be adapted to meet the needs of our children and together build progression in knowledge and skills as children move up through the school. There is an emphasis on the development of technical vocabulary and fieldwork skills. We have ample of outdoor space available every day to children of all year groups and we are lucky to have our own pond on site. We provide external experiences for our children, such as, visiting rivers, beaches and local green spaces, to allow our children to explore the locality and conduct geographical surveys. This allows our children to also develop their practical skills such as orienteering and map reading.  

Being such a diverse school we are lucky to celebrate many cultures every day. We are proud to belong and being a UN Rights Respecting School we are always seeking ways for our children to engage in global citizenship. Cross-curricular learning is encouraged and through the introduction of special weeks our family’s cultures are explored and celebrated.

Throughout their time at Southmead children are given a variety of experience to appreciate and discover their local area and learn about how the places familiar to them fit within a wider geographical context. Children build upon their own identity and develop their sense of place as well as an understanding of their role as a global citizen.  Children have an awareness of the world around them and its orientation. We use a range of strategies to assess what skills and knowledge the children have attained each term including the following:

• Speaking to children about their learning (pupil voice) and their understanding of key vocabulary
• Book Studies
• Assessment of pupil discussion about their learning
• Quizzes
• Moderation staff/phase meetings
• Regular feedback each lesson
• Annual reporting of pupils’ achievements in the subject