Geography

Our Geography curriculum at Headlands is designed to build towards success at GCSE and A level, as well as enfranchise students with an understanding of the world around them – whether this be through being able to read a map of their local area, understand the physical processes that create hazards and opportunities in different areas across the world, or understand the complicated issues that lie at the heart of global inequalities.

At key stage three we have two aims as a department. Our first is to equip students with the key knowledge and conceptual understanding they need to start to engage more actively in the world around them and to thrive at KS4 and KS5.

The KS3 curriculum provides students with opportunities to study a broad array of human and physical topics. At KS3 we will start in the local area and will work outwards to the point that we are examining global issues.

We want to foster a deep understanding of both physical and human processes and to examine how the interplay between the two create opportunities and challenges across the globe. Our second aim is to develop students’ geographical skills. Throughout KS3 students will have the opportunity to master increasingly complicated graphicacy and cartographical skills.

At KS4, students will put the conceptual understanding and geographical skills that they have developed to good use as they follow the AQA specification, examining a wide range of complex and overlapping human and physical topics. Increasingly, they will explore how human and physical geography interweave to create the world we live in.

As well as consistently revisiting the skills that they have developed at KS4 with increasingly difficult content, students will also get the chance to work intensively on data collection, graphing and statistical analysis through two fieldtrips.

The success of our curriculum is evident in our students’ exam results and in the confidence with which they take the next steps in their education or employment options. We also judge our curriculum’s success in the ways that students begin to understand and engage actively in the world around them.

Find out more information about our geography curriculum by clicking the links below.

Get more detailed information on what students look at on a term-by-term basis in each year group by clicking on the links below.

Click on the links below to see how students are assessed in Years 7, 8 and 9.