Our aim is to inspire learners with a curiosity and fascination about the world and its people, fostering a lifelong interest in the environment around them and their place within it. We offer opportunities for learners to explore the physical and human world, developing a deep understanding of both its processes and the diverse places, people, and resources that shape it.

Through our teaching, we prioritise promoting respect, understanding, and an appreciation of the world’s diversity. Geography education plays a key role in learners’ spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development, helping them understand their responsibilities as citizens of Britain and global citizens. By engaging with geographical knowledge, learners are encouraged to ask questions and explore their surroundings, building both critical thinking and geographical skills.

We aim to provide a stimulating and motivating curriculum that captures curiosity and fuels a desire to learn. All learners will be given opportunities to develop essential skills, ensuring they not only understand the world around them but are equipped to continue exploring and questioning it throughout their lives.

National Curriculum Aims

The national curriculum for geography aims to ensure that all pupils:

• develop contextual knowledge of the location of globally significant places – both terrestrial and marine – including their defining physical and human characteristics and how these provide a geographical context for understanding the actions of processes
• understand the processes that give rise to key physical and human geographical features of the world, how these are interdependent and how they bring about spatial variation and change over time
• are competent in the geographical skills needed to:
  • collect, analyse and communicate with a range of data gathered through experiences of fieldwork that deepen their understanding of geographical processes
  • interpret a range of sources of geographical information, including maps, diagrams, globes, aerial photographs and Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
  • communicate geographical information in a variety of ways, including through maps, numerical and quantitative skills and writing at length

We believe in quality teaching and learning. The aim for our learners is to have a fully encompassing creative curriculum, which engages their imagination and encourages the next steps in their learning. Our subjects are planned in Learning Topics and, wherever possible, seek to involve the learners and their interests in planning. 

Topic Experience

Each Topic Experience takes appropriate objectives from the National Curriculum and they are then taught creatively to make even the most abstract of ideas real to the children. Throughout the Topic Experience, learners are encouraged to think about what they are learning, why they are learning it and how they will be able to apply these new skills in a meaningful context.

Cornerstones Education has taken Topic Experiences and mapped out the National Curriculum across each Key Stage and ensures that learners work towards achieving the Programmes of Study outcomes by the end of each Key stage. Using the Cornerstones Topics, teachers are provided with guidance to ensure that can play their part in providing a well thought through broad and balanced curriculum within their year group and how this fits in within the learners’ whole school experience.  One of the key aims of using this vehicle for our curriculum is to create excited and enthusiastic learners, who have been taught to explore ideas, take risks, solve problems, be inspired as well as inspire those around them, within meaningful contexts. Choosing topics carefully and planning to suit the needs to each cohort of learners: preparing learners who will are able to make positive contributions now and in the future; learners who feel confident to take risks and take their own learning forward; learners who explore ideas and are questions and self-motivated.

Geography Curriculum Overview Documents