Passmores Geography department wants students to gain knowledge and skills that will allow them to make sense of their immediate, and distant, environments so they can appreciate the world around them when they travel or hear and read about places and events in the news. We want to promote excitement, creativity and critical thinking about the world that equips young people to make their own way in it.   

Students will develop their knowledge, skills and understanding over time through engaging content. Topicality is key, and geography in the news is flexibly included in our schemes of work and new knowledge is integrated into bigger concepts, whether it be natural hazards, conflict, urban planning, or coasts. Students will develop their knowledge and ideas using maps and graphs, Geographical Information Systems, audio and visual sources; and communicating their understanding effectively will be in creative and diverse formats, ensuring they can make informed decisions and respond to feedback in a reflective and progressive way.   

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A successful KS3 geographer will have knowledge of the world map, understanding the difference between low- and high-income countries and groupings of countries, such as trading blocs. They will write like a geographer, expressing a wide range of geographical terms to link to the physical and human world, and understand how the natural world and people are interdependent. Studying like a geographer will include an ability to complete a range of map skill tasks and data extraction from graphs, analysing trends and draw conclusions. Students will work effectively in groups, collaborating and sharing ideas with their peers about the places and issues they see in the news every day, including posing a variety of questions to investigate in fieldwork enquiries.  

A successful KS4 geographer will know geographical material, having developed a good understanding of knowledge of locations, places, environments, and processes at different scales. A successful GCSE student will be able to study like a geographer, having acquired a good range of skills including those used in fieldwork, maps and Geographical Information Systems; and will be able to apply enquiry approaches to questions. Thinking like a geographer means understanding the interactions between people and environments, and changes in places and processes over space and time; and a successful geographer will be able to evaluate and justify their opinion on these geographical phenomena, using their knowledge to support their own ideas.