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Geography National Curriculum Debate: GA Conference 2025

Geography National Curriculum Debate: GA Conference 2025

27 May 2025

Read time: 8mins

‘Geography teachers should continue to seek opportunities to actively contribute to the National Curriculum subject reviews rather than waiting for a top-down curriculum.’

Alex Standish

Following a successful debate at UCL in December, the Geographical Association and UCL Institute of Education organised a GA Conference forum for geography teachers and educators to voice and discuss their ideas about how they think the GNC can be improved.

Speakers were asked to share their views about what the current curriculum gets right and wrong, where there is a need for more/less knowledge, skills and values, and whether geography needs a different framing for young people today.

Four speakers (Richard Bustin, Hope Nyabienda, Eleanor Rawling, Alex Standish) were invited to share their views, which are summarised below.

Richard Bustin, geography teacher, Lancing College

The Geographical Association recently shared an image of all the skills that studying geography can give a young person. Whilst these are all very worthy none of them (with perhaps the exception of map skills) are unique to geography – other subjects can develop them too. Which leaves two ‘framing’ questions for discussion:

What is the unique (knowledge, skills and values) contribution geography makes to an educated person?
How can a good geography curriculum contribute to valued generic skills development?

It is these that should drive the geography curriculum. Oracy, for example, is a laudable aim, but the danger is that this will drive curriculum thinking and leave the geography lacking. This happened previously in the well-meaning ‘Thinking Skills’ time of the late 2000s where lesson aims became about completing a card sort, rather than the card sort being used to develop geographical understanding. In the same vein when it comes to assessment the following question would be of value:

What makes a young person good at geography and how do you know when they are getting better at it?

The answer to this should drive the assessment. It might be sitting in a room for two hours answering unseen questions whilst remembering loads of facts. But I wonder if there is a greater role for more innovative forms of assessment like in field assessment of fieldwork, group work, oral/viva style assessments, especially as AI causes issues for A level coursework authenticity (Non-Examined Assessments).

Finally, some specific ideas: key stage 3 works brilliantly to give teachers autonomy within set parameters (like ‘Russia’). GCSE has way too much content in it and has become a memory test of case studies – this needs slimming down to engender more critical thinking. A level is great – contemporary, content feels the right amount and the NEA provides individuality. Finally – bring back weather as an option at GCSE and A level!

Hope Nyabienda, geography teacher, Finchley Catholic High School

The geographies of our students have changed since the last iteration of the curriculum and the next Geography National Curriculum should reflect this. Although the current curriculum is broad in scope and breadth, there is a need to refine this so that students gain the skills to critically engage with the globalising world around them.

Firstly, students face the challenge in tackling the plethora of ideas and ways of understanding the world around students that is presented with social media and the multiple streams of information that students are bombarded with.

So, what is needed for this? In Robert’s 2022 piece ‘Powerful pedagogies for the school geography curriculum‘, there are three strategies outlined which include connecting everyday knowledge with school geography, practising geography and debating and discussing geography. Through this, we can hope to invite students to share their current understanding of processes, systems and structures, and alongside our own subject specialism, start to redress and equip students for the bombardment of viewpoints they face from all sides. However, to develop these tools, we need time. We need a geography national curriculum that makes space.

In addition, how could we make better use of the different critical lens geography offers? For example, could the use of feminist and Marxist geographies provide a helpful critique to be more explicitly integrated? These are the tools that we as geographers come to understand the social constructions present all around us and so why would we not equip our students with these tools?

Finally, our GNC needs to face up to the reality of the past and present colonial legacies in our present-day geographies. This would support us moving away from the teaching of places and people that is comparative, oversimplified, not contextualised and doesn’t engage with the racialised nature of the social dynamics present in place (Winter et al., 2025). And without the use of a decolonial lens, any move towards centering climate change arguably will be shallow and will not equip students to effectively address the current and futures challenges and they may face in our rapidly changing world. Put simply, denial is not a tool for sustainable change and our curriculum needs to recognise this.

The inclusion of the guiding principles above could actively help equip teachers and subsequently pupils with the necessary tools needed for an effective geographically literate society.

Eleanor Rawling, research fellow at Oxford University and consultant for the GA

Prof Becky Francis, Chair of the current Curriculum Review Group described how teachers feel ‘disempowered and de-professionalised by over stipulation and the challenge to cover content’. She recommended a curriculum providing ‘greater flexibility and professional ownership of what is taught in schools’. The GA’s Curriculum Framework, launched in 2022, shows how this can be done with geography.

In A Conceptual Position paper, the Review Group set out two principles which would underlie the curriculum review process:

1. Firstly the importance of recognising the difference between disciplinary knowledge (big concepts, high level skills, approaches characteristic of a subject) and substantive knowledge (facts, information, more specific detailed concepts, skills and examples). The GA’s Curriculum Framework distinguishes disciplinary from substantive knowledge, recognising the rich substantive knowledge base of geography but also outlining the disciplinary knowledge that is fundamental to the discipline, defined as:

the key big geographical concepts (place, space, earth systems, environment) and the organising concepts (scale, time, diversity, interconnection, representation) which together highlight ways of knowing and thinking as a geographer
geographical practice and enquiry skills, encompassing the activities of finding out about the world or working like a geographer
geographical application referring to applying geographical knowledge, skills and approachesto the world around us in a way that is distinctive compared with other disciplines (making use of geography).

2. Secondly, the need to understand how a National Curriculum should work – particularly the importance of recognising levels of curriculum development (national, sub-national, school/classroom) and the design responsibilities appropriate to those levels.

The GA’s Curriculum Framework clarifies the different levels of curriculum development and shows how the disciplinary knowledge outline can be used to select a rigorous geographical entitlement at national level at the same time as leaving further selection opportunities for others at lower levels of planning and development (e.g. examination boards, publishers, schools and teachers).

In the ‘next steps’ outlined for the Review, it stated that ‘we expect to recommend a phased programme of work in different subjects’ and suggested that in some subjects, the current construction and balance of content appears to be inhibiting improvements in learning. I would suggest that geography is probably one of these. Let’s offer to be involved in further work for geography based on the Curriculum Framework.

Alex Standish, Associate Professor, UCL Institute of Education

Firstly, we should acknowledge the success of 2013-15 curriculum and the knowledge-led approach. Since 2010, GCSE entries up by over 100,000, which is surely a vote of confidence from students. Another improvement is the inclusion of young people from ethnic minorities (see Geography of Geography, 2020). However, there is less success with narrowing the participation gap between higher and low-income students, which needs greater attention and action.

Secondly, the knowledge-turn has led to an enhanced focus and understanding of curriculum concepts, design and thinking in geography. Evidence for this can be found in Getting our Bearings: Geography subject report (2023), A Framework for the School Geography Curriculum (2022) as well as other publications. Each year, I work with a group of UCL Fawcett Fellows on curriculum development. It has been a pleasure to see them engaging with and making use of curriculum concepts and theory, including core/disciplinary knowledge, substantive knowledge, interweaving, curriculum threads, as they seek to establish a Future 3 approach to curriculum in their school.

My main point is that young people need a more optimistic and humanistic narrative to frame people-environment interactions. Research by Hickman et al. (2021) shows that the majority young people across 10 countries are fearful for their future, think humanity is doomed, that older generations have failed to care for the planet and many are reluctant to have children themselves. This is not a healthy situation, nor a sign of educational success.

A better approach is that of Hannah Ritchie (2024). In her book Not the End of the World, she uses data to put environmental problems into a longer-term perspective and shows where countries have made progress on improving human welfare and the environment. For instance, everyday 300,000 more people across the world gain access to electricity and clean water for the first time.

Schools should be challenging rather than mirroring the pessimistic, catastrophising media narratives, which are often untrue, erode trust in science and journalism and leave people feeling paralysed, notes Ritchie. We need to teach young people that modern society and economy, with associated improvements in human welfare and environmental conservation, are something to be proud of rather than a cause of environmental catastrophe. This is not to diminish the extent of environmental problems, including the effects of global warming, which should not be hidden from young people.

In The Big Ratchet, Ruth Defries (2014) suggests that we look at human history as cycling between crisis and growth: ‘history is a story of continual innovations that have enabled us to surpass existing limits even as they create new problems in their wake.’ In schools, we need to show students how we have adapted to past climate change, will continue to do so and have prosperous futures, while continuing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The school curriculum should teach young people about past success to help them critique the media narrative and prepare for their future. How many of us have taught students that:

Since the 1920s, increased resilience/infrastructure has reduced deaths from extreme weather and climate by 95 percent.
Young people’s carbon footprints are just a fraction of their grandparents’ footprints?

The introductions were followed by questions and points from the audience, many of which echoed the views of the speakers. Despite differences, there is definite scope for correspondence between the perspectives and finding a more hopeful curriculum path for geography students. Geography teachers should continue to seek opportunities to actively contribute to the National Curriculum subject reviews rather than waiting for a top-down curriculum.