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30 March 2026
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‘We built on what already worked well and targeted specific areas for improvement, proving that a spring clean does not mean starting from scratch!’
Lucy Folan
It’s spring so maybe you feel it’s time to spring clean your fieldwork ideas! You might feel that the fieldwork experiences your department has planned for this year are tried and tested and work really well for your students. Or you might feel that some parts could be refreshed.
Last summer I went through the process of improving the fieldwork experiences for our students. Using a template from the Island Geographer (found here) we completed a SWOT analysis of our current fieldwork provision and realised that there were large gaps with no fieldwork.
Together we decided that we wanted all year groups to have at least one fieldwork opportunity and that this was both realistic and achievable.
A summary of our original fieldwork provision looked like this:
Our new fieldwork plan looks like this:
We’re really pleased with how the scale and topics being studied varies across the year groups and we now have more opportunities to introduce and practice core data handling skills before the intensity of year 11.
The fragile environments fieldwork we introduced in year 9 was completely new and this is where we spent a lot of our planning time. Here’s a run down of what we did if you want to have a go!
Fragile environments school site fieldwork
For context, in the classroom we first looked at local ecosystems and woodland areas in the UK, before moving on to look at Antarctica and the Brazilian rainforest.
- We used stratified sampling to look at two sites in the school grounds (the school garden and the school field) and a grassy area at the front of the school – this created great excitement as the students got to go out of the front gate!
- One of the fieldwork aims was to give students the opportunity to explore the school grounds in a different way, so our first task was to carry out a sensory survey in each area. We asked them to be silent for two minutes and consider what they could hear, see and smell. They wrote notes on their data collection sheet.
- Next was an environmental quality survey. We asked students to score against a range of categories which we had written ourselves. In the future, it would be feasible to ask the students to create their own themes on which to judge the environment. The students also completed a field sketch.
- Finally, at each site the students judged how humans had made an impact on nature and vice versa using a simple grid relating to challengers and supporters.
This was an activity FOLSIG showcased on their field visit session at the GA Conference in Oxford last year, based on things you can do in the grid square of your school. It helps students investigate consensus and conflict between elements of physical and human geography.
We’re facing a challenge this year with lots of building work on our school site but I’m hoping for evidence that shows nature has prevailed over humans in a small way! If you were doing this with younger students you could use it as stimulus for a treasure hunt style activity.
5. In the classroom the students annotated photographs with reflections about the different sites. The students evaluated all their evidence and concluded with thoughts about how fragile they thought the different environments were.
Our department was happy to try a new fieldwork plan, knowing that we will probably be tweaking it with the arrival of each new cohort. However it is important to note that we did not completely overhaul our fieldwork from one year to the next – we built on what already worked well and targeted specific areas for improvement, proving that a spring clean does not mean starting from scratch!
Written by Lucy Folan, member of the GA Fieldwork and Outdoor Learning Special Interest Group
© Lucy Folan and the Geographical Association, 2026
