Intent Statement

At Medlar-with-Wesham, we are GEOGRAPHERS!

We want our children to love and be curious about Geography. We want them to have no limits and to be resilient learners so they are able to achieve their ambitions and grow up wanting to be cartographers, town planners, conservationists or weather forecasters.

Our aim is that, through the teaching of Geography at Medlar-with-Wesham, we provide a purposeful platform for exploring, appreciating and understanding the world in which we live and how it has evolved. We want to ensure that through Geography, pupils are able to explore the relationship between the Earth and its people through the study of place, space and environment.

In Geography, pupils in our school will learn the skills of understanding locational knowledge; how and where people fit into its overall structure. We also intend for children to become passionate and knowledgeable about our local community and beyond, by learning through experiences in practical and fieldwork activities developing their ability to be resilient learners and confident to share their thoughts and ideas.

We teach Geography following an ambitious curriculum. CUSP Geography is built around the principles of cumulative knowledge The effect of this cumulative model supports opportunities for children to associate and connect with spaces, places, scale, human and physical processes with an emphasis on how content is connected and relational knowledge acquired. An example of this is the identification of continents, such as Europe, and its relationship to the location of the UK. 

How do pupils learn?

• Class timetables have been built to ensure a broad and balanced curriculum.  

• Subjects have been blocked in a spaced retrieval model to support catch up and to build the frequency of Geography and wider curriculum subjects. This maximises learning time. 

An essential component to CUSP lessons is the systematic and coherent approach that we embed focusing on the six phases of a lesson.

‘You can travel the seas, poles and deserts and see nothing.  To really understand the world, you need to get under the skin of the people and places.  In other words, learn about geography.  I can’t imagine a subject more relevant in schools.’  - Michael Palin