At Burnside Primary School, our Geography curriculum inspires a curiosity and fascination about the world that stays with our pupils for a lifetime. Geography surrounds us every day; through enquiry-based learning, fieldwork, and spatial studies, we help our children understand their local community, the natural environment, and the interconnected relationships between nations.
Our Geography curriculum is explicitly structured around our school motto, be safe, be smart, be kind, ensuring every pupil is supported to thrive, achieve, and belong.
How Geography Reflects Our Values
Be Safe: Through outdoor learning and local fieldwork studies, pupils learn how to navigate physical environments responsibly, conduct observations safely, and respect the natural world around them. Creating a secure space to explore and ask big questions enables children to thrive with confidence and curiosity.
Be Smart: Pupils master core geographical skills—including map reading, compass directions, grid references, and data analysis. By developing a rich bank of subject vocabulary and understanding complex human and physical processes, children build the knowledge needed to achieve academic success and make sense of an ever-changing world.
Be Kind: Geography fosters global empathy and environmental responsibility. Pupils examine sustainability, ethical consumption, and diverse global cultures, learning to respect different ways of life and care for our shared planet. This builds a strong sense of community and belonging, both locally and globally.
Key Geographical Concepts
Our curriculum is carefully sequenced so that knowledge builds cumulatively across five core concepts:
Place and Space: Developing the skills to navigate new places independently using maps, globes, atlases, grid references, and keys to locate features globally and locally.
Scale and Connection: Exploring how locations are interconnected through trade, tourism, and environmental processes, understanding that small actions locally can have a ripple effect across the world.
Physical and Human Geography: Collecting and interpreting data to compare physical landscapes (rivers, weather, landforms) with human environments (settlements, economic activity, land use).
Environment and Sustainability: Examining environmental changes, ethical consumer habits, and sustainable choices, empowering children to reflect on how their actions impact the planet’s future.
Culture and Diversity: Celebrating global traditions, lifestyles, and identities while understanding regional variations, promoting mutual respect and challenging inequality.
Subject Aims & National Curriculum Coverage
Following the National Curriculum for Geography, our teaching ensures that all pupils:
Develop contextual knowledge of the location of globally significant terrestrial and marine places, including their defining human and physical characteristics.
Understand the key physical and human processes that shape landscapes, cause spatial variation, and drive environmental change over time.
Become competent in practical geographical skills by:
Collecting, analysing, and communicating data gathered through hands-on fieldwork experiences.
Interpreting maps, aerial photographs, diagrams, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS).
Communicating geographical findings through extended writing, quantitative skills, and custom mapping.
Through spaced retrieval strategies, low-stakes cumulative quizzing, and explicit vocabulary instruction (including word roots and morphology), every child at Burnside Primary builds a rich, lasting understanding of geography.