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Primary geography
Children can be given a stronger sense of their own identity and their place in the world around them if they can make sense of how places and countries have developed, the interrelationship between them and the global issues that impact on their lives. For newly arrived children this is not just at a personal level based on their past experiences but also in the sense of how the place they now live has developed, how it has been shaped by its physical setting and by human activity. Children should also learn how the size, pattern and main activities in the place have evolved and how some of the services they enjoy, such as a constant supply of clean drinking water, are due to the climate of the country and the historical development of public services.
Planning for inclusion
The national curriculum is the starting point for planning a school curriculum that meets the specific needs of newly arrived pupils. The national curriculum inclusion statement outlines how teachers can modify, as necessary, the national curriculum programmes of study to provide all pupils with relevant and appropriately challenging work at each key stage. It sets out three principles that are essential to developing a more inclusive curriculum:
- setting suitable learning challenges
- responding to pupils' diverse learning needs
- overcoming potential barriers to learning and assessment for individuals and groups of pupils.
Setting suitable learning challenges
Schools should aim to give every pupil the opportunity to experience success in learning and to achieve as high a standard as possible. The national curriculum programmes of study set out what most pupils should be taught at each key stage but teachers should teach the knowledge, skills and understanding in ways that suit their pupils' abilities. Where logistics allow, this could mean choosing knowledge, skills and understanding from earlier (or, less frequently, later) key stages so that individual pupils can make progress and show what they can achieve.
Where it is appropriate for pupils to make extensive use of content from an earlier key stage, there may not be time to teach all aspects of the age-related programmes of study. A similarly flexible approach will be needed to take account of any gaps in pupils' learning resulting from missed or interrupted schooling. A small number of children arriving in the UK may not have received any previous schooling or their education may have been interrupted because of war. These children will have fewer geographical skills than their peers. The 'Children with little or no prior education' area of this site gives further guidance on this.
Responding to pupils' diverse learning needs
When planning, staff should have high expectations and provide opportunities for all children to achieve. Teachers will be aware that children bring to school different experiences, interests and strengths, which will influence the way in which they learn.
The experiences of children who have lived overseas can be an asset to the geography class. For example, most schools teach about the rainforest ecosystem. Children from Colombia, Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo will often have personal knowledge and sometimes direct experience of the rainforest. Most newly arrived children will have experience of a different climate to that of the UK and many will have experienced different housing, transport and shopping patterns.
However it is important to understand that some children may wish to put their experiences behind them and might feel uncomfortable if required to draw on recent traumatic events as part of their learning in school. Drawing on the pupils' past personal experience requires appropriate professional judgement and sensitivity. Even work in geography that does not appear to be directly related to the experiences of the child may raise difficult issues.
Good geography lessons should focus on general concepts and ideas and draw examples from the UK and other countries including the countries of origin of newly arrived children.
Teachers are expected to plan their approaches to teaching and learning so that all children can take part in lessons. This will include the planning of work that is accessible for children with EAL, as well as work that extends their language skills.
Teachers will need to plan appropriately challenging work for those whose ability and understanding of geographical concepts are in advance of their language skills. This may mean children using their first language in geography lessons. Engagement and access to geography can be impeded if a pupil's first language is not supported appropriately. The 'English as an additional language' area of this website gives further guidance on this.
The Ofsted report Managing the Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant: good practice in primary schools(2004) gives a number of examples of good classroom practice and of case studies.
Overcoming potential barriers to learning and assessment for individuals and groups of pupils
A minority of pupils will have particular learning and assessment requirements which, if not addressed, could create barriers to learning. For newly arrived children these are most often linked to progress in learning EAL.
The key criterion for decisions about setting and streaming is ability rather than what a child has previously studied or their fluency in English. The 'Initial assessment' area of this site gives further guidance on this.
What is the potential in the geography curriculum for valuing diversity and challenging racism?
The national curriculum programme of study and the QCA/DCFS schemes of work for geography provide starting points for valuing diversity and challenging racism in the classroom. The national curriculum makes the following statement about the importance of geography:
As pupils study geography, they encounter different societies and cultures. This helps them realise how nations rely on each other. It can inspire them to think about their own place in the world, their values, and their rights and responsibilities to other people and the environment.
The programme of study requires that, through geographical enquiry, children have a critical approach to their studies of places and environments. In particular, children are encouraged to develop their own views and consider the views that others hold about topical geographical issues. They are also required to gain understanding of how places are linked and are interdependent on each other.
On the Respect for all in geography website there is guidance on how the programme of study requirements provide opportunities to value diversity and challenge racism.
Children should be taught to view differences in others positively, whether arising from race, gender, ability, disability, age, religion/belief or sexual orientation. Geography teachers can achieve this by using materials which reflect social and cultural diversity, and by providing positive images of race, gender, ability, disability, age, religion/belief and sexual orientation.
Classroom displays
Many children like to see the countries from where they originate or where they have relatives reflected in classroom displays. Schools can purchase maps online from a wide range of countries (see useful weblinks). Displays are also a powerful medium for representing diversity in the world of today. Schools can create geography displays that reflect migration and diversity as well as children's regions of origin. Teachers can purchase, in the UK's larger cities, artefacts and everyday objects from many countries.
Differences in teaching geography
Class sizes in some of the countries from which newly arrived children come are larger than in England. This often results in a more teacher-directed style of learning. Some countries' education systems place greater emphasis on the acquisition of knowledge than on the development of skills or concepts. Children arriving from countries where either or both of these conditions apply may have little prior experience of geographical enquiry that involves an investigative, questioning approach to the subject. They may be unused to investigative geography and collecting, recording and presenting evidence.
Not all children will have studied geography as a discrete subject in their home countries. Some countries include geography within a social studies curriculum while others have a narrower primary school curriculum that contains local geography without an international dimension, so for some children geography as taught in England may be virtually a new subject.
Schools in some countries do not have the same resources for geography that schools in England have. This can be as a consequence of educational philosophy or of a lack of funding. Whatever the reason, children arriving from such countries may not have had the opportunity to use ICT or geographical instruments. Their schools may have had few atlases, maps and globes.
Knowledge of the UK
Much geography teaching in England assumes prior knowledge about the UK and the wider world. Older children who have spent all or most of their lives in UK schools will have some geographical knowledge about the UK and beyond; new arrivals from overseas may not. Some key features of the UK, Europe and the world are listed within the 'Locational knowledge - examples of significant places and environments' section of the key stage 2 programme of study. Teachers may wish to ensure that children are conversant with these locations as a minimum of knowledge they might share with their classmates. It is important not to assume greater knowledge of the UK and beyond by new arrivals.
Teachers might consider working with EAL staff to develop induction materials for new arrivals. Such materials should introduce children to the geography of the UK, geographical enquiry, map skills, the potential of ICT within the subject, and different types of resources including different scale maps that children already in the class may have encountered in previous years.
Where a teacher has in-class support it might be possible for the support teacher to read the source with the children or to use prepared tapes, particularly when working with significant quantities of written materials or at speed, in advance of the lesson. If there is no in-class support, the EAL support teacher could help prepare visual materials to aid the learning of new words.
Visual resources can also be challenging, as a child may not have the contextual information to interpret the resource. The teacher can support the pupil by anticipating where visual sources might require an elaboration of context to make them more accessible. For example the inclusion of police officers in the category of 'people who help us' is common in UK schools. In some countries, and in the direct experience of some children, the police force will not carry this connotation and the teacher will need to establish how the bulk of the population within the UK relates to the police force and the duty police officers have to protect all citizens.
Adapting the curriculum
Teachers can consider adapting the geography curriculum in order to enhance children's learning by providing them with activities that have been customised to meet their experiences, needs and abilities, and to help them to make the best use of resources available in their school and in the local area. The DCFS/QCA geography schemes of work can be adapted to teach about migration as well as to promote diversity.
The local area will be studied frequently during a child's time in primary school and therefore the focus can change. The following units can easily be adapted to take account of the diversity in the classroom and the local area.
Unit 1 'Around our school - the local area'
This unit could focus on where children live, how they travel to school, the shops they pass and changes that have taken place that reflect the changing settlement patterns in the locality.
Unit 5 'Where in the world is Barnaby Bear?'
This is a continuous unit, designed to be developed at various points throughout key stage 1. It uses a firsthand object - Barnaby the teddy bear - to enable children to learn about other countries and places. Barnaby travels with different people connected to the school as well as on school visits, creating a sense of personal involvement for the children.
Unit 6 'Investigating our local area'
This unit could be adapted to include where people came from who live in the locality and their links to other parts of the UK and the world.
The key stage 1 and 2 distant locality studies might focus on countries which reflect the pupil intake. The following units might be used as models with the localities changed.
Unit 10 'A village in India'
Unit 22 'A contrasting locality overseas - Tocuaro'
Unit 24 'Passport to the world'
Geographical themes
Schools can use examples from children's countries of origin to teach key stage 2 geographical themes required by the national curriculum. Units that could be adapted include:
Unit 7 'Weather around the world'
Unit 11 'Water, where can we find water locally? Where can we find water in the world?'
Unit 14 'Investigating rivers'
Unit 15 'The mountain environment'
Unit 23 'Investigating coasts'.
Units that could be linked to themes or places:
Unit 16 'What's in the news?'
Unit 18 'Connecting ourselves to the world'.
Geographical vocabulary
Most new arrivals will need English-language support. The DCFS has published Access and engagement in geography: teaching pupils for whom English is an additional language. This contains a great deal of useful guidance on EAL support.
Teachers might wish to provide children with geographical vocabulary lists. If using the DCFS/QCA schemes of work the key words can be drawn from the vocabulary section in the key stage 1 and 2 units. Children could build their own bilingual dictionary of key words. Collaborative learning involves children working together in small groups and helping each other learn. This is a good way of developing a child's vocabulary.
Useful weblinks
Please note: QCA is not responsible for the content of external sites
BBC: Newsround
A news site for children that includes children's reports about where they live and events. There are reports entitled ‘My country’ written by children from each of the European Union accession states telling us a little bit about life in their countries.
DCFS: Access and engagement in geography: teaching pupils for whom English is an additional language
Although this guidance applies the principles of the key stage 3 national strategy to the teaching and learning of geography for pupils learning EAL, much of it is equally applicable to primary teachers.
DCFS: Citizenship
The site has been designed as a source of information about education for citizenship in the curriculum for young people in schools and colleges in England.
Geographical Association
The Geographical Association (GA) produces printed and online resources and downloadable material in a range of formats. Some material is accessible only to members of the GA.
Maps online
Map store
Maps, travel guides and globes.
Maps worldwide
Topographic maps, road maps, wall maps, postcode maps, atlases, globes, guide books, travel guides, nautical charts, satellite images, GPS equipment and mapping CD-ROMS.
Stanfords
Categories of maps include world, countries, cities, continents and oceans, popular regions and special interest.
Moving here: 200 years of migration to England
This website is a database of digitised photographs, maps, objects, documents and audio items from 30 local and national archives, museums and libraries which record migration experiences of the last 200 years. The site is useful for teachers developing geography schemes of work on migration and the development of ethnically diverse communities in Britain.
Ofsted: Managing the Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant: good practice in primary schools
This report (2004) includes case studies of schools which manage their Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant (EMAG) funding effectively.
Oxfam: Cool planet
Cool planet is primarily intended for teachers and their pupils. It aims to bring the global dimension to the classroom using the concept of global citizenship. It contains resources useful for teaching geography as well as country-specific information.
Portsmouth Ethnic Minority Achievement Service (EMAS)
The EMAS website contains a range of resources including cultural and religious information concerning minority ethnic communities. Use the drop-down menu to locate this information. The information has been grouped according to country of origin and religious practice.
Education for sustainable development
This site has been designed to help teachers, curriculum coordinators, school managers and governors develop approaches to education for sustainable development. The case studies demonstrate how some schools try to implement the principles of inclusion and the involvement of the wider community.
QCA: Inclusion
This site contains references to documents and guidance relating to equal opportunities.
QCA: Innovating with geography
This website has been designed to help schools plan and teach geography courses from the national curriculum geography programmes of study that will engage and motivate pupils aged from 5 to 14. It is also a gateway to other websites offering support for geography teaching and learning.
Refuge Project: Learning about refugees with refugees: a citizenship education project
The Refuge Project teacher's resource pack is the result of a schools project in the UK which paired nine refugees with nine schools for a six-month period. The outcome of the project is a collection of personal testimonies published in personal profiles, films and a website, supported by a comprehensive range of resources for classroom use. The teacher's section of the website contains questions, classroom discussions and points for further learning and information.
Refugee Council
The Refugee Council produces a range of resources including Refugees: a resource book for primary schools, 1998. This is a primary teacher resource book containing activities, personal testimonies and background information that can be used in geography lessons.
Refugee Week
Refugee Week is an annual event that celebrates the enormous contribution of refugees to life in the UK. This website provides information on running successful events in schools. There are also free resources to download.
Tide
Tide is a teachers' network supported by DEC. This partnership supports creative work to meet young people's educational entitlement to understanding the global dimensions, development perspectives and human rights principles which will shape their lives.
UNHCR in the UK: Teaching tools
The website of the UK office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provides a wide range of teaching resources that can support learning about refugees in several subjects including geography.
Population Statistics
One world
Current information about many countries worldwide is held on this site.
National statistics online
The home of official statistics, reflecting Britain's economy, population and society at national and local level.
Worldaware
This site provides a catalogue of resources to support the teaching of global citizenship and development issues at all levels of the school curriculum.
Weather
BBC: Weather Centre
The BBC Weather Centre provides UK and worldwide weather services. The site contains detailed maps for temperature, wind, satellite, pressure and radar.
The Educator: the weather
A collection of sites relating to the study of the weather.
Staffordshire Learningnet: Geography: the 7 - 11 weather and climate guide
This site contains links to a collection of sites relating to the study of the weather, including satellite imagery sites.
Met Office
The official site of the Met Office. The links page is full of links to other sites which focus on aspects of the weather. This site may be useful for extending personal knowledge.
MetLink International weather project for schools
MetLink International is a project for primary and secondary schools that involves the exchange of weather observations. Full details of all the facets of the project can be found on the MetLink website.