Creating a Statement of Intent for your Geography Curriculum

As a Subject Leader you have probably been asked to complete a statement of intent to highlight the aims of your geography curriculum. But what should you include?

A few years ago, in my previous role of Head of Geography, I was asked to write a curriculum statement of intent. I sat with my team and together we came up with the following. It's not perfect by any means but hopefully will be a good starting point for anyone who has been asked to write one.

Our geography curriculum has been designed to...

• Inspire a sense of awe and wonder with our physical and human surroundings
• Create a sense of place, space and time - to enable students to think about the world they live in and to be able to communicate that thinking to others (the idea of representation and perception)
• Develop an appreciation for the diversity of our complex and varied world
• Understand the concepts of cause, consequence and mitigation for a variety of situations and at a range of scales
• Understand the interaction between people and the environment, the effects of this and the need for management, especially sustainability and climate change
• Develop an appreciation of change within physical geography (eg. processes such as coastal erosion) and human geography (eg. migration, urbanisation); and how this might be managed in the future
• Develop an appreciation of interdependence - how people and countries are interlinked and how they interact with each other (eg. development, globalisation, migration)
• Enable students to communicate effectively - graphically, orally, visually and through writing
• Enable students to identify, describe, explain, analyse and evaluate