It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
The word ‘curriculum’ derives from the Latin ‘currere’, meaning to run the course, to race. In a secondary context, the focus, in my experience, has often been on the final charge to the finish line of GCSEs. However, in focusing so much on the final goal, it has previously been forgotten that the educational race is not a sprint, but a marathon, one that starts much, much further back than Year 11.
Although there has recently been a welcome shift to remove the distinction between KS3 and KS4, seeing a students’ time at school as one continuous journey, I would argue that we need to go further. More thought needs to be given to the continuity and coherence of the curriculum from before the time that students join us in year 7.
Up until this point, it has been a regular occurrence that in September I have encountered a new cohort of year 7 who have wildly varying experiences of geography at KS2 and who often lack an understanding of what geography is as a discipline, or of the fundamental building blocks of the subject. The first part of the year has therefore been spent having to teach the foundational knowledge and principles of geography as well as unravelling misconceptions that have previously gone unchallenged. Because students often do not understand geography as a discipline, any knowledge that they do have is not connected together in a coherent geographical schema, which leads to even more misconceptions that need challenging (see previous post for reflections on this).
I am not blaming our primary colleagues for this. They already have an immensely hard job trying to be specialists in so many different curriculum areas, whilst at the same time having the inevitable attention seeker that is KS2 SATS, without secondary colleagues telling them that students are not adequately prepared for subjects introduced as discrete disciplines at KS3.
What I am saying is that in my experience, there has been little, if any communication at all between primary and secondary colleagues about how our curriculums are part of the same, one, long journey. This is as much our fault as anybody’s. At BVC, we talk a lot about the ‘learning journey’; about staff and students being aware about where they are heading in their learning and how what they are currently doing fits into that journey. If there is a lack of clarity as to details of the final destination, then the route to get there is going to be much more jumbled and confusing. Wouldn’t it therefore make much more sense for staff across the whole curriculum to know where students are aiming for; for staff at KS1 and KS2 to know how the work that they are currently doing with their students is laying the foundations for their future geographical education (or for any other subject, come to think about it)?
To this end, I am very excited that this last week we have begun work to remedy the situation. Working initially with one of our feeder primaries, myself and our head of history spent a thoroughly stimulating couple of hours with their head, sharing and discussing the key themes that we have identified as underpinning our whole geography (and history) curriculum (see download for our current curriculum map working document). This is just the start, but the dream is that this will become common practice across all our feeder primaries and we are very hopeful that in time, everybody will have a much clearer understanding of how KS2 flows into KS3, ultimately resulting in more proficient and effective geographers.
BVC Geography 