Geography Teaching Today

One of the biggest barriers my school faces is actually being allowed to take the children off timetable. The school is very reluctant to allow students to have chunks of time off timetable, especially in SATs and exam years, even if we do cross- curricular field trips. This is often very frustrating when core subjects, such as english, are allowed to go on play visits etc.

Our department has developed a field trip to our local park for all Y7 pupils. We walk them to the park and they then take part in 6 cross curricular activities including Haiku poetry, gravestone weathering anaysis, orienteering, traffic counts, land-use maps and ecology tour and field sketches.
It takes all day over 2 days as we have over 320 Y7 pupils. We use enthusiastic staff from a variety of departments making it cross-curricular. We have the full support of the senior management team and actively invite them to visit the pupils. Additionally we encourage PGCE students to take part which makes a huge difference.

One of the barriers to creating good fieldwork is that to make a fieldwork expedition highly effective as well as run smoothly, requires a large amount of work, which time starved teachers, sometimes cannot find. The best geography expeditions require a detailed pre-trip visit, which might involve taking photographs, meeting with education staff, collecting data, checking routes etc. It might also involve the making of a detailed booklet to accompany the expedition and this, also takes time.

Whilst it is good to keep refreshing expeditions, it can also be good to produce a detailed expedition guidebook which gives timings, safety information, emergency numbers, routes taken etc, not only so that it might serve as an aide memoire for students well after they have returned, but also as a template (or a basis for development) for the expedition in following years.

HMI annual report for Geography identifies a similar problem - in a number of schools, possibly for a variety of reasons; disruption, lack of specialist teacher, limited senior management support, there is either a lack of fieldwork at Key Stage 3 or that the experience is verging on the banal. What HMI do identify, without suggesting that it is causal, is that department swhere there is planned programme of fieldwork opportunities, student sappear to get enjoyment and satisfaction from the subject and their performance reflects the latter. I can quite understand that your experience is demoralising. We need to ensure that geographers obtain maximum benefit from the DfES's Outdoor Manifesto and that senior management is made more aware of both the subject and personal benefits gained from well planned, well executed and followed up fieldwork.

The department used to have a successful Geography fieldwork programme (praised by OFSTED) before the introduction of PPA time. I have now had to cut fieldwork activities in KS 3 due to cover problems. I have also been told that is causes disruption across the school! As a result I could not run a Year 9 fieldtrip last year, which we have used as part of our KS 3 assessment for many years. This is very demoralising.
Has anyone else had the same problem?

Thank you very much for your comments so far. Paula's thoughts on health and safety are very useful. The fieldwork pages of the GTT website will provide more information to help you ensure that your trip adheres to health and safety regulations. Accidents on school trips are, in fact, extremely rare. Exposing children to risk in a controlled and carefully monitored way is a valuable way of teaching them about personal safety.

Simon has highlighted a key issue for geography. The future for coursework is still uncertain but the role of fieldwork without it certainly needs to be considered. Any comments on this topic would be extremely welcome.

Assessment is increasingly looking like a major barrier, if we are not careful...
How are we to build fieldwork into the curriculum without coursework there to support it? What possible models of assessment are there, other than some largely uninspiring Spearman / Chi-squared / "what did you do at the field centre?" examination? How can it be built into a new model of assessment in innovative ways? I think this urgently needs debating, especially given the problems that Paula alludes to in terms of actually conducting fieldwork - what kinds of more inspiring assessment would actually make the effort of taking classes outside more worthwhile in the future? How can we integrate the fieldwork experience more effectively into courses rather than just bolting it on for the purposes of sitting a practical paper? Dicuss....

From my own experiences in school I think that the main barriers appear to be related to access, lack of confidence and health and safety. These are significant areas of concern but can be addressed.

Access - some schools report that their immediate environment is hard to access on foot or that it is not particularly attractive (a recent complaint from a primary school co-ordinator). Even if you only have a limited degree of access it's good to get out there and make the most use of it - whether it's deemed attractive or not!. Sometimes the best geography comes through examining why a place is run down/ugly/deprived. It's a good ploy to use the same landscape (no matter how small) for a different focus with different year groups, thus maximising the potential.

Access to the wider locality which requires transportation is another difficult barrier if parents are reluctant to pay costs. Perhaps local community funding can be sought - from Groundwork or charities like the Children's Fund. Perhaps local businesses can be persuaded to sponsor a fieldtrip - especially if you can convince them of the benefits re community care and value from young people. If fieldwork is given a valued profile within the school it is easier to persuade parents to contribute too.

Health and Safety is a worry for lots of people but the guidance is clear - if you have thoroughly prepared your visit and risk assessed properly then if the unthinkable happens and there is an accident, teachers cannot be blamed because they have taken every reasonable precaution. Every school should have a named EVC (Educational Visit Co-ordinator) who takes responsibility for ensuring that all necessary paperwork is up to scratch. This is usually the Head teacher but can be another senior member of staff.

Once fieldwork is built into the school curriculum and initial visits and risk assessments have been carried out it is easy to update them each year. If you frequently go out into the local vicinity then a generic risk assessment can be laminated and placed by the main entrance for staff to take and use or copies kept in each class. Always involve pupils in their own risk assessment - it is considered good practice and they love it. It also means that they realise the dangers and act more responsibly. Always have a fieldwork policy and updated 'what to do, what to take' lists, even for short trips. Use excellent GA publications for support and lobby senior management for staff training. This, combined with regular fieldwork will soon build confidence and certainly raise enthusiasm. Please share problems you have encountered and how you have overcome them.