Third time lucky…
Written February 2026
The significance of the February half term holiday is etched into every teacher’s mind: it’s the halfway point of the academic year and, every year, without fail, many of us ponder how on earth we have reached that point already.
This year, arriving at February half term will have additional significance for me as it’ll mean I’m officially halfway through writing a Key Stage 3 geography curriculum from scratch. When I joined Future Academies as Trust Lead for Geography in September 2022 this was an integral part of the role; to write a common Key Stage 3 geography curriculum for our eight schools. We began implementing the curriculum in September 2023 and so the halfway point beckons. As it does, and with curriculum reform on the horizon, I wanted to start a new series of blog posts to share some of the thinking behind what I’ve done as I seek to get it ‘right’ third time round.
I’m lucky that this role allows more headspace for complex curriculum thinking. Don’t get me wrong, the role is vast and I spin many more plates than I did as HOD in one school. However, I don’t teach anything like a full timetable and so I have office days (I try to give myself 1 a week) where I can spend a solid chunk of time writing our curriculum (I am resourcing KS3, 4 and 5). So, whilst time is always tight and the challenge of competing demands persists, I do feel like I’m able to step back and think really hard about what excellent practice in Key Stage 3 geography looks like. As anyone who loves curriculum does, I’ve then tried my very best to put this into practice and to write the very best curriculum possible.
As the title of this series suggests, this is the third KS3 geography curriculum that I will have written and taught in my career thus far. The two previous curricula I have taught to KS3 were wildly different and taught in very different circumstances. My first 3 years of teaching were spent in School 1 where I was an NQT HOD surviving week by week and doing the best I could in incredibly challenging staffing circumstances. Looking back, I recognise that I didn’t have the knowledge, time, or headspace to do any real big picture thinking and so I did what I could with what was there whilst learning as much as I could from incredibly generous geographers in person and on Twitter. I don’t have any curriculum documentation left from that experience and, as much as I wish I did, it’s probably for the best- what I can remember involved some pretty questionable topic choices and sequencing (think weak regional studies of China and the Horn of Africa before they’ve studied development as one particularly memorable example).
It was when I moved to School 2 and took my second HOD role in September 2018 that my curriculum thinking (and love for curriculum!) really developed. I read as much as I could, joined TeachMeets, watched myriad webinars and listened to endless podcasts in a quest to understand what an excellent 7-year geography curriculum looked like. During my time at this school, I started to share this curriculum work and thinking widely- perhaps most notably in this webinar about using concepts to underpin a curriculum that has since been watched more than 4,000 times. Four years later, and after constant curriculum tweaking and refinement alongside the three other geographers in the team, I left that school and walked from a KS3 curriculum that I remain incredibly proud of.
And yet… I knew it could be improved. I knew there were elements that I hadn’t quite got right; fundamental geographical skills that could have been developed further, links across topics that could have been strengthened, and curriculum components where great progression could have been achieved. And so, in September 2022, I relished the opportunity to start from scratch and go again. This time, the stakes were higher; the curriculum is being taught to many hundreds of students a year and by a team of around 30 geographers.
So, what does my Key Stage 3 geography curriculum look like third time round? How are we building a coherent 7-year geography curriculum? What has been kept from the previous two curriculums I’ve worked on and what’s out? What curriculum components have been strengthened and how? Here’s to sharing as much as I can and keeping the curriculum conversation alive!
To kickstart the series: What if we teach development before tectonics?