What if… Y7 started with a bang?

Written July 2026
What if… Y7 started with a bang? With really rich geographical knowledge? 

As I explained here, as I reach the mid-way point of writing the third Key Stage 3 curriculum of my career so far, I’m hoping to share as much of my thinking as possible to keep the curriculum conversation alive. The first blog of this series was titled ‘What if… development before tectonics?’. I argued that if we don’t study development before tectonics then we’re missing a chance to unlock a key piece of the progression puzzle. I challenged us to think critically about our KS3 tectonics topic: is it simply a watered-down version of our KS4 topic? Have we framed our tectonics topic in a way that actually encourages geographical thinking? How do we achieve genuine progression in students’ understanding of tectonics from KS3 to KS5?

In this blog, I’m going right back to the start of any Key Stage 3 geographical curriculum and asking: what if we started with really rich geographical knowledge? As always, I am certainly not writing this to suggest that our approach (detailed here) is the ‘right’ way of doing things and that other approaches are all flawed (of course they’re not). Rather, I hope to share my reflections and lessons learnt as I aim for ‘third time lucky’ with all things KS3. I hope this blog provides food for thought regarding one way of doing things from someone who adores curriculum thinking and is constantly tweaking, refining and improving!

So, where to start? Well, you may read the title and assume that I’ve made a mistake and that everyone starts Year 7 with ‘a bang’ and ‘really rich geographical knowledge’. It would be an easy assumption to make because… well, why not? Why would we not want to start the 7-year secondary journey of our geographers this way? Alas, I’m afraid my experience suggests that, in reality, things look a little different on the ground and I’m certainly guilty of not having started Year 7 with a bang in the past.

What to choose as the first topic of Year 7 geography is always a tricky decision. How do we balance the need to ensure students have the basic geographical knowledge and skills needed for success at Key Stage 3 and beyond with the desire to ensure that we start their secondary journey with rigorous, challenging and engaging geography? Historically, the desire to introduce geographical skills has won and many schools begin Year 7 with a unit that introduces students to geographical skills that they require throughout KS3. In my two previous curricula, I did the same. We may have called it a ‘skills’ unit but it wasn’t really; it was largely a mapwork unit.

Now, though, I recognise an inherent problem with what I was aiming to do in this unit: at this early stage of Year 7, the students didn’t yet have the knowledge with which to apply the skills we were teaching about. We were trying to teach them how to interpret the landscape on an OS map before they knew what they were looking at in the landscape. We were trying to teach them the skills needed to be a geographer before they’d gained any of the foundational knowledge needed to be a geographer…

What resulted was a ‘fluffy’ unit that lacked powerful geographical knowledge and (in my opinion) didn’t ignite a love of geography for our Year 7 students.

For that reason, in this third curriculum, I’ve said goodbye to the skills unit and our curriculum begins with a bang: we’ve prioritised starting with rich geographical knowledge above everything else. We don’t waste a single lesson on anything that could risk being ‘fluffy’; there’s no ‘what’s the difference between human and physical geography?’ and there’s no ‘what is geography?’ (they’ll learn this in time as we work through our course). Instead, it’s straight into ‘How and why do populations change?’

So, we start Year 7 with a unit studying population dynamics and exploring how and why populations change. We show our Year 7 students how geography enables us to see the ‘big picture’ of planet earth whilst teaching (what I consider to be) essential foundational knowledge. They explore the process of population change at a global, national, and regional scale which provides the foundational knowledge needed to study development, globalisation and other topics linked to population, in depth, later in KS3.

The topic begins at a global scale with the big picture: what is the global population today and how is it distributed? We then explore the factors that affect to that distribution by looking at climate, topography, birth rates, death rates and migration. At this early point in the topic, students are introduced to their first geographical skill: they learn how to read, describe, and draw a line graph to show how a population can change over time. This is quickly followed by another; the knowledge gained so far is applied to population pyramids and students are taught what population pyramids tell us about population structure and how to read and describe them.

This early in Year 7, we have to think carefully about the geographical links that we can and can’t draw. It can be tempting to try to do everything, in every topic. But, in doing so, we achieve shallow coverage instead of deeper understanding and so (perhaps counter-intuitively) hinder the progression within our curriculum. As always, tough curriculum choices are needed. So, in this first topic, when learning about population, the links between population and development are implicit but not explicitly explored. This is because students will learn about development as a concept and process in Topic 3 of Year 7 and will therefore build directly upon the knowledge gained in this first topic to draw those links. Of course, the lesson end points have to reflect this and so we have planned that students can describe (but not yet explain) population pyramids; this progression to explaining will come later in KS3.

Following this application of their knowledge to the data presentation technique of a population pyramid, students then study the population growth theories of Malthus and Boserup. One of the challenges when teaching geography, particularly at KS3, is to teach the disciplinary knowledge of geography; to teach students what it means to ‘do’ geography and how geographical knowledge is constructed. In many topics, it can be hard to find the opportunities to discuss contrasting theories and how knowledge is debated in geography (a forthcoming blog topic- watch this space). It is for this reason that the theories of Malthus and Boserup are included in this topic, allowing us to teach students the two different opinions and theories of population growth and to debate them. What knowledge did this person have about population growth and how did this inform their theory? What evidence is there for and against these theories? Which is likely to hold true in the 21st century and why?

As we begin the second half of the topic, students start to apply the knowledge they have gained so far to different places- thus moving from the global scale to a national scale. Of course, there is a huge number of countries that we could study to exemplify and apply knowledge of population dynamics. In this curriculum, I’ve chosen to teach students about China, Japan, and the UK because these countries and their varied populations allow us to tell an up-to-date and nuanced story of the populations globally and how they are changing. 

The global population story today isn’t one of youthful populations and concerns of over-population but instead one of drastically declining fertility rates and concern for the demographic future of many nation states. Language of a ‘demographic time-bomb’, ‘demographic collapse’ and ‘demographic crisis’ abounds and is increasingly reported in the media.  Arguably, to exemplify this, there is nowhere better to study than China.

We teach Year 7 how in 1979 China needed to implement an anti-natalist policy (the One Child Policy) to control its population growth. We explore how this worked and show students how successful it was at reducing the birth rate, and extreme poverty rate, in China. Teaching students that the One Child Policy ended in 2016, we explore how China’s birth rate is now so low that its population will soon start to shrink- and at a rate far faster than anywhere else has experienced. This allows us to contextualise China’s population dynamics within the global story of widespread declining fertility rates.

From here, we move to studying about Japan and its pro-natalist policy. Students are taught about Japan as an example of a country that has long been experiencing falling fertility rates and is now a population in decline. This allows us to revisit ideas of natural increase and natural decrease and embed knowledge from earlier in the topic.

Having studied two Asian countries, the topic ends with students studying the population dynamics of the UK. They consider the characteristics of the UK’s population today, its uneven distribution and how it is changing. This helps students further apply the knowledge they’ve gained previously in the topic and also gives them foundational knowledge about the UK with which to build on in Topic 2 (Our Home The UK). This also allows us to introduce and teach about choropleth maps (another key geographical skill). We look at choropleth maps from the 2021 Census to consider key characteristics of the UK’s population.

So, there we have it: our first topic of Year 7 that, I’d argue, really does ensure students start their secondary geography journey with rich geographical knowledge. Whilst I’ve argued that we should seriously considered removing ‘What is geography?’ / ‘What is a geographer?’ / ‘What skills do I need as a geographer?’ units as the first topic of KS3, I am not, of course (!) arguing that the teaching of geographical skills is not essential. As I hope is obvious by this point, key geographical skills are embedded throughout this unit. In this third curriculum I’m writing I’ve been more precise than ever in mapping out our skills teaching and in this first topic students are introduced to line graphs, choropleth maps and population pyramids. Each of these is revisited, consolidated and applied to different contexts through Year 7. Whilst map skills aren’t included here, they certainly are elsewhere!

Equally, as I explained here and hope to explore in another blog, locational knowledge is a central pillar of this curriculum. Students should be able to correctly locate all of the countries explicitly discussed in the topic on a world map. In this first topic, the countries are the UK, India, China and Japan.

So, there we have it, my argument for starting Year 7 with really rich geographical knowledge and saying goodbye to the skills unit. Not everyone will agree with this viewpoint, not everyone will think that skills units are ‘fluffy’ and not everyone will agree that population is the best way to start KS3 but, as always, I hope that I’ve provided some food for thought and perhaps sparked an idea for someone!