Geography

Course summary

Students study a mixture of human and physical geography throughout the Lower Sixth – glaciated environments and Earth’s life support systems on the physical side and the geographies of place and space, migration and geopolitics on the human side.  Early in the Lower Sixth, students participate in urban fieldwork in London, culminating in a curry evening on Brick Lane. At the end of the year, students complete some investigative fieldwork through a compulsory three-day residential field trip to Birmingham and Snowdonia where they explore a mixture of fieldwork techniques in contrasting environments. This is the launchpad for students to start exploring an issue of their choosing in their non-examined assessment/independent investigation. In the Upper Sixth, students are given the opportunity to look at the biggest and most complex issues of our generation. Topics include an exploration into the causes, impacts and management of climate change, as well as an insight into hazardous earth and the management of large-scale natural disasters. Students grapple with the complicated interplay of the physical processes in action, the decision-making at a variety of spatial scales, the geopolitics and more. This gives students the tools to be able to write extensively, substantiate their arguments and give well-reasoned conclusions. The two topics are then linked back to material covered in the Lower Sixth, including how climate change has influenced migration and caused climate change refugees. We also look at how tectonics hazards have influenced people’s sense of place.