Geography
Welcome to Geography
We are a dynamic and thriving department within the school, consisting of four committed and enthusiastic members of staff. On top of that, we have amazing views from our classrooms for miles over the Culm Valley! Geography at Uffculme School offers an exciting opportunity to study both the natural and human worlds using contemporary issues and case studies. The subject content provokes and answers questions about people, place and the environment. It inspires our students to think about their own place in the world and encourages a sense of empathy with the opinions, values, rights and responsibilities of other people and places in the world.
Geography also develops a wide range of transferable, interpersonal skills such as problem solving, report writing, ICT, presentation and mapping. These skills are useful in future study and careers, as Geography qualifications are well respected and geographers are increasingly sought after in the workplace. Our department always look to ensure the students have a sense of awe and wonder of the world around them and field trips are an important part of our teaching. The department runs several trips for different year groups, including Cheddar Gorge, The River Culm, Exeter and overseas trips to Iceland and Sicily.
The subject has an extremely high uptake of students for the GCSE course, with over 60% of the year group opting to study Geography each year. Geography is one of the most successful departments in the school and we are proud of the impressive progress and well-earned results our students achieve.
Curriculum and Qualifications
At KS3, the department follows a varied programme of geographical study. (See the Geography Curriculum plan for more details)
At KS4, the department follows the AQA GCSE Geography course. The specification for this course can be found here
If you require further information about Geography at Uffculme School, please contact Mr D Harbour, Head of Department, at HarbourD@uffculmeschool.bep.ac
Extra Curricular Opportunities
The geography department prides itself with the trips and opportunities that we run to supplement and support the classroom based learning. Fieldtrips are a really important part of the learning and help to cement the ideas that students learn in the classroom by seeing geography in the wild.
Year 7 get to experience a cave system at Cheddar as we go to explore the formation of a limestone environment. Year 10 and 11 have two pieces of field work, one visiting the River Culm in the fields outside Uffculme Village. We spend the day researching the velocity of the river in relation to the depth in various points along the course. Meanwhile Year 11 head to Bristol Harbourside to investigate the regeneration of the floating harbour in terms of the social, economic and environmental opportunities and challenges.
On top of this we have run multiple trips overseas to Iceland, a firm favourite with the students, and also to Sicily including climbing Mount Etna! During the time we were unable to travel overseas, we arranged a trip to Snowdonia and climbed Snowden as well as investigating rivers while gorge walking!
When we can’t get out of school, in recent years we have run a virtual geography field trip from our Theatre and visited places such as Madagascar, California and Norway.