Happy Finland

Last Friday was World Happiness Day....

And the World Happiness ratings for 2026 were revealed - and once again the Nordic countries are the happiest in the world, taking 5 of the top 6 slots, with just Costa Rica sneaking into the mix.

This BBC Travel piece explores what makes the Nordic countries so happy.

Iceland has gone up to 2nd place as well, which is good news.

Links with the Discover the World Education resource on the Happy Nordics.

It was not such good news for the UK.

Sharing the blog on Substack

I've been sharing my blogs over on my Substack Newsletter. This comes out weekly and provides an update on blog posts, projects, news, books, images and events linked to geography.

Subscribe here.

Digital Assessment - some early trials

Digital assessment is coming...

Katie Hall has shared some of her recent work exploring digital assessment options.

She has been working with Qualifications Wales to look at a possible model for doing this.

Nathan Evans from Qualifications Wales has written a blog post about progress to date.

This includes some videos of the tasks that learners were asked to do.

And then you can have a go yourself at doing the activity here.

50 000 page views

A small milestone, and far less than on other blogs but nice to see nonetheless. Thanks for reading.

Met Office animation: the passage of a depression

A Met Office resource. 

Check out their other resources on Climate Change weather and adaptation.

Cooper Education

James Peverill got in touch to let me know about some upcoming events organised by Cooper Education.

This is a newish CPD offering - catering for those who want help with specific GCSE and ‘A’ level exam specifications - and includes some very well known speakers including Cameron Dunn, Paul Logue, Kate Stockings and Catherine Owen. 

If you go to the website and scroll down you will see that they offer a range of CPD sessions - held as webinars - supporting different qualifications. The next session, for example, features Kate Stockings talking about Regenerating Places for EQ3 and EQ4. It takes place later today. She is also leading another session next week. 

Check the website if you are interested in finding out more.

Please note: I have not attended any of these sessions so this is not a personal endorsement, but all the speakers are very highly regarded.

Biome Viewer

Thanks to Hannah Steel for the link to this useful visualisation tool.

Biomeviewer displays a range of information in a visual way.

It's really useful for identifying biomes in a general way, and rotating the globe to see where they are located and identifying their characteristics.

There are accompanying resources in a folder, student worksheet and apparently an iOS app too.

The worksheet takes students through the various features which are built into the app.

You can also explore anthromes: anthropogenic biomes. These are where the majority of humanity lives.

A classification proposed by E.C. Ellis, October 25, 2005 lists them. Minimum mapping scale greater than or equal to one square kilometer.

Source: https://ecotope.org/about/anthropogenic_landscapes/

There is a lot more information and some useful maps on this website too, which is the new home of the previous link. Lovely work and I now want to do something with this as well...

Tourism in the Lake District - a research report

 

This is a very useful report from the Friends of the Lake District

It's a really clear piece of research by Dr. Davina Stanford on the costs and benefits of tourism in the Lake District with some case studies from other locations on how they raise money for sustainable tourism and to pay for some of the additional requirements.

One option is a Tourist tax expansion. What is the tax spent on?

If you have travelled to a European city recently, you will be familiar with the idea of paying a few extra Euros on top of the price of your room.

Who Pays for the Lake District? Tourism is a vital part of the #LakeDistrict economy – but it comes at a cost. It’s time to talk about the problems and the solutions. Read our report here: https://t.co/1IYKJxZmly #WhoPays pic.twitter.com/liwxF8Pok7

— Friends of the Lake District (@FriendsofLakes) November 20, 2024

 

OCR 'B' Update

 

OCR B is my favourite GCSE specification. 

I co-wrote a number of textbooks to support people teaching this spec. They are in their 2nd edition currently and available to purchase from a number of places.

Did you hear we're planning an update to our GCSE Geography B qualification? We're improving its manageability, accessibility and relevance to ensure it continues to meet the needs of teachers and students. Read more: https://t.co/tERyYOGXFe
#geographyforall pic.twitter.com/UU0PtbGmwX

— OCR (@ocrexams) April 30, 2024

Details are here. 

GCSE B will feel very familiar for our existing teachers. However, our goal is to create an improved qualification that continues to meet DfE criteria while also being...

✅ More manageable: We’re striving to reduce the amount of content you need to teach so you and your students have more time to enjoy the course, complete fieldwork, and prepare effectively for exams.

✅ Accessible to all: We want all students to have a positive exam experience. We plan to publish a refined list of clearly defined command words for assessment. We’re also reviewing question tariffs, the language used in our papers, and plan to embed resources within exams where appropriate.

✅ Relevant to students’ lives: We're reviewing content to ensure it is up-to-date and empowers students to tackle future challenges. This includes a proposed greater focus on positive climate action, sustainability and green technology.

We’re also working to enhance our fieldwork experience and ensure equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging principles are embedded throughout the qualification.

Plus, whether you're new to OCR or have been teaching with us for a while, you will have comprehensive support from the start – from professional development courses to switching and mapping guides, schemes of work to curriculum planners. We’ll also have support for non-specialist teachers of geography.

Read a blog from Kerry Sage.

A draft specification and other materials are being developed and it is hoped that there will be first teaching of the new specification from September 2025.

Census Data on Centenarians

 

A new visualisation on the ONS website today explores the growth in the number of centenarians flagged up in the latest Census.

There are now almost 14 000 people who are aged over 100.

A few other facts:

Centenarians still only represent 0.2% of the total population.

Male centenarians in 2021 had outlived their life expectancy at birth by four decades and female centenarians by three decades.

Two in five centenarians lived alone; one in five lived in private households with other people; the remaining two in five lived in a communal establishment.

A higher proportion of male centenarians were married than female centenarians; this is because of the longer life expectancy of females and because men, on average, marry women slightly younger than themselves.

Investigate the map yourself here. One of the areas with a higher than average percentage of centenarians is local to me: the North Norfolk coast.

Life on the Edge

 

New on iPlayer as of a few minutes ago is this 27 minute documentary on events at Hemsby on the Norfolk coast.

Worth a watch.

The residents of Hemsby don't want to leave, but their houses are on the edge of a cliff. This is their story of surving one of the most dramatic cases of UK coastal erosion.

Census 2021: How well do you know your area?

 

These quizzes were previously available for the 2011 Census, and are now back with data from the 2021 Census.

✨IT'S QUIZ TIME!✨
So, you think you know your local area? Now you can test your knowledge in the new #CensusQuiz and broadcast your scores on to your friends and followers on social media!https://t.co/yIf0YfMx6q pic.twitter.com/SHLuFnDw14

— Ahmad Barclay (@bothness) December 2, 2022

The quizzes can be embedded, which makes them particularly useful for teachers who can add them to VLE pages etc.

WJEC Blended Learning Resources

There is a wealth of Blended Learning resources on the WJEC / CBAC website.

These are excellent and cover a great many topics suitable for 'A' level and GCSE students and also teachers who want to check their subject knowledge ahead of teaching a topic for the first time. They are free, and no account is needed. They follow a similar format to those on the SENECA website.

Click BEGIN and work through the resources.

Very helpful support from the awarding body.

GeogPod: National Fieldwork Week

Head out with Year 10 this coming week if you can.

One of the best ways to appreciate the landscape is to head out on fieldwork. 

The latest GeogPod has been released and it features Paula Richardson and I talking about the GA's National Research Report and how that fed into the development of the National Fieldwork Week.

 This starts on Monday the 6th of June.

Episode 53 of #GeogPod is now available!

In this episode, @GAGeogger speaks with @GeoBlogs and Paula Richardson on fieldwork

Listen now at https://t.co/hLSfHDfVhp

Series 9 of GeogPod is kindly sponsored by @CambridgeInt#geography #nationalfieldworkweek #podcast #education pic.twitter.com/sk62VGtEQS

— Geographical Association (@The_GA) June 4, 2022

Thanks to John Lyon for hosting - see if you can spot the question I wasn't expecting... :) 

AQA Pre-release 2022

I was told yesterday that the AQA GCSE pre-release material for the 2022 summer exam season was based in / or mentioned Ely, so I asked for a copy and discovered that it was based on an application by Amey to add an incinerator to their existing waste management park near Waterbeach / Denny Abbey to the south of Ely, along the A10.

The scheme was controversial, although the benefits were clearly stated by the company. A protest group was set up, and commissioned a report on the impact of the proposal, which included mention of the chimney which would be taller than Ely Cathedral and spoil the view towards it from Madingley (a place of geographical significance).

Interestingly, for a pre-release where students usually have to weigh up whether a planned development should go ahead, the decision has already been made in that the scheme was .... spoiler alert.... turned down in 2020.

I tried to add some local contexts - newspaper articles, campaign group reports, local landscape character analysis reports etc. into the mix and shared to the community - AQA is the most popular GCSE specification choice so there will be lots of teachers looking to prepare something on this, and we are all working at our limits at the moment with hybrid learning for many still due to students recovering at home from COVID.

Anthony Bennett has added a copy of the document to his page of pre-release materials. This is available to subscribers and non-subscribers of Internet Geography.

An editable version is below or on this link...

Feel free to download a copy and add your own ideas to the document - there have already been some deletions from the document which is a little disappointing, but I have been able to recover to previous versions.

Images: Alan Parkinson and shared under CC license

Threads

This is not related to the 1980s TV drama featuring a nuclear bomb being dropped on Sheffield...

Threads is a new online game from the Global Goals Centre, which has had the involvement of a number of organisations.

Thanks to Verity Jones for the tipoff.

Go here to play the game.

The activity explores the product life cycle of an item of clothing, with different routes depending on what the product is, and several other decisions that are taken during the course of the journey... This is revealed at the end.

Usefully, the team has also created a set of lesson plans which are helpful for those in KS2 and KS3, and with a strong cross-curricular / Global Goals theme. There are 8 lessons, each with a PPT and an accompanying overview document.

Here are the details of the team that created the game and accompanying resources.

This is well worth taking a look at, as there might be something here that can slot nicely into, or alongside existing curriculum content and activities.

Chalk one up

An interesting long read in 'The Guardian' on chalk: a rock which makes up a large part of the UK's bedrock stretching all the way from East Anglia and the famous striped cliffs at Hunstanton all the way down to the south coast, and the famous Old Harry Rocks of the Foreland. 

It is one of the rocks that gets taught at KS3 very often because of its association with particular stretches of coastline, landforms, and as a rock type which is affected by solution. At GCSE it can lead to distinctive landscapes, although limestone and granite are more often selected.

If I was to dig down below the village where I live, I would reach chalk, as I would for most of Norfolk.

BGS Map Viewer for my village.

To find out what lies below your feet, visit the British Geological Survey mapping site, or download the MySoil app.

Mountain Aglow

A new website which looks at the legacy of the Soufriere Hills volcano's eruptions in Montserrat.

Since the eruption began in 1995, hundreds of scientific studies have been published on the activity at Soufrière Hills and its impacts. But these numbers are dwarfed by the remarkable creative outpouring amongst Montserrations on island and all over the world, which matches the vigour of the volcano and the enthusiasm of the scientists to understand more.

The impact of the volcano on the lives of Montserratians is powerfully reflected in these memories, stories, poems and songs that have been written, told and shared over the last 25 years. We are a team of scientists, literary analysts, historians, artists and social scientists who have benefited from this new knowledge. With ‘Mountain Aglow’, our goal is to document and celebrate the creative responses to the eruption, to keep the collective memory of Montserrat before, during and after the eruption alive and accessible to everyone.
There is a digital exhibition.

Trailer for the website / exhibition on the island. The physical exhibition is paired with this digital exhibition to explain the eruption and the legacy.

Out later in the year... to help with GCSE fieldwork

Will be available to order from the GA shop and also view on the GA stall at the GA Conference.

Surrey Geography Network Meetings

For those who are in Surrey or within easy reach, Brendan Conway has shared details of what looks like a very useful series of events in the next few months, and into 2020.
As you can see, there are some excellent speakers including the 'mighty' Simon Oakes and the GA's very own Alan Kinder.

Details for booking are at the bottom of the blogpost.

Surrey Geography Network meetings 2019-20

These are designed to help you to address current issues whilst at the same time networking with other geography leaders / teachers.
The meetings will take place at Notre Dame School KT11 1HA from 1.30 to 4.30. The dates, speakers and their topics are as follows​:

Tuesday 19th November: Enabling Data Skills in the Geography Curriculum, Dr Simon Oakes - former chief examiner, author and education consultant

The session will present some excellent ideas for embedding data skills into Geography lessons. It will draw on Simon's Royal Geographical Society funded project work as well as his own wealth of experience as a chief examiner, teacher and text book writer. The session is designed to help you to develop students' confidence and their ability to use their geographical knowledge to make the most of available data.

Tuesday 10th March: Planning your Geography Curriculum, Damian Gray - Chartered Geographer and Head of Geography, Sunbury Manor School

Damian will illustrate how he has planned his department's geography curriculum to meet the requirements of Ofsted's new inspection framework which necessitates the need for subject leads to be able to justify the quality of their educational provision and lesson sequence choices.

Monday 22nd June: The new Education Inspection Framework (EIF) - What this means for Geography Curriculum Leaders, Alan Kinder - Chief Executive of the Geographical Association. 

Alan is also a Director of the Council for Subject Associations, British Council consultant and a virtual editorial board member to the SecEd educational newspaper. He is a member of the Council for British Geography and on the advisory board for the University of Sheffield's Geography’s Department.
The session will offer advice and share ideas as to how best to meet the new demands on geography subject leaders of the new EIF with specific reference made to the support provided by the Geographical Association.​

If you wish to book a place, please email Katy Gill (courses@schoolsnetwork.co.uk) who will allocate you a place and send you an invoice. 

The cost of the 3 meetings, one per term, remains £160 in total.