At the GTE Conference in January 2013, I heard about the work that was underway on a new area of the Geographical Association's website.
This was being led by Andrea Tapsfield and colleagues on the GA's Teacher Education Special Interest Group.
The background was that with an increasing number of teachers being mentored within schools as part of their training, alongside the needs of NQTs who would need continuing support. There has been considerable effort to prepare a range of materials on all aspects of the task of MENTORING colleagues since then.
You will find that it is useful for any teacher, not just those who are mentoring others, or being mentored. This is a wonderful addition to the GA website.
There are resources for FIELDWORK for example - dig deeply and you will find some really important resources here.
One of the things about being a prolific blogger is that things you write disappear off the main section of the blog quite quickly.
I thought it was worth reminding you of something that I created a while back with the guy on the left here...
Good GCSE teaching needs good up to date case studies, and the current flooding affecting large parts of the country is perfect for that - although its misery for those caught up in it...
This is an excellent resource for the current times, when we have COBRA meetings (bonus points for those who tell me why they are called that)
The Conversation offers a perspective on news stories, and would be a useful resource for geographers preparing for GCSE exams.
Ministers should be applauded for recognising that there’s simply no way we could tell the thousands of key workers and low income families, desperate for a decent home, that we can’t build any more new homes because of concerns about flood plains.
David Orr, National Housing Federation, BBC News, 2007.
For the past six weeks, Somerset has experienced its most significant flooding in decades that have at last required calling out the army.
While commentators fixate on dredging rivers, or more sustainably planting trees, or reintroducing beavers as the solution to prevent more homes from being flooded, those with longer memories may cast them back to 2007, when much of central and southwestern England was underwater from some of the worst flooding in living memory.
Communities Minister Eric Pickles might like to consider the inconvenient truth of his own words in 2007 while in opposition. Following the floods, he said in response to Labour’s housing strategy that: “if you build houses on flood plains it increases the likelihood that people will be flooded”.
A flood of water and bad ideas
As the still-beleaguered residents of the Somerset levels will recall, the floods of 2007 followed the wettest May, June and July since records began in 1766. The airwaves and newspapers were similarly awash with opinion in response to the government’s ambitious plans to build 3m new homes by 2020. Inevitably, it was said, so long as the proper defences were in place, some of these new homes would be built on floodplains.
The cost of 2007’s wettest-ever summer: 7,000 businesses and 48,000 homes were flooded in the South West, Midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside, prompting 120,000 household insurance claims, 27,000 commercial claims at a £3bn overall cost to insurers.
The subsequent inquiry led by Sir Michael Pitt published its review the following summer. It found that around 10% of properties in England were located on floodplains, with 11% of new homes since 2000 built in flood hazard areas, and 16,000 dwellings since 2006 built in high flood risk areas. Roughly a quarter of properties flooded in summer 2007 had been built in the last 25 years. This, the review pointed out, emphasised the vital importance of strong planning controls and well-informed planning decisions.
Sandbags do not a flood defence make. Tim Ireland/PA
Realising there needed to be a balance between development needs and flood risk, the idea of “environmental limits” was discussed within Defra. In putting “the green back into the Green Belt” as then environment secretary David Miliband said, this stressed the importance of the ecosystems approach.
For example, planting urban woodland improves biodiversity and wildlife, provides a degree of flood control, renewable wood to offset climate change, and attractive environments for exercise and recreation. Strips of planted green space alongside city river banks are cheaper than expensive concrete barriers, and provide a fall-back area, a “turquoise belt”, that could be flooded without great risk or expense, and also provide for leisure and biodiversity at the same time.
Recommendations made
Of the 90 recommendations in Pitt’s review, two clearly stated there should be a presumption against building in high risk areas. This was in accordance with the government’s planning policy on flood risk, known as PPS25.
The review also called for the effectiveness of PPS25 and the Environment Agency’s powers to challenge development to be kept under review, and strengthened if necessary. Another recommendation stated that Defra, the Environment Agency, and Natural England should establish through Catchment Flood Management Plans a programme that would find a way of working with, rather than against, natural processes.
These approaches, which included setting back river defences and relocating buildings if necessary, were considered particularly important in the face of the predicted increase in river flow levels. Flood risk had to be managed co-operatively between local authorities, the Environment Agency and developers, in a more sustainable way and also as a means to provide more attractive places to live. Newspaper editorials at the time called for there to be “no backsliding on commitments to be better prepared in future” and that there should be “no cherry-picking of the Pitt recommendations for quick political gain in the run-up to a general election.
Flood Risk Management - A Little More Complex Than Dredging. Tim Ireland
Recommendations ignored
But a general election later, in 2012 prime minister David Cameron is pledging to “cut through the dither” that is holding Britain in “paralysis” and has brought forward by contentious measures to relax rules on planning applications with an eye to boosting growth, and providing 75,000 new homes. The National Planning Policy Framework is proclaimed “simple”, and had reduced planning policy from more than 1,000 pages to under 100, said to pave the way for swifter, clearer decisions.
Otto Thoresen, director-general of the The Association of British Insurers, expressed immediate concern that the framework could lead to greater inappropriate development in flood risk areas, something that the current “rigorous planning system” was a bulwark against. The result, he predicted, would not be the “stimulation of the economy,” but “misery for people when their homes are flooded”.
The National Flood Forum’s chairman, Charles Tucker, similarly argued that the new framework “has, at a stroke, scrapped the carefully constructed raft of technical guidance, context and definitions built up over years” for flood protection.
Dredging as a solution was raised following the Cumbria floods of 2009, to which Professor Colin Thorne, fluvial geomorphologist at the University of Nottingham, responded that floods caused by a huge amounts of rainfall cannot be entirely prevented. Constantly dredging rivers and clearing vegetation to do so would be unsustainably expensive, financially, socially and in terms of biodiversity and habitat loss.
It is clear to see, reflecting back on the floods of 2007 (and those in 2005 and 2009), the lack of integration and disjointed policy across the two central government departments has still not been resolved seven years later. The fixation with dredging continues, and David Cameron has called for dredging to start as soon as possible, reversing previous statements that it would be little help.
Perhaps instead if the media turned their attention to dredging the Defra archives, they’d find the “inconvenient truth” of floodplain development – that houses built on floodplains could flood – a truth currently lying buried in the sediments of their own filing cabinets. Karen Potter receives funding from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB), Welsh Government and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Over the Christmas holiday, the Pole of Cold teamwere making their way towards Oymyakon: the Pole of Cold (coldest inhabited place in the Northern Hemisphere)
Meanwhile I was a little closer to home... in fact I was at home, working on a resource for the From the Field section of the Royal Geographical Society website.
These resources are now live on the KS4 From the Field section of the RGS website.
Check them out here:3 lesson plans with all the materials, plus plenty of extension ideas and other materials, with more to come... Thanks to Matt Podbury for some kind words already. Let me know if you use them or take a look.
Dr. Simon Carr of QMUL is currently co-ordinating the new programme.
Here's the details:
FREE Launch Event
The London 2012 Olympics: Evaluating the Legacy of the Games
5.30 - 7.30pm, Tuesday 14 January
School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS
Nearest tube: Mile End and Stepney Green; bus routes 25 and 205.
The Geographical Association East London Branch would like to invite you to join us for a launch event hosted by the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London.
The launch will comprise two talks examining the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics given by: Professor Steve Cummins (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine) Emmanuel Gotora (The East London Communities Organisation, TELCO).
We hope the evening will provide insight and inspiration about our East London location as well as examine the theme of a popular case-study and fieldwork component used throughout the National Curriculum and at GCSE and A Level. There will also be a brief introduction to the new GA Branch and an invitation to join and be a part of its future development.
This event is free to attend and is aimed at teachers, teaching assistants and others involved in the preparation, teaching and evaluation of teaching, whether they are members of the GA or not. Refreshments will be provided.
If you have any enquiries about the GA East London Branch or the launch event, please email Dr Simon Carr. We would be very grateful if you could email to confirm attendance for catering purposes.
I spent Thursday of this week on the first part of a journey around the coast of Norfolk from Wells next the Sea, visiting some of the communities that were affected by the recent storm surge. The surge affected communities much further up the coast in Lincolnshire and East Yorkshire, then down into the Thames estuary.
I will be writing up some of the discussions that I had with people and the stories that I collected in further posts over the next week or so.
Beach Road in Happisburgh is shorter than it was the last time I visited, and the resources I used then will need to be updated.
The full detail, and more images, will appear in a range of resources, including a new GCSE textbook. Here's a selection of the images I took yesterday...
I was also particularly interested in this image, which shows the area of London that would have flooded in the surge if the Thames Flood Barrier had not been built.
Image copyright: Environment Agency
The Environment Agency has shared a range of valuable information, and I will be adding to that in further posts...
We believe that the curriculum content for geography can be the same for all students and that all students can be assessed in the same way. We propose that the reformed GCSE in geography should not be tiered.
Forms of assessment
Our controlled assessment review found a good deal of agreement that carrying out fieldwork is essential for students of GCSE geography. There was less agreement about whether it is possible to assess fieldwork skills as part of GCSE geography assessment, although there was a view that some of the skills – data manipulation, interpretation and analysis, for example – can be assessed through written exams. There were many concerns about the nature of school fieldwork exercises which many schools complete in a single day. Even the most capable students are unlikely to have the time during one day of fieldwork to experiment with alternative approaches to data collection, which means that they are not able to reflect on, further analyse and evaluate their work.
There are also issues of fairness for all students. We found that if teachers designed poor fieldwork exercises then that could prevent students from performing well, or from accessing all of the marking criteria.
The curriculum content requires students to undertake fieldwork, but the related knowledge and skills can be assessed by written exam set and marked by the exam board. We therefore propose that all assessment for the reformed geography GCSE should be by written exams alone and that the total assessment time should be no less than 3.5 hours.
It's important to have a suitable case study on landscape change....
“This is the equivalent to trying to build a cable car in front of Buckingham Palace. Cheddar Gorge is of international importance. There are better ways of driving business without destroying the very asset people come to see. It is far better to retain the uniqueness of the place.”
Helen Bonser-Wilton, assistant director of operations at the National Trust.
I explored this planned development of cable cars in Cheddar Gorge with student before the holiday and over half term, this has come into the news once again and here are a few links that you could follow to bring the story up to date.
First, there's a clip from West Country News.... (may only work for a limited time) A few different opinions expressed here...
Also an article from the Daily Mail, which shows some mocked up images of how the cable car will look, and describes the plans.
We used Digimap for Schools to create maps of the Gorge to use with our work... We will be practising our map skills again over the next few weeks as we get nearer to exam week.
