School: Merdon Junior School

The school has been awarded:

Gold

Geography: notable aspects and strengths

Many thanks for your well organised, clearly presented and incredibly detailed submission. For a first application this has a great many positives, and you are to be congratulated for pulling it together under the circumstances, and for your own professional journey so far. The vision statement is clear, and context slips have been used well throughout to show the evidence underpinning your statements. The mention of Geography’s Big Ideas shows that you really understand the subject, and we appreciated that you also use Twitter to share your work effectively with other colleagues in your network.

It was good to see you making effective use of your school location and the local area and looking for opportunities to learn outside the classroom and look at landscapes through a geographical lens. Displays are creative and effective and celebrate pupil work and add to the learning environment. You have made some good choices of topic areas to cover and selected interesting evidence.

We were pleased to see some of the creative ways that you involved students in geographical learning during the lockdown such as ‘lamppost’ orienteering which you adapted from social media for your own context, and the use of topical contexts such as the TV series ‘Race across the World’. The fact that you are open to, and aware of, such external sources of support is encouraging, and relatively rare in the Primary phase. We were also impressed with the running challenge linked to Shackleton’s Boat Journey - what a creative initiative!

Fieldwork is frequent and uses interesting ideas such as the ‘8 Way Thinking’ sheets and is supplemented by virtual fieldwork opportunities using Google Earth.

We are delighted to be able to award the PGQM at the Gold level, which we hope comes as a very pleasant surprise, and is ample reward for your efforts through this challenging period. Congratulations.