Geography teachers often mention how our subject needs to keep up to date with a constantly changing world.
However, sometimes it is also worth pausing to reflect on what might have changed within geography teaching, and how the standards in the subject might have changed over recent years.
The Geographical Association’s new Report Standards in School Geography 1991 – 2023, written by Dr John Hopkin with contributions from Dr Paula Owen, does just this.
Drawing on Ofsted subject inspection reports for geography, and other sources, it explores standards in the geography curriculum, teaching, achievement and leadership over these three decades.
This period also coincides with the introduction of the (English) national curriculum and successive periods of curriculum reform.
The report identifies times where the subject has been flourishing and standards have been improving. It also highlights periods where, within the different key stages, the subject has faced pressure.
For example, during the 1990s and early 2000s primary geography was frequently seen as marginal or incidental to the primary curriculum and often also suffered by being integrated into broader thematic topics.
Since then, we have seen positive change; most notably through the general improvements reported by Ofsted in 2023, who also observed how geography was now being taught as a discrete subject in almost all inspected primary schools.
Turning to secondary, and particularly from the 2010s onwards, we have seen welcome improvements to key stage 3 geography.
Previously, it had been given a lower priority in comparison to GCSE and A-level. However, an ongoing issue for secondary schools is how the use of teachers without a subject specialist background in geography is often associated with lower standards.
Over this 30-year period, Ofsted’s reports do chart a course showing strengths in primary and secondary geography and in pupils’ achievement.
For example, since 2010 there has been very significant growth in, and a greater diversity of, the cohort of pupils studying GCSE geography with a record level of 303,000 candidates in 2025.
Indeed, from 2000 to 2025 over 6 million pupils in England, Northern Ireland and Wales have taken a GCSE geography exam.
But there are also a number of weaknesses that endure. These may be unsurprising to primary and secondary teachers, such as continuing pressure on opportunities for fieldwork and – in the secondary phase – the use of Geographical Information Systems.
However, one systemic weakness may surprise some colleagues. This is in relation to the study of contemporary places, which is central to the discipline and to pupils’ developing knowledge and understanding of the world.
Yet, this area of work remains one of the subject’s biggest challenges. Ofsted has regularly noted how pupil’s understanding of places might be limited by a range of factors including insufficient opportunities to study them in depth or how they might learn about places through bite-sized vignettes which present outdated caricatures of a complex world.
In addition, where teachers’ subject knowledge was weaker, there is the danger of places being taught superficially or through a focus just on cultural and exotic aspects – which can reinforce stereotypes.
And in 2023, Ofsted cautioned against such narrow learning, which has the danger of repeating a single-story that ‘shows people or place as only one thing, over and over again’.
This review of standards enables teachers to both consider their current work against past experiences and look for future improvements.
The report’s analysis informs the next stages of the independent curriculum and assessment’s review, and identifies how strengthening standards is a challenge for the whole profession to address.
So if we ask the question ‘have standards in school geography improved in the last three decades and, if so, how?’, we can give the answer is a cautious ‘yes’.
However, in spite of notable advances, these improvements have not yet been secured in all schools or for all students
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