What’s the point?
Creating a future-facing geography curriculum
There is a question that sits behind most curriculum conversations, but is rarely answered directly:
What is geography for?
Not in the loose sense of “understanding the world”, but in the more precise sense of what pupils are able to do differently because they have studied it.
This matters because geography is under pressure. It competes for attention in a crowded curriculum, and one in which at KS4 its place is no longer supported by the EBacc. It is shaped by shifting expectations around ambition (as defined by impact rather than by intent), sustainability and disciplinary thinking. A revised Key Stage 3 landscape is emerging, one that is likely to place greater emphasis on enquiry, fieldwork and coherent subject content . At the same time, the subject is still vulnerable to being pulled in too many directions, asked to serve too many purposes.
Without a clear answer to that initial question, it becomes very easy to lose sight of what geography actually is.
Geography’s “superpowers”
One way to answer the question is to think about what geography gives pupils that they would not otherwise have. In my presentation at the 2026 GA Conference, this was framed as geographical “superpowers”. The phrase is deliberately provocative, but it captures something important.
Geography does not just provide information about the world. It changes how pupils see the world.
Through geography, pupils begin to notice patterns that would otherwise go unseen. They start to understand how places are connected, not just locally but globally. They learn to explain how physical and human processes interact, and to recognise that what happens in one place is often shaped by decisions made somewhere else entirely. Perhaps most importantly, they begin to imagine alternative futures and to think about how those futures might come about.
This is what gives geography its power. It equips pupils with a way of thinking that allows them to move beyond their own immediate experience. As the session set out, geographical knowledge should enable pupils to discover new ways of thinking, to better explain the world, to engage in debate and to think about how the future could be shaped. It gives them not generic, but geographical, capabilities.
If that is the goal, then the curriculum needs to be built with that outcome in mind.
Starting with questions
A future-facing curriculum does not begin with topics. It begins with questions.
Too often, curricula are organised as a sequence of content blocks. We move from coasts to rivers to cities, covering what we need to cover. The structure is familiar, but it does little to communicate why any of it matters.
A different approach is to ask what it is that geographers are trying to understand about the world. Once that is clear, the curriculum can be built around those enquiries. The task becomes identifying the questions that sit at the heart of the discipline, selecting the knowledge that allows pupils to answer them, and then sequencing that knowledge so that it builds over time .
This shift from topics to questions changes the nature of what happens in the classroom. Instead of learning about something, pupils are working towards an explanation. Instead of accumulating information, they are using knowledge to resolve uncertainty.
The role of fertile questions
Of course, not every question is capable of doing this work. If a question is going to drive a unit of study, it needs to be carefully constructed.
Yoram Harpaz describes what he calls a “fertile question” as one that opens up enquiry rather than closing it down. It should not have a single correct answer that can be retrieved and repeated. Instead, it should invite multiple possible responses and require pupils to weigh up evidence.
A fertile question should also challenge assumptions. It should unsettle what pupils think they already know and create a need for new understanding. It needs to be rich enough to demand substantive knowledge, drawing together different aspects of the subject rather than sitting within a narrow domain. At the same time, it should connect to prior learning and allow pupils to see how different ideas relate to one another.
There is also an important evaluative dimension. A good question will often carry an ethical or political weight, inviting pupils to consider not just what is happening, but what ought to happen. Finally, it needs to be practical. However ambitious the question, pupils must have access to the information required to answer it within the constraints of the classroom .
Consider the question: To what extent can countries ever be truly food secure? This is not a request for a definition. It is a genuine problem. To answer it, pupils need to draw on knowledge of climate systems, economic inequality, global trade and political stability. They need to recognise that there are competing arguments and that any conclusion will be provisional.
The question itself sets the intellectual demand of the curriculum.
Selecting knowledge with purpose
Once the question is established, the next step is to identify the knowledge that will allow pupils to engage with it meaningfully.
This is where curriculum design becomes particularly demanding. It is not enough to include interesting facts or engaging case studies. The knowledge selected needs to do specific work. It must enable explanation, support connection and allow for evaluation.
In the case of food security, this means ensuring that pupils understand not only what food security is, but where it is found and why. They need to know how physical factors such as drought and soil quality interact with human factors such as poverty and conflict. They need to understand the role of global trade, and the ways in which countries rely on one another for food. They also need to grapple with the limits of these systems, recognising that improvements are often fragile and that stability is difficult to guarantee .
This knowledge is not an end in itself. It is the means by which pupils are able to think geographically about the question. This is what we mean by a knowledge rich curriculum.
The role of place
Place remains central to geography, but its role shifts when the curriculum is built around enquiry.
Rather than selecting places because they are familiar or engaging, the focus moves to what those places reveal. A place earns its position in the curriculum by helping pupils to understand something significant about the world.
This requires a disciplined approach to selection. Teachers need to consider whether a place genuinely contributes to answering the enquiry question, whether it reveals important processes, and whether it allows pupils to make meaningful comparisons. There is also a need to ensure that the places studied take pupils beyond their everyday experience, giving them access to knowledge that they would not otherwise encounter .
A case study such as Ethiopia in a unit on food security is valuable not simply because it is an example of a lower-income country, but because it illustrates both improvement and vulnerability. It allows pupils to see how agricultural development and government policy can enhance food security, while also exposing the limits imposed by climate variability and political instability.
The place is doing conceptual work. It is helping pupils to think.
Understanding how knowledge is created
A future-facing curriculum also needs to make visible how geographical knowledge is constructed.
This involves teaching pupils about the methods geographers use to investigate the world. Fieldwork plays a role here, not necessarily through conducting extensive enquiries, but through understanding how data is collected, presented and evaluated. Pupils might consider how surveys are used to gather information about food consumption, how data can be represented to show patterns of trade, and how conclusions are tested for reliability.
GIS offers another powerful avenue. By working with spatial data, pupils can see how patterns of food insecurity are distributed globally and how these patterns relate to other variables such as rainfall, income and conflict. They begin to understand that explanation in geography often involves layering different types of information and exploring the relationships between them .
In both cases, the aim is not simply to develop technical skills, but to deepen pupils’ understanding of how knowledge about the world is produced and contested.
Allowing room for hope
There is a final consideration that is easy to overlook. If the curriculum focuses only on problems, it risks leaving pupils with a sense of inevitability, as though the challenges they study are beyond resolution.
A future-facing curriculum needs to create space for something different. It should allow pupils to recognise progress where it has occurred, to see examples of human ingenuity, and to consider how change might be possible. This is not about offering false optimism, but about ensuring that pupils can engage with the future in a meaningful way.
As suggested in the session, this involves enabling pupils to evaluate progress, to maintain a belief in humanity and to consider how more sustainable futures might be created .
Returning to the question
So, what is the point of geography?
It is not simply to inform pupils about the world, nor to encourage them to care about it, though both may happen. Its purpose is to give them the means to understand, to explain and to think about the world in ways that would otherwise be closed to them.
A future-facing geography curriculum is one that is built with this purpose in mind. It is structured around meaningful questions, underpinned by carefully selected knowledge, grounded in the study of place, and enriched by an understanding of how knowledge is created.
Most importantly, it equips pupils with the ability to see the world differently.
And once they can do that, everything else follows.
This article is based on my presentation to the Geographical Association conference 2026. The accompanying slides can be found here