Fieldwork’s educational value to young people is long-established and expresses geography’s commitment to enquiry and discovery, and the subject’s encouragement to be curious about the world.
So the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) welcomes and fully supports the statement in the Department for Education’s returning-to-school guidance that: “Schools should also make use of outdoor space in the local area to support the curriculum.”
Geography teachers’ typical fieldwork concerns may include the weather, booking a coach or field centre and the (sometimes tough) negotiations with their school management teams to get sign-off for “going out”.
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However, new concerns are added to this list with Ofqual’s proposals for the 2021 exams (including that “content relating to fieldwork should not be assessed in 2021”). These could set a new and potentially damaging direction for the status of fieldwork within geography, particularly for its 265,000 GCSE students.
Coronavirus: Geography fieldwork under threat for GCSE
Ofqual is rightly asking the question of how geography (and other subjects, too) could be made more manageable for the 2021 examinations. However, the regulator presents a solution for GCSE which, with its singular focus on fieldwork, provides the wrong answer.
Does this present a struggle for the heart and soul of the subject? Possibly not.
But it certainly continues the ongoing dialogue between the geographical community and the exam boards, regulators and policymakers. Sometimes this dialogue has been challenging, sometimes encouraging.
For example, the recent reform process (re)committed to statutory fieldwork within the national curriculum and placed unequivocal requirements for fieldwork within the new GCSE and A-level specifications. Geography students have to undertake fieldwork in two contrasting environments beyond the school (GCSE) or four days of fieldwork and complete an independent investigation (A level).
In addition, schools must sign an annual declaration confirming that such opportunities have been provided for their students through the relevant exam courses.
The limitations on fieldwork
The RGS-IBG is under no illusion about Covid-19’s critical health, economic and educational impacts - and we recognise Ofqual is operating in very difficult circumstances.
There are some recommendations that the RGS-IBG does support. However, overall, the proposals need a more critical review and the RGS-IBG encourages all geography teachers to respond to the consultation by Thursday 16 July.
1. A-level points of concern
For A-level, there is the welcome retention of the Independent Investigation (also known as the NEA), which is worth 20 per cent of a student’s final marks. In addition, flexibility is being helpfully proposed in relation to how schools might complete the minimum requirements of four days fieldwork across an A level. The RGS-IBG supports this proposal.
However, we do not underestimate the significant challenges facing teachers and students in how to undertake this work - particularly given the lost summer term and limitations on where fieldwork might take place.
For example, pre-Covid-19, over 50 per cent of A-level geographers undertook their fieldwork at a Field Studies Council (FSC) centre or another provider’s field centre.
With these centres currently closed, teachers will need to look closer to home and support (within the NEA’s rubric) their students to undertake safe, socially distanced NEAs that are geographically valid and achievable.
And the FSC and others are to be commended for how they have reorientated their work to provide new digital and locally-based fieldwork support for such local NEAs.
It may be true that all geographers love an iconic natural landscape or classic urban development. However, by bringing A-level geography “back home”, this may allow students to delve deeper into their local communities and environments, and these local NEAs can still underpin excellent work.
For example, the RGS-IBG makes an annual award to an outstanding NEA, which in 2019 was awarded to a Stockport student who investigated the geography of inequality in neighbouring Hyde and Gee Cross.
There is already wide and proven experience across the geographical community that supports how such an approach can be successfully undertaken with many geography teachers - such as Laura-Jayne Ward - sharing their local fieldwork ideas.
This is also complemented by the wealth of support available from the RGS-IBG and others - including the Geographical Association, FSC, Ordnance Survey, and Esri UK - from which teachers can draw.
And being currently uncoupled from a field centre’s booking diary may allow more extended fieldwork and/or at different times of the year - alongside the potential of some late availability booking of centres if “normal” returns.
2. GCSE points of concern
Turning to GCSE, we enter a much more complex and contested situation.
Ofqual is proposing that the content relating to fieldwork should not be assessed in 2021, with no fieldwork questions included in the exams and schools being exempted from the need to complete their fieldwork declarations.
At a stroke, this removes the assessment of fieldwork and any need for schools to report on their fieldwork activities - with a likely consequential removal of fieldwork from the geography GCSE courses.
The RGS-IBG recognises that the prospect of GCSE classes filling up coaches to head off across the country to investigate the contrasting environments of moorlands or shopping malls is implausible, and no risk assessment would currently be signed off on this.
However, an opportunity has been missed to explore how, as a one-off, fieldwork could be relocated on to a school’s grounds or in close proximity of a school.
There are multiple well-tested activities - from investigating infiltration rates of different surfaces to microclimates, exploring place perception to assessing environmental quality - that could all be undertaken on-site or nearby.
And the ubiquitous availability of online data sets - from local river levels and flood data, to air quality and climate data - can be capitalised on as an essential part of a school’s own fieldwork and allows students’ findings to be set against the wider content.
A light-touch reading of the requirement for fieldwork in “two contrasting environments” for the 2021 exams would permit this and could be supported by extra flexibility across the awarding organisations; requirements within a particular spec would then be uncoupled from specified questions about a required type of environment, location or skill
In this way, and with proper recognition of Covid-19‘s challenges, the RGS-IBG believes that fieldwork could still form part of a student’s GCSE experience.
Based on such an approach, the RGS-IBG would be open to a pragmatic decision that established a common, yet flexible, expectation for school-based fieldwork across all the awarding organisations for the 2021 cycle.
This would keep fieldwork as an integral part of geography and enable a route to its inclusion in the 2021 examinations, which maintains this key geographical entitlement, while offering pragmatic and practical answers to the challenge geography heads of department and school leaders face.
It would also maintain the continuing development of young people’s fieldwork skills and better support their transitions into post-16 geography.
The RGS-IBG would wish to see consideration over the flexibility over the location and details of fieldwork, rather than it being taken out of the courses in total.
Further, we have grave concerns that Ofqual’s one-year hiatus has the potential to become an epoch-defining removal of fieldwork in some schools - particularly in schools serving students who could most benefit from the experiences.
Now is not the time to explore the wider merits of residential fieldwork, though research has demonstrated that it is students in disadvantaged areas who have the fewest opportunities to participate in residential trips (which includes geographical fieldwork).
Yet such analysis is pertinent when the growth in the numbers of GCSE geography candidates (up by 50 per cent since 2010) has come predominately from students previously less likely to study the subject - disadvantaged students; black, Asian and minority ethnic students; and those studying in comprehensive schools.
It is precisely such students whose exposure to fieldwork might already be more limited, and the proposals would further reduce such experiences.
We are now getting air bridges to allow Britons to jet off to 59 destinations from Andorra to Vietnam, including the British Antarctic Territories and Pitcairn Islands. Sadly, Ofqual’s proposals would narrow teenagers’ geographical horizons.
So, while the RGS-IBG supports Ofqual’s proposal for A-level geography, we strongly recommend that it plots a new course for how fieldwork can be included as a required element for the 2021 GCSEs.
Steve Brace is head of education and outdoor learning at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)
