Geography A Level

Geography is the study of people and their relationship with their environment, the impacts each has on the other and the challenges of managing those impacts. You will take part in fieldwork, classroom discussions, and reflect on your own experiences: how will the changes to the planet affect you, and how are you influencing these changes?   

You will begin by studying the Carbon Cycle and Energy Security - how do we “keep the lights on” and avoid runaway climate change. We then move on to Globalisation – why is the world increasingly interconnected? How has this helped drive development, inequality and environmental degradation? How could we manage this better? Shaping Places is our last topic of year one and focusses on regeneration; why do some places in the UK need extra help and how might this “levelling-up” be achieved? We finish the first year with coursework; a report on a topic of your choosing on an area of geography that interests you, and you would like to develop further using data collected in `the field’.

In Year 2 we start with a study of Glaciated Landscapes – how do ice sheets and glaciers operate to produce distinctive landscapes? How are these landscapes being changed by both physical processes and human activities? This is followed by Superpowers; the study of the pattern of power across the world, including analysis of how superpower dominance has changed over time and what this means for the global economy, global politics and the environment. Tectonic Processes and Hazards is our final Physical Geography topic, with an in-depth study of the causes of tectonic hazards and management responses. We finish the course by pulling together aspects of Human Geography around the themes of Migration, Identity and Sovereignty- how have changes studied in Globalisation and Superpowers affected the `nation state’, their populations and the environment?

The course is very relevant to current global problems, and I have become more aware of these and possible solutions to them. I now want to study Geography at university.