ABSTRACT
In the UK geography has traditionally had a stronger place in the school curriculum, not unrelated to its colonial past. Here, the focus will be on the combined curriculum for England and Wales, as Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own independent school systems. Unlike the US, the curriculum in England and Wales had been relatively free from political debate until the 1980s. Launched in 1991, the first geography national curriculum included geographical knowledge and skills drawn from its past traditions: landforms, rivers, climate, population, settlements, urbanization, development, and required study of both the UK and different world regions. The focus on knowledge content, as well as process, was to the dismay of progressive educationalists, who had been developing enquiry-based teaching materials for geography since the 1960s. This child-centred approach laid down the foundations for geography to embrace global citizenship education in the late 1990s. This did not happen until after a decade of New Right Thatcherism, which included the implementation of the geography national curriculum, and the end of the Cold War, leading to a period of global advocacy.
