ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that place is one of the biggest challenges for school geography. There is a pressing need for dialogue with academic geographers about interpreting and developing the subject in the school curriculum. In academic geography, one of the most influential movements in relation to place has been the humanistic, in which geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan and Relph drew on the works of philosophers, particularly Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to reassess the fundamental significance of place to human existence. In the first English National Curriculum for Geography, there was strong representation of locational knowledge, regional descriptive approaches to place and an equally strong emphasis on facts in thematic human and physical geography. The current national geography requirements do allow the opportunity for place to be represented more diversely but the extent to which this potential will be realised depends on implementation.
