Healthy High Streets Fieldwork
Updated September 2024
Written September 2023
Since the release of the latest Ofsted geography report (‘Getting Our Bearings’), my Twitter feed has been awash with references to fieldwork. This is perhaps unsurprising given that the poor quality of fieldwork in many schools is one of the key messages of the report. And yet despite more articles, CPD offerings and published resources around fieldwork recently, it remains a struggle for so many of us. How do you build an effective fieldwork curriculum? How can you move away from the classic (often repetitive) fieldwork foci and ensure it is both engaging and yet effective? How do you make the most of a precious day out of the classroom?
As we seek to answer those questions as a subject community, the Ofsted report has inspired me to share some resources that I’ve used in the past- in the hope that it might help others to diversify their fieldwork offering. Resources I’ve previously shared can be found here but this is the first of a few that I hope to share that are a bit different.
This blog shares some resources I first used in 2018. I created these resources after seeing the release of ‘The Health of Our High Streets’ report and was immediately inspired to consider how I could use the approach, the methodology, and the secondary data for local fieldwork with our A-Level students.
The context of this fieldwork:
I’ve previously used this investigation with Y12 students in the summer term when they were studying the Edexcel Regenerating Places topic.
It formed 1 of their 4 required fieldwork days. Whilst we did not directly focus on or make reference to the NEA on this day, in Year 13 I reminded them that they could do something similar for their coursework, if they wished.
It was a local investigation using our two local highstreets which were within walking distance of each other.
When I’ve undertaken this investigation with Y12, I’ve really enjoyed it and found that the students really engage with it too. Perhaps it’s the contrast from their GCSE fieldwork or perhaps it’s the use of a real-life report which makes it feel very meaningful to students? Whatever it is, it can be difficult to ‘sell’ local fieldwork to older students and so I’m pleased to have found an investigation that seemingly works!
I took the following approach:
These slides set the scene and introduced the focus to the students. We discussed what a high street is, who uses a high street, how different people use their high street in different ways and what makes a high street ‘good’ or ‘bad’.
We then discussed some recent articles about high streets and considered whether we agreed with the opinion that ‘UK High Streets have twice as many shops as needed’.
We used the fieldwork booklet to discuss the Health of the High Street report. Students read Chapter 2 of the report to make notes on key questions before reading another article that considers the impact of Covid-19 on British high streets.
Students were then asked to reflect on their own high street and how different people use it.
As the final part of the introduction, we completed a ‘sense of place’ activity that I first used with Kate Amis as part of her Brick Lane fieldwork. I gave them 12 photos of Cricklewood and asked them to discuss them as a group:
Which photos represent Cricklewood as you know it?
Which photos do you feel show Cricklewood as your local place? Why?
Which photos do not represent Cricklewood as you know it? Why not?We then moved on to specifically thinking about conducting our healthy high street fieldwork. Students critically considered the methodology of the 2018 report and discussed whether or not they agreed with the scoring system.
Students came up with their own hypothesis and null hypothesis for the investigation before thinking (and resolving!) some logistical issues for this fieldwork:
How were they going to define where the high street started and ended?
What were they going to do with outlets that didn’t neatly fit into their categories?
How would they record this information?
How would they decide the exact site to undertake their EQS and Index of Decay surveys along each high street?
How were they going to record the exact location of this data collection?Once they’d decided how to approach the issues listed above, students set off in their groups to collect the data!
Upon return to the classroom, we analysed and presented their data before discussing it further.
I focused on Fast Food Outlets (FFOs) and pubs as these are specifically discussed in the report. There is also a stark contrast between the frequency of these two outlets on our local high streets which makes for a very interesting discussion.