Rex Walford Award
The Rex Walford Award is for trainees or teachers who have just started their careers.
The Rex Walford Award is for trainees or teachers who have just started their careers, including students enrolled on a PGCE, SCITT, Teach First and School Direct, alongside ECTs and colleagues at a similar stage in their careers.
The award was named after Rex Walford. Rex was a teacher, a natural enthusiast, a leading international name in geography education, a long-serving Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and one of the first group of Chartered Geographers. He supported the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in many ways over more than 25 years.
Reflecting the late Rex Walford’s passion for training new geography teachers who can inspire their students in their subject, it is awarded for the best scheme of work, set of teaching resources and/or lesson plans developed on the same theme as the Young Geographer of the Year competition.
We welcome innovative and effective approaches to engaging pupils with the competition question and would also be interested to see examples of pupils’ work that has resulted from the lessons.
2025 competition
The 2025 Rex Walford Award is open for entries. The theme for this year is 'Understanding Islands'. The deadline for entries is Friday 3 October 2025 at 5.00pm.
2024 competition
The theme for the Rex Walford Award 2024 was: Choose Geography
We were interested to see lesson plans and accompanying resources which encouraged students to think about:
- Why geography is a useful and relevant subject to study
- Why studying geography matters
- How geography and geographical skills can help you to understand a range of ideas and concepts
- The skills that geographers have that make them stand out from the crowd
- Where geography can take you and the jobs that geographers do
- How geographers make a difference
- What parts of geography they find the most interesting and useful to study and why.
The winner of the 2024 Rex Walford Award is Beatrice Spicer from Orleans Park School.
Previous winners of the Rex Walford Award
In 2023, we asked trainee or early career geography teachers to create a short scheme of work which encouraged their students to create their own blueprint for the future. We asked to see lesson plans and accompanying resources which encourage students to think about innovative ideas to address problems in areas such as food production and supply, energy and sustainability, water security, resources, population growth, economic crisis, transport, travel, urbanisation, risk management, trade, environmental management, biodiversity and more. The winner of the Rex Walford Award 2023 was India Owens from Latymer Upper School. India's resources are available to view
In 2022, we asked trainee or early career geography teachers to create a short scheme of work, including a range of mapping, which reveals a place where their pupils’ would like to travel to, and how and why they want to go there. Unfortunately we were unable to award the Rex Walford Award in 2022.
In 2021, we asked trainee or early career geography teachers to create a short scheme of work, including a range of mapping, revealing how their pupils’ lives had been shaped by the Covid pandemic. The winner of the 2021 Rex Walford Award was Paul Greenhalgh, Berkhamsted Boys’ School, Berkhamsted.
The 2020 Rex Walford award challenged teachers to produce a scheme of work around the topic of the world outside my window. The winner of the 2020 competition was Emily Chandler from William Perkin CofE High School.
The 2019 Rex Walford Award asked entrants to produce a short scheme of work, covering at least three lessons, that focused on the question: Where can geography take you? The winner of the 2019 Rex Walford Award was Victoria Pellant, Torquay Boys Grammar School.
