Understanding islands

For this year’s Rex Walford Award, we asked trainee or early career geography teachers to create a short scheme of work which encouraged their students to create a poster about the geography of islands and enter it into our Young Geographer of the Year competition 2025.

The winner of the Rex Walford Award 2025 was Emelia Welch from Marling School. Emelia's resources are available to download here. These resources belong to Emelia and should be credited as such, and the Society takes no responsibility for their content.

We asked to see lesson plans and accompanying resources which encouraged students to think about:

• Islands that demonstrate the geographical processes, topics and themes that they learn about through geography.
• The similarities and differences between islands, what connects them and what makes them unique.
• How the unique geography of islands can differ depending on socio-economic, political, environmental and physical aspects.
• The challenges that islands face, and the solutions presented to them at local, national and international scales.

Overview

This Key Stage Three scheme of work is designed to provide a concise but comprehensive understanding about the physical and human geography of islands around the world. It allows the opportunity to consider how islands have evolved over time and will continue to change into the future. Additionally, this scheme of work explores the relationship between people and the physical environment. The lesson content is likely to deepen their prior geographical knowledge. However, it also delivers new knowledge and information, with challenging and complex ideas. Designed to provide pupils with a broad understanding of different aspects of ‘islands’, these lessons also inspire them with their own ‘young geographer of the year projects’, with the strong foundational island knowledge helping improve the quality and individuality of their work produced but also spark their imagination and creativity. 

Due to copyright restrictions, images have not been included in the slides. However, once the lessons have been downloaded, teachers should add the suitable images to the lessons using online resources.