A trio of Geography trips gave senior boys opportunities to learn from an international expert on poverty, from a famous explorer and from the natural terrain of South Wales.
Pupils from Years 11 and 12 visited two prestigious royal organisations in central London to hear lectures, while boys in Year 10 headed off to the Margam Field Studies Centre near Port Talbot.
Five boys from Year 12 heard Professor Katie Willis, of the Royal Holloway, University of London, lecture on Moving from the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington – one of a series of RGS lectures on topical geographical issues.
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Professor Willis, an expert on employment, migration and development, explored the history and development of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals and their relationship with the more recent Sustainable Development Goals.
Head of Geography Emily Parry said the trip expanded the Sixth-Formers’ knowledge of how poverty is addressed on a global scale – a topic covered in their A-level unit entitled Contemporary Conflicts and Challenges.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes’s lecture at the Royal Institution in Mayfair provided inspiration of a different kind. Under the title Living Dangerously, ‘the world’s greatest living explorer’ shared his experiences from some of his most memorable expeditions in the annual Prince’s Teaching Institute lecture.
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Sir Ranulph, who was awarded an OBE in 1993, enthralled his young audience as he spoke about feats from becoming the first person to circumnavigate the world along its polar axis to discovering the lost city of Ubar on the Yemen. He also showed slides of the frostbite and gangrene he and his team had suffered during some of their expeditions. His belief in the importance of character attributes such as resilience was a key feature of the lecture, which was attended by 15 boys from QE’s Year 11 and 12.
The Year 10 geographers’ trip to Wales enabled them to complete fieldwork in preparation for Paper 4 of their IGCSE Geography examination. The boys carried out three investigations: for their coasts topic, they investigated how sand dunes change as one moves inland; for rivers, they looked at how river characteristics change downstream, and, for the human geography topic of tourism, they investigated the impacts of tourism on the seaside resort of Porthcawl.