Great candidates to read Geography at university have a deep and meaningful relationship with aspects of the subject and discipline. They are, fundamentally, motivated to study Geography at university, because they’ve found parts of it intellectually fascinating and enjoyable – and great applicants are able to demonstrate this in their application.

I think there are three key components that make great Geography candidates:

They can demonstrate scholarship and critical engagement.

This is simply a sense of reading and thinking about what you’ve read. The best Geographers – even just when we consider this in terms of an A Level essay, for example – are able to recognise lots of ideas, lots of case studies and examples, and evaluate and think about what that means. They don’t accept ideas at face value, but are able to thoughtfully incorporate them in to their existing understanding.

And, just like in our A Level experience, the best Geographers are able to play at a level above their existing understanding. They’re able to demonstrate engagement with undergraduate quality thinking (or beyond!), rather than sticking closely to the confines of their specification and taught course. Most often, this is demonstrated in an application through reading or engagement activities (e.g. RGS lectures, speaker events etc.).

Complexity and range of the discipline.

Geography is a huge subject, and there are lots of areas of it which have their own focus and specialisation. A great Geography candidate is able to recognise that there’s a lot of ideas out there, and that you *don’t* have to engage with, or indeed, be an expert on all of them.

In an application, then, it’s often better to show deeper engagement with a smaller slice of the discipline – I am interested in X, so I read Y, and followed that up with Z, and explored that further with A, B and C – rather than trying to show that you know all of the bits of Geography in a very limited or superficial way. Again, this is really about critical and sustained engagement – rather than brief and light touch!

Explaining and exploring the ideas.

Fundamentally, the biggest differentiation between Oxford & Cambridge (and a couple of other places) and other universities is the focus on dialogic teaching as the key focus of your student experience. As well as lectures, seminars and workshops that you’d have at any Geography Department, you’ll get regular discussions and debates in small groups. At Oxford, they’re called tutorials, and Cambridge call them supervisions. But at heart, you’re expected to be able – and willing – to discuss your ideas regularly with your tutor and peers, and hold your own in an academic conversation about the particular topic in question.

So, you need to be able to talk coherently about your subject. This isn’t really something that gets discussed in your initial application phases, but it’s the primary purpose of the interview phase.

I’ve said before that I believe the best way of doing this is through a ‘rich diet of Geography education’ from start to finish. We want thoughtful, engaged and enthusiastic Geographers in all of our lessons – and good dialogic teaching helps to model the scholarship and communication elements. The more students can hear and see what academic Geographical discussion looks like in their day to day, the less work they’ll have to do to prepare specifically for the application phase.

As we come towards the Sixth Form, though, I think it’s worth having some strategies in place for explicitly raising the level of engagement and scholarship, and making it accessible and normal for students to explore the world of academic Geography:

1. Consider whether your school can support and subscribe to journals or publications so they can regularly be visible to students. You might like to get them to explore the GA’s GEO platform, or some of the additional resources on the RGS website
2. Can you subscribe to the Royal Geographical Society so that you have access to lectures and speaker programmes?
3. Alternatively, can you set up a Geographical Society for Sixth Form students to speak – and hear guest speakers – in your own school, or nearby schools? If you’ve got good connections with careers leaders, or former students, they can be really helpful to push towards interesting topics to cover! If you have students doing EPQs, or extended essays and similar thoughts – then getting them to show and talk about their work can be really powerful as a demonstration of academic thinking.
4. Depending on your school and Department context, it’s interesting to think about what access to books and reading your students might have. You might be able to work with your library team, if you have one, to get great material in. If that’s not an option, a few books each year can soon build up a Department library of great reading material that can be kept in one of your classrooms, or a shared office space. Having the ability to say “oh, yes, you should read…. this book on that interesting question”, and be able to recommend and hand the student the book sends a really powerful message about academic reading, and makes it part of the normal process.

This helps to prepare students for the three parts of excellent Geography, and gives them interesting points for research to make decisions about what to apply for, and exactly what to look for in their decision-making process.

It’ll also be a key part of preparing for the personal statement process, and I think should be the key focus for Year 12 and the summer period.

Realistically, a lot of the process for applying to Oxbridge is no different to other universities – you’ve got to make good decisions based on your research and thinking, and then prepare a high quality application.

So, what’s different?

First, the timescale is accelerated. Unlike other university applications, the first phase of UCAS needs to be done by October 15^th. This means that a lot of the work needs to be done in between Year 12 and Year 13, rather than purely at the start of Y13 as you might be able to do for other application cycles.

Second, there are often additional requirements involved. This might be the submission of work, the completion of pre-interview assessments (Thinking Skills Assessments for Oxford, traditionally), and the interview process. These all take time to prepare, and it’s helpful if you can have a clear sequence from start to finish in your mind.

I’d recommend something like this:

This is an idealised timetable. No matter when a student decides they want to apply to Oxbridge – and in the days of AS/A2, we’d have some who’d realise they were good enough after their AS results day in August….! – they can always make a good application in a shorter time-frame.

However, as with anything, the more time you have available to prepare and think, the better the outcome is likely to be, and the lower the stress for candidate and teachers respectively!

So, I’d encourage starting early to lay the groundwork. This builds on the principle of ‘the rich diet of Geography education’ and allows developing and meaningful conversations to happen over the timetable!

Part of our job as Geography teachers is always about raising aspirations of our students – whether that’s in the completion of an individual task, discussion or exercise, the grades that they can achieve, or their eventual destinations that they can move towards.

We do this all the time by:

• Having high standards of Geography – always encouraging people to think deeply and explore more perspectives.
• Extended and enriched ‘diet’ of Geography – trips, visits, competitions, reading, modelling a wider and deeper engagement with the subject at all levels.
• Modelling interest and passion for our subject, and encouraging them to share the same excitement about their understanding of the world
• Showing our own journey, and being open about our experiences that made us Geographers, or helped us. For some, it’s about talking about specific moments, decisions, or travel experiences – for others, it’s about university experiences.
• Connecting further to our friends and peers who have studied Geography, and gone in to careers that aren’t “being a Geography teacher”

These help students to understand that ‘Geography is worth studying’ and that it’s a valid and approachable option for them. Hopefully, it’s part of what we’re all doing in our classrooms right from Year 7 onwards – and this “rich diet” narrative will be really important for the creation of high quality Geography students over their curriculum experience. You simply can’t do it all in Sixth Form.

If you are specifically looking to raise aspirations towards Oxbridge, then it’s worth considering:

• Access and outreach visits from Oxbridge tutors and admissions teams. Most Colleges have specific parts of the country that they’re responsible for, and specific connections. If you can get multiple schools together, then it’s worth them coming to you.
• Access and outreach visits to Oxbridge are really valuable in providing an insight in to the people and places – they can be complex to organise, and support from the outreach teams is invaluable. It’s normally worth having a multiple-subject approach – for your school, or for groups of schools, rather than trying to make it subject-specific. They can be hugely helpful in allowing students in Y12 to make decisions about picking Colleges, or deciding between universities, for instance.
• However, it’s often worth considering this in Year 10/Year 11 for students – the motivational push for GCSE grades, or in helping them to select their A Level subjects can be really valuable. And, as we said before, it’s sometimes worth having the idea planted before reaching Sixth Form.

If you can, getting former students who’ve had success in their interview or application process is a really valuable connection between “the students” and “people like me” getting success and making it real.

The other component of this is the “have you considered?” kind of conversation – with talented students who haven’t potentially considered themselves as Oxbridge candidates, and encouraging them to think about it or look at it. I know this was my own experience – Mr Phipps and Mr Russell as gentle guide encouraging me to think of these options. Often, this is a combination of confidence building – students with excellent GCSE profiles and likely A*/A at A Level, having a chance to think about what and where they might be able to study.

There’s a difficult balance to strike between raising aspirations and putting pressure on students. Some people will find the support welcome – and others might resist it. Like any other Sixth Form experience, the relationship and understanding your students (and their context, their parents, their motivation/aspiration) is critical.

So, assuming a rich diet of thinking has taken place through the Geography curriculum, what kind of timescale are we talking about? Let’s have a look.