It described the work that QCA (and in particular John Westaway and Eleanor Rawling) had been doing to develop a Pilot GCSE specification for Geography.
A first tranche of 18 schools were recruited, to start teaching from September 2003.
The course was the OCR Pilot GCSE Geography (1949)
It started to be taught twenty years ago now.
A second group of schools joined in 2005 and myself and colleagues at King Edward VII School in King's Lynn were part of a third tranche in 2006 which meant the final two years of my first stint in the classroom (20 years in total) were spent teaching a completely new GCSE, with an exam at the end of Year 10 counting for 33% of the marks, and coursework completed in Year 10 and 11 accounting for the other 67%.
The units were all contemporary, and based on five key concepts.
Three of the students who sat the specification were also brought in to help my colleague Chris Clarke and I with our involvement in the GA's Young People's Geographies project.
There were a number of teacher support events, mostly led by Phil Wood, and with inputs from other people whose names were going to become increasingly familiar to me when I later joined the staff of the Geographical Association.
I blogged the two years of my involvement here and shared all the thinking, resources and ideas, and had exchanges with other teachers who were teaching the specification. The blog has had over 175 000 views and is still visited regularly.Thanks in advance for any contributions.

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