Less than 10 years ago, Michael Gove, then the education secretary, was defeated in his plan to remove climate change from matters to be studied as part of GCSE geography in schools.
The previous decade there had even been attempts to remove geography altogether from the core curriculum because it was not seen as vital to the skill set of getting a job.
In writing “a defence of geography” at the time, one useful statistic made the case for retaining the subject. Geography graduates from universities in the 1990s recession were the fastest to find employment when they entered the jobs market, and employers said they were actively seeking them because they had a wider, more rounded and intelligent view of the world than their contemporaries.
Scroll on to 2022 and for the 11th year in a row the number of students learning GCSE geography has risen again and is now 289,351. The subject seems to have weathered the storm and been embraced by a generation of students anxious to find out about the state of the planet and the people who live in it.
With climate disasters, migration, conflict over water and resources getting more intense we need geographers more than ever and employers will continue to seek them out.
