Part 3: Shared Purpose – Why It Matters

This follows on from other these posts.. (1) Subject Communities: A Shared Space for Professional Growth and Curriculum Coherence | LinkedIn (2) Part 1 - Geography Subject Community – Common Ground & Shared Identity. | LinkedIn

At the heart of our work as a subject community lies a clear and unifying purpose:

To teach a brilliant geography curriculum expertly—and in doing so, to disrupt disadvantage.

This purpose guides everything we do—from curriculum planning and professional development to everyday classroom practice and long-term strategy. It’s not just about ensuring consistency. It’s about pursuing excellence, equity, and ambition for every student, in every school, regardless of postcode.

In one of our earliest subject community meetings with Heads of Department, I shared the aspiration I’ve held since becoming National Geography Lead: to move from isolated departments—where subject leads often worked in silos—toward a vibrant, interconnected subject community.

This vision is clearly reflected in Figure 1: The evolution of our subject community. In Year 1 (2021–2022), we began by connecting individual departments to a central hub—important early steps that laid the groundwork for collaboration. At this stage, departments in South Yorkshire and Cambridgeshire largely operated in isolation, with communication directed through the central Team Geography.

By Year 2 (2022–2023), we saw stronger two-way communication begin to emerge, as departments became more engaged and relationships across hubs started to build. The diagram shows these growing reciprocal connections, a sign of increasing trust and shared purpose.

Year 3 (2022–2024) marked a significant shift: the formation of direct connections between departments, regardless of geography. This growing web of collaboration began to reduce silos and build a more unified subject identity.

Our ultimate aim is what’s represented in Year 3+: a thriving, interconnected geography community where knowledge, practice, and leadership flow in all directions. We’re not fully there yet—but we are getting closer. Like any community, ours continues to evolve. There are still areas to strengthen, but the progress is clear and the direction is right. Every connection we build brings us closer to that vision of a truly collaborative subject community.

The goal has always been to break down the barriers of geography between our two regional hubs and to create something greater, supported by strong connections in both directions. At Astrea, as Matthew Carnaby outlines in his blog post here Stenhouse and Beyond: the power of subject communities – The Carnaby Chronicles, we talk about three important layers of subject communities at Astrea Academy Trust. We have our Trust Subject Community at the heart, with the HoD and the National Lead working together to link departments and staff as a community.

• Upstream, to the Astrea Geography Community we have the national subject community—including the Geographical Association, the Royal Geographical Society, and our exam boards (AQA for GCSE and OCR for A-Level)

• And downstream, we have the school level community - the department level where the curriculum is brought to life in the day-to-day work happening in classrooms and across the trust.

We’re not all the way there yet—but we’ve made real, visible progress. And the fact that we’re now able to bring our community together—through shared structures, shared values, and shared curriculum—is a powerful symbol of how far we’ve come.

Alongside our trust-wide curriculum principles, which were shaped collaboratively with school leaders, we’ve also defined a set of subject-specific principles within the Geography Subject Community. These underpin how we think about content, progression, pedagogy, and assessment in our subject. Together, they form the foundation of our Common Core KS3 Geography Curriculum and have shaped its intent, rationale, and design—informing how we think about content, progression, pedagogy, and assessment in geography.

But crucially, our shared purpose isn’t expressed only in curriculum documents. As Lawrence Stenhouse reminds us, having a well-designed and coherent intended curriculum is only part of the story. The real impact lies in how it is brought to life—in how the curriculum is implemented in classrooms and experienced by students.

Our Geography Subject Community is central not only to the design of our Common Core KS3 Curriculum, but also to its implementation. This is what makes the community so powerful: it doesn’t just support the delivery of curriculum—it shapes and sustains it, ensuring that what happens in classrooms reflects the intent, values, and ambition we’ve developed together.

We are not a group of isolated departments. We are a connected, purposeful community, working collectively to ensure that what is taught—and how it’s taught—aligns as closely as possible with what was intended. That’s where shared purpose becomes lived practice.

What Shared Purpose Looks Like in Practice

We are already seeing this shared purpose come to life in powerful and practical ways.

For example, two schools recently collaborated to co-lead a sixth-form field trip—an experience that would have been difficult, if not impossible, without cross-school planning and shared intent. That partnership has since sparked closer alignment in A-Level teaching and early conversations about future joint curriculum projects a great example of trust dividend and the strengthening of cross-academy department links.

In another instance, a department developed model answers for a challenging exam unit. What started as a local initiative became a trust-wide resource—shared across the subject community, enabling students in multiple schools to benefit from that collective expertise during the recent GCSE Geography exam series.

Perhaps most telling is the shift in how we connect. Where previously subject leaders often relied on central facilitation to exchange resources or ideas, we’re now seeing direct, organic, peer-to-peer collaboration. Colleagues across schools are reaching out, sharing solutions, and building relationships.

Structures That Make It Happen

Of course, shared purpose doesn’t sustain itself. It requires the right structures to enable and protect it and the evolution described above in how we connect hasn’t happened by chance—it’s been actively supported by regular opportunities to meet and connect.

The leaders of the Astrea Central Education Team have deliberately built opportunities for collaboration and strategic alignment into the rhythm of our academic year in subject areas:

• Half-termly subject community meetings bring together all Heads of Geography and Lead Practitioners to discuss curriculum, pedagogy, and student outcomes.

• Trust Intellectual Preparation (IP) sessions, are built around shared themes developed at trust level—ensuring coherence across schools, without compromising local context.

• Strategy Days offer protected time for subject leaders to come together in person to reflect, challenge, and co-construct curriculum decisions collaboratively.

• And, for the first time this year, our annual Trust INSET curriculum day brought geography departments together in person—connecting subject staff across schools, regions, and career stages for a full day of shared learning and development.

These structures give momentum to our shared purpose. They ensure that what we value isn’t just aspirational—it’s embedded in how we work, every day, across the community. These structured touchpoints have helped lay the groundwork for trust, familiarity, and shared purpose—paving the way for the more mature subject community which is beginning to emerge guided by central leadership, but strengthened by increasing peer-to-peer collaboration.

Final Reflection

Shared purpose isn’t just about having a clear goal—it’s about how that goal is held and acted upon collectively. For our Geography Subject Community, that purpose is visible not just in our planning or our documentation, but in the way we collaborate, support each other, and shape the curriculum as a team.

Next Post.. Part 4: Shared Resources – Structures That Strengthen Community and Collaboration | LinkedIn

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