Another brick in the wall

We have been exploring supply chains, and this week there was another 

Who made the bricks that went into making your house?

One would imagine they might have been made in a UK brickworks, perhaps in the SE in an area where suitable clay is found. However, this is not necessarily the case and they may in fact have been made by children in brick works far from the UK. Another example of supply chain issues and a lack of transparency.

After a year's investigation, proud to see our revelation of child and bonded labour in UK brick imports on the front page of @Politico this weekend

The UK imports 400 million bricks each year, many of them made in terrible conditions

Read more here:https://t.co/e72PhAf3HU

— Disaster Trade (@DisasterTrade_) April 24, 2023

Image: Alan Parkinson - shared under CC license 

Rana Plaza - ten years on

Regular readers will know that I have been involved with the work of the Follow the Things project for some time now.

This is a project based at Exeter University, which started with the work of Professor Ian Cook, exploring global supply chains, trade justice and the stories of the things that we own and consume.

One of the associated projects that explores this area is Fashion Revolution Day.

We are approaching the tenth anniversary of the Rana Plaza tragedy on Monday and a pack of materials has been produced to help teachers and students think through its significance and the wider question of 'who made my clothes?' 

The education materials can be seen and downloaded at this page.

There are also Top Trumps cards to be made as part of the activity, exploring the impact of globalisation.
Ian Cook writes about using the cards here. Make sure that you are using the most up to date Transparency Index.

We will be using the materials at my school with Year 8 in some format and marking the tenth anniversary of Rana Plaza.

Happy Earth Day 2023

Happy Earth Day!

Dennis Hayes started the first event back in 1970.


‘Preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known’ - Carl Sagan

#EarthDay2023 #ClimateChange is about consumption of the very richest people in our global society.

50% of global emissions are emitted by just 10% of the population.

90% of global emissions by 50% of the population.

We need to recognise climate justice to save our planet pic.twitter.com/qhZoOTVqeG

— Professor Mark Maslin 👍 (@ProfMarkMaslin) April 22, 2023

and a cartoon:

Ella Baron on #EarthDay2023 #ClimateEmergency – political cartoon gallery in London https://t.co/dePcTdnXF6 pic.twitter.com/u9LJCcKNHC

— Political Cartoon (@Cartoon4sale) April 22, 2023

As part of Earth Day, why not have a go at the Sustainable Fashion Quiz, which links closely with our Fashion topic in Year 8.

GA Governing Body vacancies for September 2023

After four years as a trustee as part of the Presidential journey through the GA, my term in office comes to an end at the end of August 2023.

At the same time, there is also the end of a term of office for several other GA colleagues who I have worked with for the last four years. This means that there some vacancies on the GA's Governing Body, which is of course a good training ground for those who may have ambitions to become more involved with the Association and give back to the association.

There are actually four vacancies to be filled, which carry different responsibilities.

You can read more about them on the GA website page, and the links here.

Chair of Trustees

Honorary Treasurer

Elected Trustees

Co-opted trustee

For those who may have previously suggested that the GA and its Governing Body needs to become more inclusive and diverse, this is your opportunity!

Happy to answer any questions about the roles and the wider work of the GA's Governing Body if anyone is interested in finding out more.

I will blog my thanks to some of those people who are leaving GB later in the year...

How well do you know your area?

 

Details from the Census 2021 have been turned into quizzes by the team from ONS who have frequently created and shared interactive comment.

How well do you know your area?

There is a wide range of questions here to choose from.

How well do you know your local area?

We’ve added some more questions to our interactive #Census 2021 quiz 🗺️❓

Try to guess things like:

🏠 most common number of bedrooms
🩺 how people reported their health
🎓 qualification levels

➡️ https://t.co/lnm0wnbH61 pic.twitter.com/mmbNePjqcK

— Office for National Statistics (ONS) (@ONS) April 3, 2023

Give it a go. It's embedded below: 

Young Geographer of the Year Competition 2023

Around about the time of the GA Conference, the theme of the Royal Geographical Society's Young Geographer of the Year award is revealed. 

The new theme is now revealed.

We always use this competition as a focus for the final month or so of the Summer term, when lessons are often disrupted by trips and other events, and this forms a useful basis for some lovely class work. Students have time to complete their entries over the summer and we then collect them in in September and have an in-school competition judging and then send off the best entries.

The Young Geographer of the Year is the Society’s annual competition which recognises the outstanding work of the next generation of geographers. With its age ranges spanning the primary years to A Level, the competition encourages thoughtful and creative answers to the competition’s theme which is set each year.

The Society encourages schools to run their own in-house competition and then send their top 10 entries into the national competition. The Young Geographer competition has been running for over 20 years and in 2020 over 10,000 young people took part.

The theme for the Young Geographer of the Year competition 2023 is:

A blueprint for the future

The Society invites students from KS2 to KS5 to create their own blueprint for the future. 

They are looking for innovative ideas to address problems in areas such as food production and supply, energy and sustainability, water security, resources, population growth, economic crisis, transport, travel, urbanisation, risk management, trade, environmental management, biodiversity and more. 

Your ideas and recommendations should be forward-thinking, taking into consideration the depth of the problems and the reasons behind them, as well as what can be done to mitigate them. 

Your blueprint for the future could be a design for an eco-city, or a plan to produce and distribute enough food to feed the world. It could be a look at the future of energy and how we can produce enough energy sustainably without harming the environment, or a plan to revolutionise travel and transport in your country or beyond. 

Your plan must be realistic, but we welcome ideas for futuristic strategies and new technologies.

Details of the competition are here.

To get an idea of the standard of entries of last year's winners, head here.

Entering the competition

The competition has four categories.

Key Stage 2 (pupils aged 7-11)

Key Stage 3 (pupils aged 11-14)

Key Stage 4 or GCSE (pupils aged 14-16)

Key Stage 5 or A Level (pupils aged 16-18)

Students should enter the Key Stage category they will be in on 30 June 2023. 

The deadline for receipt of all entries is Monday 2 October 2023 at 5.00pm. 

Entries received after this time will not be accepted. The RGS encourages schools to run an in-house competition and only send their top 10 entries into the national competition. 

All winners and highly commended students will be invited to an Awards Ceremony at the Society in London on Friday 8 December 2023.

The general entry criteria are the same as usual

KS2, KS3 and KS4 students should produce an A3 size poster entry. 

This can be handmade (then submitted electronically using a scanned copy or photograph) or using PowerPoint, Word, Publisher or PDF, etc. KS5 students should produce an Esri Story Map or write an essay – both of which should contain no more than 1,500 words. 

Key Stage 2 criteria: 

Provide your plan for at least one geographical issue, using annotated images, maps or diagrams. 

Key Stage 3 criteria: Provide your plan for at least two or more geographical issues, using annotated images, maps or diagrams. 

Key Stage 4 criteria: Provide your plan for at least three or more geographical issues, using annotated images, maps, diagrams and data. 

Key Stage 5 criteria: Provide your plan for multiple geographical issues, using annotated images, maps, diagrams and data.

Good luck to all those who put together an entry.

Food for free

I've asked my students, following several weeks exploring food production and sustainability to see what foods they can find for free, and consider that there are hundreds of millions of people who have to produce or find their own food.

Richard Mabey wrote a very useful book in this regard, and you can read a good chunk of it (also for free) here.

Foraging is also very much part of some cultures, and even a necessity for many who can not afford to purchase food at all.

Tens of millions of Africans rely on bushmeat.

This has caused issues in the past - the consumption of 'bush meat' being a factor in the outbreaks of Ebola in West Africa, such as the outbreak in 2014.

Eggs - Nuffield Scholar report

I was recently completing a resource and doing some additional reading around the production of eggs: bringing an earlier PPT up to date.

I discovered the Nuffield Scholarship scheme for those involved in farming, which funds travel and investigation to aid foor production.

Nuffield funds a number of scholars each year who do research and share it back in some way for wider dissemination. They write reports. This report is by Hannah Easthaugh.

(PDF download)

There were some interesting facts in the synopsis of the full report.

Average retail prices decreased from £3.14/dozen in 2007 to £1.30/dozen in 2018 and have now crept up again.

It shows how we have got used to food being cheap, and that the recent increases, which are the result of a great many different factors are going to cause an issue for many consumers who are being hit by other price rises and inflation, along with wages failing to keep pace with the changing costs.

Image: Alan Parkinson, shared under CC license