A blog providing ideas and resources for those teachers hoping to teach the new GCSE Specification, first announced in April 2022. Draft subject content released for consultation in June 2026 - for first teaching from 2028 or 2029.
Derek vs Derek is a documentary exploring two neighbouring farmers, both called Derek.
Two neighbouring Devon farmers, both called Derek, go to war over the future of their land in this funny and timely documentary.
One is an advocate for intensive farming; the other is giving his entire farm over to nature, rewilding it into an oasis for wildlife. Tempers fray, wild animals escape, and the land between them is transformed, all while the two Dereks butt heads over what the English countryside should look like and who gets to decide. The tension between rewilding and traditional agriculture has never felt more urgent, and the film finds its way into that conversation through a neighbourly dispute that just happens to share a name on both sides of the fence.
The Festival features a whole range of events broadly on the theme of landscape, connected to North Norfolk. This includes art, literature, and field events.
They mostly take place in and around the Norfolk town of Wells next the Sea, including some boat trips on the marshes and a few events outside of the town.
Here's some of the events on Saturday
There is an exhibition of paintings including some from one of my favourite contemporary artists: Fred Ingrams, who frequently paints in the Fens.I have the catalogue of one of his exhibitions of Fenland paintings which has a great introduction and description of the landscape from Jonathan Meades.
“There’s a real experience behind each of my paintings. They say I have stood in this landscape, been bitten alive by midges, drenched by massive storm clouds. You can’t fake it.”
Fred’s work connects him with the deep history of the landscapes he paints – the strange stories and myths of places that exist on the outside of a world beyond the horizon.
Spending time in these fragile ecosystems he also sees how threatened they are – by natural processes or well-meant schemes, from crumbling coastlines to drainage to conifer plantations to massive wind farms encroaching into a pristine wilderness.
There are some excellent additional trips running:
several boat trips through the marshes
a tour of Holkham Estate including some of the management of the different landscapes that it has
A film which was made a few years ago, and is now available to view on YouTube.
Hope Rewilded is a documentary exploring rewilding in Britain — what it means, why it matters, and whether giving nature the freedom to recover could help reverse the dramatic decline of our wildlife.
Across Britain, landscapes that have been shaped and depleted over generations are being given the chance to recover. Species are returning, habitats are regenerating and people are beginning to rethink what our countryside could look like.
But what does it really mean to rewild a country like Britain?
How much nature have we lost?
What should we bring back?
And how wild are we prepared to let Britain become?
Hope Rewilded explores these questions through some of the people at the forefront of rewilding, conservation and nature recovery in Britain. Featuring interviews with:
George Monbiot — environmental journalist, author and campaigner, and co-founder of Rewilding Britain. His books include Feral, an influential exploration of rewilding and ecological restoration.
Isabella Tree — award-winning author and co-owner of the Knepp Estate in West Sussex, home to one of Britain’s best-known rewilding projects. She is the author of Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm.
Simon Roper — zoologist, conservationist and co-founder and Director of Ambios, an organisation working in nature recovery, conservation training and species reintroductions.
Prof. Alastair Driver — ecologist and leading UK rewilding specialist, former Director of Rewilding Britain and former National Conservation Manager for the Environment Agency, with more than four decades of experience in conservation and nature recovery.
At its heart, Hope Rewilded is not simply a film about what Britain has lost. It is about what we could get back. What happens when we give nature another chance?
Sea Land and City is a new documentary, supported by The Crown Estate.
Series such as David Attenborough’s Wild Isles have made audiences aware that the UK is one the most nature depleted countries on earth, but what can we do about that?
With The Crown Estate’s diverse portfolio which includes urban centres, rural land, the seabed and much of the coastline, the connection between these ecosystems needs to be at the heart of how we approach nature recovery for the UK.
That’s why we are thrilled to have supported a new adventure and documentary, ‘Sea, Land and City’, alongside Triodos Bank and distributed by Waterbear, to spotlight powerful nature positive solutions across South-West England. The documentary was premiered at the Blue Earth Summit in October 2024 following months of filming.
From tripling the size of the UK’s temperate rainforest, to restoring the South Coasts’ lost sea grass and kelp forests, to growing access to regenerative food in a changing climate — the documentary features some of the most exciting projects with the potential to lead big impact. The team, led by Mairead Cahill, Founder of Wonderoom, trekked, climbed, wade and foraged their way through the region to meet exceptional projects and the people behind them, giving the audience a direct and intimate experience of nature restoration in action.
Our Head of Nature and Environment for Marine, Caroline Price, joins Mairead in Dorset to discuss how The Crown Estate is working in partnership with a range of organisations under The Studland Bay Marine Partnership to support nature recovery in the region through the use of eco-moorings.
It was written in collaboration with young farmers and it questions why discussions about the weather are so common, in contrast to discussions about climate change.
Environmental campaign group the Climate Majority Project hopes the five-minute film will help pupils and teachers speak "honestly and sensitively" about the issue.
It was written by King's Lynn-born playwright Emma-Louise Howell, who spent time speaking to young farmers in the county about their experience of climate change.
She said: "They really were engaged in it and they were almost shouting into a void saying 'we have got a bit of an answer, working with nature'.
"You can't control the weather, but they are having to adjust every single day to the shift in climate.
Merlin Sheldrake's book is an important one, and I will be exploring it for the reading list.
I will write a full review in due course and add it to the library as well once I get the chance to finish listening to it - which I will do during March.
I have an Audible copy of the book to explore and potentially use with students. The introduction to the book is an excellent start and nice introduction to the value of fungi in our lives. There is also plenty on how humans have used fungi for a range of applications from industrial to medical to recreational.
One of my favourite sequences from the upcoming IMAX movie, Fungi: Web of Life. Björk explains how a fungal spore becomes a mycelial network. The astonishing footage is by Wim van Egmond. I'll post a series of clips from the film in the coming days. Stay tuned! pic.twitter.com/TnAjjqFfQK
“Entangled Life is a dazzling, vibrant, vision-changing book. Sentence after sentence stopped me short. I ended it wonderstruck at the fungal world and the earth-shaking, hierarchy-breaking implications of Sheldrake's argument. This is a remarkable work by a remarkable writer, which succeeds in springing life into strangeness again.” — Robert Macfarlane
A film has been made suitable for IMAX, so I will look out for a screening of that as well.
Six Inches of Soil is a new film, which explores the value of this material, which many people undervalue - not understanding its critical importance. I studied pedology (soil science) in the final year of my undergraduate degree, spending quite a lot of time carrying out experiments and fieldwork, and know very well how important it is to look after it.
Humans have represented the natural world in many different ways over the centuries, dating back to cave paintings through a whole range of other art forms: literature, poetry, art, pottery, gardening etc.
The original ideas in the consultation on the specification included a reference to cave paintings. This may form part of a topic called 'Life in the Early World' or more likely 'Representations of the Natural World'.
There are some famous locations where cave paintings have been discovered, which represent the flora and fauna of the time. The drawings capture creatures which are no longer native to the countries where the images are found. The paintings were also made with dyes / paints made from natural sources as well.
A few key locations which would be worth referencing:
The problem with the caves is that visitors change the atmosphere within the caves, due to their respiration adding heat and moisture to the otherwise cool and relatively dry interior of the caves (which was why people lived there).
Visitors are now directed to a replica of the cave which was recreated following 3D scanning of the original spaces to ensure that they are not damaged further.
2. Chauvet Cave
The Chauvet cave, in the Ardeche region of southern France, contains some of the oldest and most remarkable cave drawings ever found - yet it has been sealed shut since its discovery to preserve this precious art.
The cave is the subject of an early film by Werner Herzog.
