Rex Walford Award
The Rex Walford Award is for trainees or teachers who have just started their careers.
The Rex Walford Award is for trainees or teachers who have just started their careers, including students enrolled on a PGCE, SCITT, Teach First and School Direct, alongside NQTs and colleagues at a similar stage in their careers.
The award was named after Rex Walford. Rex was a teacher, a natural enthusiast, a leading international name in geography education, a long-serving Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) and one of the first group of Chartered Geographers. He supported the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in many ways over more than 25 years.
Reflecting the late Rex Walford’s passion for training new geography teachers who can inspire their students in their subject, it is awarded for the best scheme of work, set of teaching resources and/or lesson plans developed on the same theme as the Young Geographer of the Year competition.
We welcome innovative and effective approaches to engaging pupils with the competition question and would also be interested to see examples of pupils’ work that has resulted from the lessons.
2023 competition
The theme for the Rex Walford Award 2023 was:
A blueprint for the future
For this year’s Rex Walford Award, we were asking trainee or early career geography teachers to create a short scheme of work which encourages their students to create their own blueprint for the future and enter it into our Young Geographer of the Year competition 2023.
We were interested to see lesson plans and accompanying resources which encourage students to think about:
- 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.
- Recommendations that are 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.
2023 winner
The winner of the Rex Walford Award 2023 was India Owens from Latymer Upper School. India's resources are available to view here
Winner India Owens pictured with RGS-IBG Director Professor Joe Smith and Tom Heap.
2022 competition
Where, how and why
For the 2022 Rex Walford Award competition we asked trainee or early career geography teachers to create a short scheme of work, including a range of mapping, which reveals a place where their pupils’ would like to travel to, and how and why they want to go there.
Unfortunately we were unable to award the Rex Walford Award in 2022.
Previous winners of the Rex Walford Award
In 2021, we asked trainee or early career geography teachers to create a short scheme of work, including a range of mapping, revealing how their pupils’ lives had been shaped by the Covid pandemic. The winner of the 2021 Rex Walford Award was Paul Greenhalgh, Berkhamsted Boys’ School, Berkhamsted.
The 2020 Rex Walford award challenged teachers to produce a scheme of work around the topic of the world outside my window. The winner of the 2020 competition was Emily Chandler from William Perkin CofE High School.
The 2019 Rex Walford Award asked entrants to produce a short scheme of work, covering at least three lessons, that focused on the question: Where can geography take you? The winner of the 2019 Rex Walford Award was Victoria Pellant, Torquay Boys Grammar School.
