2021: Alan Parkinson

Updated October 2023

The final entry for the blog - at least for a while - is a post about me. 

I'm Head of Geography at King's Ely Prep, and also an author and consultant geographer. I'm a Chartered Geographer and Fellow of the RGS and RSGS.

For what I get up to, please visit, and subscribe to my main blog, which is called Living Geography, and follow the development of my Quotidian Geographies project during 2021.

I will also add other blog posts here from time to time through the following year, before the next President as I have the chance to go into the archives.

You can also follow the #POTGA21 hashtag during this year as well as #everydaygeographies.

I was born in the Listerdale Maternity Hospital, to the East of Rotherham in late December 1963. I lived in the village of Wickersley and went to Northfield Lane Infants and then Junior School before going on to Wickersley Comprehensive School. This was formerly Wickersley High School (many of our folders still had the old name) and also had ROSLA extensions after the raising of the school leaving age, and a classic 1970s construction. My journey to school involved walking over the blue bridge here, with distant views of the Peak District and Sheffield.

Image: Alan Parkinson

Miss Moon was my teacher in Year 8, then I had John Neale and Steve Hanstock amongst others. I still have my exercise books from that time. I moved to a house on the main Bawtry Road shown above during my secondary days. I got an 'A' in my 'O' level Geography, and stayed on to do 'A' levels at the school.

I was really interested in computers too, and our science teacher Doc Humphries had an Apple II computer in a locked-up trolley at the back of his lab. I used to stay behind one or two evenings a week after school and teach myself to programme the machine, and used magazines and books to find out more about how it worked. I took 'O' level Computer Science and ended up teaching GCSE and A level Computer Science as well as Geography for a while.

Taking Computer Science also meant that we would travel on an old double decker bus operated by Powell's coaches, and head for Dinnington College to actually access some computers - RM machines with green graphics on black screens, and machine coded. 

I did quite well in my 'A' levels, and the big success was Geography for me. My teacher was Steve Hanstock who was personable and a good teacher.

John Neale was another of my teachers, who it turned out worked with John Lyon, who later became a colleague at the GA.

Our notes were often banda duplicated, and had lots of information and diagrams and spaces to fill at GCSE, but as we got more into geography, we had more lecture-style lessons.
When I opened my 'A' level results in August 1982, I had the grades to head for either Lancaster University or Huddersfield Polytechnic, but chose the course which would be more practical and fieldwork based, and also physical geography based as that was my interest back then. I also had plans to return home more than once or twice a year and Huddersfield wasn't too far away from Rotherham.
As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, in entries describing Huddersfield and the connections with other GA members, it is clear that this was a good proving ground for some young lecturers including Tim Burt and David Butcher amongst others.
A few images of me emerged on a local Facebook page, and also another dedicated to those who 'survived Huddersfield Polytechnic'.

Image: Sally Stow. I'm the one in the yellow and black hat. I haven't changed a bit.

I graduated with a II, i and was not sure what to do with myself.

Teaching was an option as my mother was a lecturer at the time at Dinnington College of Further Education. I took a Computer Science 'A' level at Rotherham College of Arts and Technology, which involved learning other computer languages and gave me the time to read, and play a lot of golf. 

I went for several interviews for PGCE courses, and was eventually accepted at the University of Hull by Vincent Tidswell, who was in his final year as PGCE tutor. He appears on this blog of course as I later found out he was involved with the GA and wrote a number of influential books.

After finishing the course, I eventually found work. The first school I actually earned money from teaching in was Kimberworth Park in Rotherham - now demolished and famous for being the school where former England goalkeeper David Seaman. Ironically, I now teach at the school where Nick Pope - an England goalkeeper in the last year - was taught.

Here's the 'fun' biography I put on GeographyPages in 2006. It's a little out of date now of course, but includes some interesting snippets. Geography Pages was my website I started creating in 2001, and which became one of the most popular websites of the time (as one of the few websites of the time) gaining millions of page views a year (and costing me a lot of money to maintain)

Born on a sheer mountain side in South Yorkshire in the early 1960's during a blizzard, Mister P was educated at the local 'comp' and enjoyed moderate success (9 'O' & 5 'A' levels) before moving on to Huddersfield Polytechnic (when polys were polys) and spent the next 3 years pushing the Atterberg limits, enjoying the mid-1980's price of beer, checking tensiometer readings at Bicknoller, criss-crossing the Pennines in a land rover with a radioactive soil moisture probe.

He has taught at various schools in Derbyshire (the good old Amber valley), East and South Yorkshire, and at  King Edward VII School: a specialist Sports College, in King's Lynn, Norfolk where he is Head of Geography, and edits the school newsletter, amongst other things. In his time at the school he has overseen the introduction of the Geography National Curriculum, run the Duke of Edinburgh's Award group, been Activities Coordinator, Deputy Head of House, and for a year was acting Examinations Officer. 

A founder member of the sadly-missed Boiled Onions Climbing Club, he enjoys foreign and UK travel, hill-walking when he gets the chance, landscape photography, obscure travel literature, Scandinavian Jazz, open fires, a good tight end in a game of bowls, beachcombing on the North Norfolk coast and fine malt whiskies. The Old Hunstanton side he plays for won the Countryside League Knockout cup in 2005.

He completed a DfES Best Practice research scholarship on the use of ICT, particularly the Internet in improving the quality of teaching in Geography (2002) which is published online and has been referred to by other academic researchers, and also completed an Online course on Climate Change run by the University of East Anglia. He is an ICT consultant to 'silver surfers' in the North Norfolk area. He is also involved in various web-based interests, including 'Evaluate' (his software evaluations are featured on the website and have been published in 'The Guardian' as have contributions to 'Brainstrust')

In November 2003 he was awarded a Royal Geographical Society Innovative Geography Teaching Grant to develop the GEO BLOGS project. Blogs have come on substantially since 2003 and are now almost so mainstream that they are commonplace, but it was good to get in there at the start.

In May 2004 he was invited to join the Geographical Association's Secondary Education Committee (now Secondary Phase Committee). He had an article published in the October 2004 issue of 'Teaching Geography', and was an E:port representative of the DfES/Evaluate/Schoolzone at DfES ICT in Geography roadshow and BETT 2005 and 2006. He has also been a contributing author to GeoProjects  (http://www.geoprojects.co.uk) and has also done consultancy and writing work for Hodder and Pearson and 3 or 4 other publishers. He was Editorial consultant on the new Longman School Atlas, which was published in April 2006, and has also contributed to ideas and materials for the new BBC Digital Curriculum.

He has delivered ICT workshops at numerous Norfolk Geography conferences, and network meetings, and has also presented at the GA Conference, and the SAGT Conference in 2005, and will be once again in 2006. In August 2005, he became a Teacher Consultant for the Geographical Association, and is currently doing 'various consultancy-type-things...'

In October 2005 he was awarded a second Royal Geographical Society Innovative Geography Teaching Grant to develop the EARTH: A Users' Guide project. He'd appreciate it if you got involved.

2006 contributions to the milieu include: contributions to Brainstrust / Evaluate publication, Longman School Atlas published, article published in Pilot News, guest edited WebWatch section of GA News for May 2006 and invited to join the editorial committee of GA Magazine, teacher notes and curriculum maps produced for the RGS-IBG Discovering Antarctica website (launched June 2006), best of the web feature for Teachers TV (coming in September), contributions to working groups in Norfolk on SEN and Pilot GCSE. He is also involved in further Pilot GCSE developments to be announced shortly as part of the Action Plan for Geography. In 2006 he was awarded a 'Norfolk Geogers' award for contributions to Norfolk Geography. 

Image: showing the KES fleeces we used to wear for a while... taken around 2006.

In early 2008, I saw an ad for a post at the Geographical Association, and put in a speculative application for what was going to be my 'perfect' job, despite having a bit of 'imposter syndrome' about being up to a national role.

This was a good year, as I was also awarded the Ordnance Survey Award for Excellence in Secondary Geography Teaching by the RGS-IBG. Here I am prior to all that, and prior to the interview, presenting at the GA Conference as part of the authoring team for the new KS3 toolkit series.

In 2010, we published the first of the Mission:Explore books, written by the Geography Collective, which started with a conversation between Daniel Raven Ellison and myself. I am very proud of the work we completed together, with other members of the Geography Collective, and latterly with Helen Leigh and Tom Morgan-Jones.

Here's the motherlode: the 500+ missions that we wrote as a team, and then asked young people to select so that Tom Morgan Jones could do the inking.

Chatting to Anne Robertson of EDINA, with whom I've worked for quite a few years now.

In 2011, my job was sadly made redundant as a result of financial fallout from the end of the Action Plan for Geography.

I put out an appeal for help.

This led to two years of freelance work, with plenty of ERASMUS thrown in.

In 2013 I received a nice email from Mike Robinson, the Chief Executive of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, explaining that I had been awarded the RSGS's Joy Tivy Education Medal and Honorary Fellowship - a great honour.

I also received an email from Claire Kyndt of King's Ely. This resulted in me returning to the classroom for a second stint, where I remain to the present day.

In 2017, I got an email suggesting that I might make a good President, and asking whether I would put myself forward. I duly did, and the rest is... geography.

My Presidential theme is 'Everyday Geographies' or 'Quotidian Geographies'.

There are a great many people I haven't mentioned here who I owe a great debt too... these will be mentioned in future posts in the year ahead, and also in my Presidential lecture.

References

I have written, co-written or contributed to over 30 books, including KS3, GCSE, Fieldwork and A level textbooks, children's books, adventure books and eBooks.

Charney 20th Anniversary book, edited by Simon Catling - has a chapter called 'You can take the boy out of Yorkshire' which included a sort of autobiography as well - I think on hindsight that's one of the better shorter things that I've written.

Why not buy at least one copy of my book 'Why Study Geography'? - it's excellent.

Full biography on my About.me page.

Updates

I'm always creating and sharing resources.

Currently working on the Oak National Primary project.