GCSE Natural History - Working in Readiness with Year 8

Barney Davies has a degree in Natural Sciences and a PhD in Plant Sciences. He is Director of Science at Brighton College, where he has also been Head of Biology. Despite being a member of the Young Ornithologists Club aged seven he still has much to learn about the UK’s wildlife.

Very early on a Saturday morning around the end of April, just as spring is starting to ramp up, I will sneak out of my house — being careful not to wake my family — and head from where we live in Hove on the south coast into the Sussex countryside. I have a few preferred spots: RSPB Pulborough Brooks, the Knepp Estate, Woods Mill Nature Reserve. Armed with a coffee in the cool dawn air, I take it in; how many newly arrived nightingales can I find to listen to? Are there any white-tailed eagles perched in the distance or orchids to find on the slopes of the South Downs as the sun rises?

I have loved teaching GCSE and A-level biology for more than 15 years. I am also as excited as the next person reading this article for the new GCSE in Natural History. I can’t imagine a more timely or important qualification to help young people understand the diversity, interconnectivity and challenges faced by our natural world. When a period in the Year 8 timetable at Brighton College was offered to me for a potential Natural History course, I leapt at the chance to develop one! In this article I will attempt to distil the development of the Brighton College Natural History course into three top tips. While by no means exhaustive or canonical, I do hope that this article might help inspire others to create a similar programme themselves.

My pre-dawn rambling has helped me to consider the life around us more holistically, shaping in turn my understanding of what we might actually mean when we talk about Natural History. Take the nightingale, for example. I’m not just listening to its song (though it blows my mind every time). So much more is wrapped up in the wonderful cacophony erupting from a small brown bird deep in the scrub a few meters away, including (but not limited to): 

• how we can identify species

• conservation biology and rewilding

• seasonal changes (phenology) and migration, and the influence climate change has on these processes

• how birdsong and the natural world more broadly has been represented in music and literature

• how simply stopping to take notice of the life around us influences our wellbeing.

The Brighton College course follows three broad themes:

1. Natural History of the UK (including species identification by leaf, song, and footprint, key UK biomes, phenology, the Wood Wide Web and the changing flora and fauna of the UK since the last ice age).

2. Interconnections between nature and man (including traditional uses of plants and animals, biophilia and well-being, what is ‘natural’ in the UK?, and representations of the natural world in song, art, poetry and myth).

3. Natural History in 21st Century Britain: challenges and opportunities, environmental ethics and attitudes to nature in the UK.

The Year 8 pupils at Brighton College are surveyed at the start and end of the course, enabling the content to evolve from year to year. Along the way, pupils are developing some key transferable skills, too, such as observation, monitoring, analysis and report writing.

My three top tips are:

1.  It has been great fun to pull together!

   Developing resources for the Natural History course has become the highlight of my week. Here, enthusiasm certainly matches expertise. Like most (better) teachers before me, I magpie resources, always keeping an eye and ear open for suitable podcasts, newspaper articles and popular biology books and then using the nuggets gleaned from these to enrich my lessons, be they on herring gulls, lichens, biophilia or domestication. The Wildlife Trusts, Natural History Museum, and various learned societies all produce fantastic resources, too, and there are also many national community science projects offering opportunities for pupils to collect data (this year we have particularly enjoyed FIT Counts: help us monitor pollinators | PoMS, SwiftMapper, and, of course, the Big Schools’ Birdwatch).

2. Find your dandelion coffee drinkers

   Despite growing up in a fairly drab part of suburban Hertfordshire, I have always been interested in the natural world. However, I am increasingly aware when teaching biology that one is less and less able to assume young people have a baseline knowledge of the common plants and animals around them (and this is despite young people reporting strongly positive feelings towards nature e.g. The Children’s People and Nature Survey for England: 2024 update - GOV.UK). To my delight, the Natural History course has provided a forum for pupils to share hitherto untapped gems of expertise and engagement with the natural world. Whether it’s the dandelion coffee they made with their grandparents or the child who goes out bird ringing with the BTO, have faith that pupil advocates will appear given the opportunity. Regular assemblies have also helped build pupil interest in the life all around them; highlights included introducing them to the surprisingly complex reproductive habits of the dunnocks in the bushes outside the school hall to prizes for the first person to find a tiny rosette of Arabidopsis thaliana, arguably one of the most important plants in the world.

3. Make virtue of location

   Regardless of geographical location, there are opportunities to relate to life all around us each day. As a pupil stares idly out of window at a herring gull pecking about on the school field, for example, can we empower them to know and therefore appreciate what they’re seeing on a deeper level? Just minutes from Brighton College’s location in the centre of the city are nesting peregrines, murmurating starlings and an area with one of the highest urban badger populations ever recorded!

There is much life to inspire us that is easily missed each day. I sincerely hope that in an increasingly human dominated landscape, this course will equip pupils with the knowledge to engage with our natural biodiversity and in so doing engender an enthusiasm to protect what remains. Getting up incredibly early on spring weekends is entirely optional.