Geography in the secondary curriculum

Have had an interesting day today. I attended a course on the process for gaining the secondary quality mark for Geography at KS3. The whole process focuses on the idea of identifying quality Geography in schools. Obviously one of the benefits of going through this process is that it raises the profile of Geography in your school. One thing that worried me slightly during the day is that in the examples given they did not seem to draw elements of Geography that were taught in other subjects. In other words there was no cross subject mapping. The problem with this is that whilst the quality mark for Geography will promote the importance of Geography within the Geography department it has only a short term effect on the rest of the school. In a way this means we are preaching to the converted within the department and not encouraging the values of a great subject in everything else. This highlights the issues of subjects operating in silos within school. In primary this problem isn't so great because teachers have to teach everything so to speak. My own feeling with the curriculum is that the personal learning thinking skills approach may be the way to go in that it means we focus on the skills and use the content to develop and enhance those skills. Obviously for many secondary teachers myself included this means we need to be far more relaxed about the whole concept of not being the font of all knowledge - but rather as someone who can facilitate and guide students in a particular direction.