The Open Geography Portal: More Than a Source of Data
Today I attended a Royal Geographical Society Geography in Practice webinar introducing the redevelopment of the Office for National Statistics’ Open Geography Portal. The new portal is expected to launch fully in spring or summer 2027.
The portal already provides free access to geographical products including boundaries, postcode directories, classifications and lookup tables. The redesigned version promises a clearer interface, improved accessibility and data that is much easier to discover.
For me, the session highlighted something more significant from an educational perspective. The portal does not simply provide secondary data. It offers much more including the geographical scaffolding needed to turn data into meaningful geographical analysis.
For A Level Geography students, the boundaries data and lookup tables on the portal could help them:
connect information collected at different spatial scales;
map primary and secondary data using GIS;
select and classify fieldwork locations;
investigate relationships between environmental risk and social vulnerability;
consider how boundaries and spatial scale influence the patterns they identify.
This not only opens up possibilities for using the portal to support investigations at the physical-human interface, ranging from urban microclimates and the urban heat island effect to flooding and coastal erosion but it also provides valuable opportunities for students to think critically about data provenance, reliability, changing boundaries and the conclusions that aggregated data can genuinely support.
I have written up my reflections fully in this Substack, which explores these possibilities, the redevelopment of the portal and what this might mean for building GIS and data capabilities before students begin their independent NEA.
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