I am copying below two articles about a really important problem
in Climate Change: Students in the UK (and the US) today are not educated about
this existential problem for all humankind.
Greta Thunberg
Climate change: Schools failing us, say pupils
By Judith BurnsEducation
reporter
Joe,
17, says schools need to put the environment at the heart of education.
Ministers
agree "it is vital that pupils are taught about climate change" but
Joe says schools are failing to prepare them for a climate emergency.
He is a
founder member of Teach the Future which next week takes its call for
an environmental overhaul of education to Parliament.
"It's
people with degrees from Oxford and Cambridge who are becoming fossil-fuel
chief executives and they are the ones who are causing the most destruction to
our world," says Joe.
"And
therefore that kind of shows that education is not succeeding and that our
education is broken because education should be creating better people not
worse."
On
Wednesday, Joe, a pupil at Devizes School, and more than a dozen other under-18s
who make up the core of Teach the Future, will take over Parliament's Terrace
Pavilion to host a crowdfunded reception for MPs.
The
group, run jointly by the UK Student Climate Network, best known for the school
climate strikes, and the National Union of Students' climate charity offshoot,
SOS-UK, is launching a draft English emergency education bill which embodies
their key demands and which Joe believes "is going to be really big".
Teach the Future
Introducing Teach the Future
Teach the Future is the UK Student
Climate Network (UKSCN) and Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS-UK)
joint campaign to repurpose the education system around the climate emergency
and ecological crisis. As students studying across the UK, we believe the
majority of teaching and learning throughout the entirety of our education
system is misaligned from the systemic changes urgently required to make to
society sustainable. Our education system routinely fails to educate, prepare
and equip us, and our fellow students, for the climate emergency and ecological
crisis. Our campaign builds on the National Union of Students’ (NUS) work on
education for sustainable development in tertiary education and replaces
UKSCN’s original ask to reform the national curriculum. As education is a
devolved matter we have initially tailored our asks to England, unless stated
as a national recommendation. We have started with England because the Scottish
and Welsh Governments have taken some progressive action on this agenda
already, through Learning for Sustainability, Curriculum for Excellence and
Vision 2030 in Scotland, and the Future Generations Act in Wales. We are
unaware of any meaningful action on this agenda in Northern Ireland, but the
lack of a sitting Assembly until recently makes it harder for us to progress
our asks there at this time. All four nations need to do much more on this
agenda, as evidenced by the below research, and our analysis of the problems,
which generally apply across the UK. We
intend to develop nation-specific versions of Teach the Future soon.
Research
The following UK-wide research studies
helped influence our thinking:
• NUS
attitudes towards sustainability survey (7,800 responses, first year students
in university, UK wide, Nov 2017): 57% of students want to learn more about
sustainable development;
• Green Schools Project / NUS pupil survey
(3,000 responses, upper primary and secondary, mostly England, Dec 2018): Just
4% of pupils surveyed feel that they know a lot about climate change; 42% of
young people aged 9-18 say they have learnt a little, hardly anything or
nothing about the environment at school; 68% want to learn more about the
environment and climate change; 49% would like to be more involved in projects
or activities that help the environment.
• UKSCN / Oxfam teachers survey (350
responses, primary and secondary, UK wide, May 2019):
75% of teachers feel they haven’t received
adequate training to educate students about climate change; 69% of teachers
think there should be more teaching about climate change in UK schools.
• YouGov poll (2,579 adults, January 2020):
71% said learning about climate change should be part of the school curriculum.
What are the problems we are seeking
to address?
The Teach the Future team consulted with a
range of people working in the education system across the UK, at all levels of
the education system, as well as with academics, and experts working on
education in the main environmental and sustainability charities. The following
is a precis of what we understand to be the problems with the education system
in relation to how it is preparing us for the climate emergency and ecological
crisis:
3.1 Despite strong student demand, the climate
emergency and ecological crisis is not regarded as a learning entitlement;
3.2 There is no shared understanding, or
established pathway, for how learning about sustainability should develop, in a
progressive sense, through the key stages, from early years through to adult
education;
3.3 The outcomes that educational institutions
are measured by present a major barrier. In secondary schools, the focus is on
passing exams, rather than preparing us for the future we face. In
universities, our success is usually measured by our starting salary, not the
social good we go on to achieve. This is compounded by the c£50k debt we
graduate with, due to tuition fees, which incentivises work that pays well over
work that does good.
3.4 Although current English education policy
sets out to provide the maximum amount of autonomy for what schools teach,
teachers state that they do not have sufficient knowledge about the climate
emergency and ecological crisis to confidently teach about it beyond the
minimum curriculum specification;
3.5
Teacher training courses in England typically do not prepare trainee teachers
to teach about the climate emergency and ecological crisis, and it is not
adequately reflected in professional standards; 3.6 Teaching about
sustainability requires contributions from across disciplines. This is more
prevalent in primary and tertiary than secondary, in part because teachers in
secondary find it more difficult to collaborate across subject boundaries,
being more results-driven and facing greater time pressures. As a result, there
is a discontinuous learning journey on sustainability from primary to tertiary,
which leads to a loss of student engagement and interest;
3.7 Learning about the climate emergency and
ecological crisis tends to be restricted to science and geography in secondary,
and related disciplines in tertiary, despite most subjects being able to
contribute to our understanding of these issues;
3.8 Geography is not a compulsory subject at
GSCE, despite having important climate-related content;
3.9 Some schools are making good use of
Personal, Social, Health and Economic (PSHE) lesson time to teach about the
climate emergency and ecological crisis in the absence of being able to teach
it in a more systemic way;
3.10 Vocational courses in colleges urgently
need overhauling to reskill the workforce to deliver the transition to a low
carbon economy (e.g. retraining 3 plumbers away from gas fired boilers to
solar, heat pumps, battery installation, etc.);
3.11 There has longstanding move away from
outdoor education, as evidenced by the RSPB’s work on connection to nature, and
the notion of nature deficit disorder. This is an issue in other countries too,
as highlighted by the US campaign No Child Left Inside. This is compounded by
the rise of digital technology and social media, which often outcompetes being
in nature. Learning in, and about, nature, especially at an early age, helps
nurture a sense of wonder, fascination and curiosity, which reinforce innate
desires to conserve and protect what we have;
3.12 Other educational agendas, such as
technology, financial management and character, have much higher priority for
Government than the climate emergency and ecological crisis, even though all
those issues pale in significance given the catastrophic social, economic and
environmental consequences facing us through runaway global heating;
3.13 Our educational institutions are
typically not acknowledging, or sufficiently acting upon, the growing youth
voice on the climate emergency and ecological crisis. There is great sympathy
for our strikes, our cause and our plight, but as yet no meaningful or
coordinated attempts to work with us on solutions in relation to our education;
3.14 A lack of funding is often cited as a
barrier by young people who want to take more action on the environment. This
was reinforced at the World Economic Forum in 2020 when conservationist Jane
Goodall said “The young people know what needs to be done, but very often there
aren’t the resources for them to actually do it”.
3.15 Many schools, colleges and universities
do little or nothing to encourage us to contribute to, or lead on,
sustainability in terms of operational and estates issues. Sustainability is
often done for us, rather than with or through us. This is a missed learning
opportunity;
3.16 The buildings and estates that we are
educated in and on are often environmentally inefficient, wasteful and fully
reliant on fossil fuels. These assets are our subliminal curriculum and form
part of our learning on sustainability.
What are we asking Government to do?
ASK 1: A government commissioned
review into how the whole of the English formal education system is preparing
students for the climate emergency and ecological crisis
A review commissioned by the Department for
Education, led by an independent Chair, endorsed by UKSCN and NUS
representatives, supported by a panel of students, into how the English formal
education system in its entirety (primary through to adult education) is
preparing students to mitigate, abate and end the climate emergency and
ecological crisis. It will need tight terms of reference and ideally report
within a year so as not to disillusion student campaigners, many of whom are
anxious for immediate change. The review should propose detailed and costed
recommendations for Government and autonomous educational institutions,
including universities. All stages of the review should be should developed in
consultation with all relevant interest, stakeholder and 4 representative
groups. We believe the review should include whether learning about the climate
emergency and ecological crisis is a learning entitlement, what is the most appropriate
learning pathway (taking into consideration the very real problem of
eco-anxiety), and how any such learning pathway can join up through the various
forms of education. We will call for similar reviews in the devolved nations in
due course.
ASK 2: Inclusion of the climate
emergency and ecological crisis in teacher training and a new professional
teaching qualification
As is the case in Scotland, leaning about the
climate emergency and ecological crisis should be a compulsory part of teaching
training courses. We would like to see this detailed in the Government’s
teacher standards for England and/or the Initial Teacher Training (ITT) Content
Framework. We would also like to see a new National Professional Qualification
for teachers on the climate emergency and ecological crisis, including
considerations relating to eco-anxiety. These actions should not wait for the
review in Ask 1 and should be done immediately.
ASK 3: An English Climate Emergency
Education Act
We propose creating a symbolically important
new act of Parliament, sitting above the various pieces of existing
legislation, stating an expectation on education providers at all levels to
deliver teaching and learning on the climate emergency, climate justice (the
social injustice issues pertaining from global heating) and ecological crisis,
and providing additional targeted funding to deliver this. This is
conceptionally like the US National Defence Education Act 1958, which provided
funding and framing for STEM across all forms of formal education as part of
the space race. Another example is the Welsh Future Generations Act, which has
led to changes in how sustainability is taught in pre-16 education. The
targeted funding should be used to: • Create an English skills development
programme for existing teachers and lecturers, and other key educational
institution staff, on the science of the climate emergency and ecological
crisis, the systems changes required to abate them, including provision of
teaching resources at all levels; • Create a set of national centres of
excellence in further education to promote the reskilling of the workforce
through vocational courses in line with the green skills requirements of
industrial strategy; • Run a research programme to demonstrate the impact and outcomes
of sustainability learning in terms of competencies, values, attainment,
resilience and wellbeing. • Fund initiatives on outdoor education and
connection to nature linked to learning about the climate emergency and
ecological crisis; • Create a Climate Education Information Institute in order
to disseminate scientific information through the English education system.
ASK 4: A national climate emergency
youth voice grant fund
The Netherlands funds youth and
sustainability charities to train and support young people to sit on youth
advisory panels on the climate emergency and ecological crisis within public
sector organisations. A similar UK-wide fund should be established so local
authorities, multi-academy trusts, colleges, universities and NHS trusts can
create youth voice forums to advise on repurposing education 5 around the
climate emergency and ecological crisis. This should happen immediately. ASK 5:
A national Youth Climate and Ecological Endowment Fund A new national endowment
should be created to fund youth-led social action on the climate emergency and
ecological crisis. The traditional model for Government endowments is to
ringfence a financial fine windfall, or money from dormant bank accounts, and
repurpose it towards a defined cause. The Educational Endowment Fund (2011,
£125m) seeks to improve schools in low income areas; the Youth Endowment Fund
(2018, £200m) seeks to prevent young people getting into violent crime; the
Uniformed Youth Fund (£5m, 2018) seeks to get more young people involved in
uniformed youth groups. This new endowment should be steered by a panel of
young people and managed by a coalition of youth-led charities. Educational
organisations should be eligible to apply for funding in order to distribute it
to young people and students at the local level for local youth-led social
action on the climate emergency and ecological crisis. The endowment should be
invested in new renewable energy assets, in keeping with the purpose of the
scheme. It might be that leading businesses and philanthropists decide to
contribute to the fund so that it grows over time. An endowment of this nature
would provide a useful stop gap measure alongside any Government commissioned
review of legislative work to ensure that students do not get frustrated by the
slow progress of with governmental processes. It is important to allocate a
substantial amount to any new climate endowment (in our view £500m) so as to
demonstrate the Government’s recognition of the size of the challenge we face,
and commitment to catalysing immediate action from as many people as possible
as soon as possible, which is exactly what the science says we need right now.
ASK 6: All new
state-funded educational buildings should be net-zero from 2022; all existing
state-funded educational buildings net-zero by 2030
Our educational buildings are more
than safe spaces for us to learn, they are themselves an education resource. It
is a scandal that so many of our nurseries, schools, college and university
buildings are powered by fossil fuels, have no or hardly any renewables, are
poorly insulated, have inefficient and outdated lighting and controls, an
absence of sufficient natural light and limited natural vegetation and
biodiversity enhancements in the grounds. Our state-funded educational estate
should be a living laboratory for us to learn about how to work and live
sustainability. It is shocking that our educational institutions are still
putting up brand new deeply unsustainable buildings, many of which will need to
be retrofitted or replaced very soon if we are to meet our national net-zero
ambitions. The Government have committed us to being net-zero by 2050, but the
science says we need to go much further and faster, and we think the
educational estate should be an infrastructural priority given the learning
gain benefit. As such we are calling for Government to put substantial new
capital investment into the education system. The Government should ensure that
all new educational institution buildings that are 50% or more funded by public
money are net-zero from 2022, and that all state-funded educational buildings
are retrofitted to be net-zero by 2030. The Government should influence other
agencies that distribute government funding for capital projects in education,
such as funding and research 6 councils, local authorities, and NHS Trusts,
encouraging or mandating them to support this target. 5.0 Version control 25
January 2020: Amended sentence on Northern Ireland to reflect assembly is now
sitting; updated research with new Jan 2020 YouGov poll; added a new bullet
(3.14) on lack of funding being a barrier; changed ‘demands’ to ‘asks’
throughout to strike a more conciliatory tone; amended Ask 2 to include ITT and
NPQ, as was just teacher standards; amended Ask 3 by tightening up the wording
in the bullet points and reducing the number by merging them; amended Ask 5 so
it refers to youth social action; amended Ask 6 net zero from 2020 to 2022.
Zamzam Ibrahim,
25, SOS-UK Joe Brindle, 17, UKSCN hello@teachthefuture.uk 25 January 2020
