Teach the Future are really excited to announce the launch of Curriculum for a Changing Climate: track changes review of the national curriculum for England.
The first-of-its-kind report reviews the curriculum for key stages 3 and 4 in the English National Curriculum, covering subjects ranging from History to Art and Design. Using a 'tracked changes' methodology the report suggests where and how the national curriculum can be amended to include sustainability and respond to the climate and ecological crisis.
At Teach the Future, we believe that students need to be taught about the climate emergency and ecological crisis: how they are caused, what we can do to mitigate them and what our future lives and jobs are going to look like due to them. We believe the majority of teaching and learning throughout the entirety of our education system is misaligned with the systemic changes urgently required to make our society sustainable. Therefore, sustainability and the climate crises need to become key content in all subject areas and educators need to be trained in how to teach about these difficult topics in a way that empowers students - and they need funding and resources to do this.
The report is a comprehensive guide, working alongside our Climate Education Bill for England and Wales, to show leaders exactly how and why climate education should be integrated into the curriculum. This project clearly demonstrates that climate education shouldn’t be siloed and restricted to certain subjects like Science and Geography. Instead, climate education should permeate the entire curriculum in order to equip students with the necessary tools to understand and deal with the climate crisis. It also shows that the curriculum does not necessarily require a huge amount of additional content: our vision for climate education can be realised through repurposing current content, making considered edits, and shifting focus and framing.
We know that teachers and students alike support our vision for climate education. According to the recent Pearson report, 47% of headteachers want climate change incorporated into the national curriculum with as much time and emphasis as core subjects, and 61% of teachers say the current education system is not successfully developing tolerant, sustainably-minded global citizens of the future.
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Posted On: 20/09/2022