2019 was a crucial year for environmental education in the UK. That was the year when the UK parliament became the first in the world to declare a climate and ecological emergency, when figures like Greta Thunberg and organisations like Extinction Rebellion came to public attention, and when, according to data from polling companies, there was a marked and persistent increase in concern about the environment among the UK public.
It was also the year when many schools – Highgate included – began writing environmental strategies and thinking seriously about their effect on the natural world. The seeds planted then are now increasingly coming into flower.
A key development was the publication of the Department for Education’s Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy in the spring of 2022. Although the strategy has attracted some criticism (as yet, schools are not formally required to do anything to promote its goals), it sets out a clear vision of where the government wants state schools in England to be: most notably, by 2025 it wants every school to have a designated sustainability lead overseeing a climate action plan which encompasses curricular and extra-curricular activities, procurement, adaptation, and decarbonisation. This has contributed to a wave of interest in environmental work among state sector teachers and presented further opportunities for cross-sector collaboration.
This is important because environmental leads within schools are sometimes relatively isolated figures, often fairly new in post and without a team or department behind them. Yet many of the problems that schools are grappling with in this area – from how to audit carbon emissions accurately to how to boost biodiversity on a school site without compromising pupils’ opportunities to play and exercise – are challenging, and the best way of addressing them is often by speaking to someone at another school who is grappling with them as well.
Last week, we hosted our annual, environmentally themed continuing professional development (CPD), in collaboration with the London Schools Eco Network. This was our third iteration of the event, connecting teachers and other educationalists from across London and the Southeast to explore some of the more pertinent topics around sustainability in education.
Our keynote speaker, Professor Alison Kitson, Programme Director at University College London’s Climate Change and Sustainability Education, spoke about the importance of embedding environmental content across the curriculum, not just in traditional locations such as geography lessons. As she pointed out, the environment can be addressed in almost any subject, whether that is by exploring the history of industrialisation, using mathematics to measure carbon emissions or wildlife populations accurately, or using literary and the arts to access our feelings about the environments we live in and the state of the world more generally. It is something that we have been exploring at Highgate, by auditing existing curriculum content, looking at where the gaps are, and working with departments across the school to embed relevant content.
Curriculum reform and the staff training necessary to implement it are not always things which schools can accomplish by themselves, and universities can have a key role to play in assisting them. UCL have produced some excellent resources to help teachers, which can be accessed here. So far, these cover geography, history, mathematics, and English, but by the spring of 2025 they will expand to cover. science, drama, art, music, and citizenship.
At the event, we also heard from representatives of the National Education Nature Park – a government-backed initiative to involve pupils in the mapping and improving of wildlife habitats on school sites across England – and the charity Ashden, whose ‘Let’s Go Zero’ campaign aims to help schools go carbon neutral by 2030 by offering them tailored advice on emissions management.
These organisations nicely illustrate the importance of the connection between the management of school sites and the actions of the people who use them. The Nature Park is all about getting pupils involved in hands-on conservation, interacting with wildlife and acquiring skills which could be used in future work, but schools’ involvement with it is likely to most effective where pupils are well supported both by teachers and staff who work to manage school sites. Similarly, while the Let’s Go Zero helps schools to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings and the management of their grounds, it also helps them to change the behaviour of pupils and staff so that resources are used more sparingly.
Both initiatives are expanding rapidly and already encompass hundreds of schools, which provides an index of the appetite that exists for educating young people to care about and understand the natural world and to run schools in a way which minimises their harmful effects on that world.
In my opinion, environmental education should be outward-looking. Reducing carbon emissions and other forms of environmental harm and preparing pupils for a potentially challenging future are actions which are worth undertaking because they have very general benefits: almost all of us would be better off in a cleaner and more climatically stable world. Looking outward to other schools and to other organisations helps us to remember that.
About the author Gabriel Roberts, Head of Environmental Sustainability Gabriel joined Highgate in 2021. As well as working on environmental sustainability, he also teaches English, although his academic interests include history, philosophy, and politics. In his spare time, he enjoys reading, bird-watching, classical music, and trying to grow his own fruit and vegetables.
