This report published by UCL is the outcome of an event held on 16 July 2024 which brought us and other professional and subject associations together to discuss the roles that they, and the subjects they represent, play in climate change and sustainability education in schools.
Month: January 2025
Today UNESCO are celebrating the International Day of Education, recognising the role of education for peace and development globally. The role of education is becoming ever more important as the global society develops in the face of a changing climate.
Climate education is one of the most effective forms of climate action, and the foundations should be laid at school. Climate education should not only ensure ‘climate science’ literacy, but also focus on climate action and solutions and look at both the roles of individuals and organisations or administrations, all whilst steering away from causing climate anxiety.
But are the current curricula across the UK providing the climate education to ensure students leave school with the basic climate literacy, enabling them to engage with messages put to them by the media or politicians, and to make decisions about their own personal responsibilities? The Society believes that school education should ensure that students do leave school with exactly this level of climate literacy.
The Society’s current and future education work
The Society’s Education Team works to support the delivery of climate education, whether that be supporting changes to the curricula, providing weather and climate CPD for teachers, or providing classroom resources.
Today, we would like to highlight and celebrate some of the work the education team is currently working on, and what there is to look forward to in the first half of the year:
- Launching and collecting responses for the 2025 Climate Literacy Survey
If you teach, or communicate with those who do teach:
- Year 11 (England/ Wales)
- Year 12 (N Ireland)
- S4 (Scotland)
Please participate in the 2025 Climate Literacy survey.
This builds on the 2023/2024 Climate Literacy report that was published by the DfE at the end of 2024. By collecting data annually, we hope to evidence the impact of changing curricula and other education policies or national scale interventions on the climate literacy of school leavers across the UK.
- Developing new climate change adaptation resources for GCSE geography
These new resources will feature two new extreme weather case studies, including a heatwave case study in the UK. The resource will also support the teaching of global adaptation strategies, a term the 2023/2024 Climate Literacy Survey identified poor understanding of.
- Weather and Climate subject days for Geography PGCE students
We provide a subject specific training days to students training to become geography teachers. Secondary geography teachers probably have the best opportunity to deliver climate education in the current curricula. Supporting the foundation of their weather and climate knowledge will strength the teaching of current and future students and reduce the misconceptions which we often see being taught.
With the education team growing in 2024, we have been able to reach more courses and students than ever before.
- Weather and Climate: A Teachers’ Guide – More for Teachers CPD videos
The Education team are making 20 new short videos to support teachers’ CPD. These videos accompany ‘Weather and Climate: A Teachers’ Guide’, a scheme of work for geography students aged 11 – 14+ years, and closely follow the CPD material, ‘More for Teachers’, published alongside the guide.
Following on from the DfE’s publication of the results of the climate literacy survey of school leavers in 2024, we are now looking for schools to participate in this year’s survey.
As the DfE are no longer funding the collection of data, we are able to open the survey up fully to schools in Scotland, N. Ireland, Wales and England.
By collecting data annually, we hope to evidence the impact of changing curricula and other education policies or national scale interventions on the climate literacy of school leavers across the UK.
If you are in a school which teaches year 11 (England/ Wales), year 12 (N Ireland) or S4 (Scotland) please take part.
Climate education is one of the most effective forms of climate action. But is our current curriculum equipping school leavers with the knowledge, skills and understanding about green careers and the impact of climate change on themselves and their communities?
We are looking for mixed ability, mixed subject choice classes – so this might be best run with forms than, say, with a geography class. It should take 5-10 minutes and should be completed online and in school. The teacher will need to remind students of the school’s postcode.
We will not ‘mark’ or share students responses either to individuals or to the school, so please stress to students that there is nothing to be gained by looking up answers or copying others’ responses.
Each students will be given 5 questions which are the same for everyone, and 5 which are different. These questions have been developed by climate experts and been through cognitive testing with young people.
For Wales, England and N. Ireland we will be collecting data until the end of March 2025.
For students in Scotland, the survey will remain open until the end of June 2025.
We are hoping to collect large quantities of data from a wide range of settings so that we can start looking for patterns in the data.