All news and events in this section
FutureLearn have published a blog by Sylvia Knight, RMetS Head of Education. It’s an introduction to weather and climate, looking at weather forecasts, climate projections and the attribution of extreme weather events to global warming.
This relates to Come Rain or Shine, the free, 5-week weather and climate CPD course for secondary geography teachers (and others with an interest in UK weather) which is now running throughout the year.
The need for better climate education in schools across the UK is undeniable – from calls from young people, teachers and employers and evidence from climate literacy surveys.
As the Curriculum is being reviewed/ refreshed in England, Scotland and N Ireland and the new curriculum is being embedded in Wales, there is an ideal opportunity for curriculum designers to assess the opportunities for climate education within their curriculum and, critically, to ensure appropriate sequencing of knowledge, understanding, skills and values across subjects and levels.
The DfE in England’s Curriculum and Assessment review interim report specifically states that: “Rapid social, environmental and technological change necessitates that the curriculum keep pace; including a renewed focus on digital and media literacy, and a greater focus on sustainability and climate science.”
The Royal Meteorological Society believes that every student should leave school with the basic climate literacy that would enable them to engage with the messages put forward by the media or politicians or to make informed decisions about their own opportunities and responsibilities when it comes to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and also to equip them with the understanding and skills required to thrive in the green careers of the future.
For this to be possible, it is vital that they are able to critically apply their knowledge, understanding and skills to the contexts they encounter in their current and future lives.
In March 2025, we invited representatives from a broad range of subject and professional organisations to come together in a workshop kindly hosted by the University of Reading.
The aim of the workshop was to begin defining a Curriculum for Climate Literacy which, as part of a much wider curriculum, would equip students with the climate literacy needed for their lives as local and global citizens, and with the skills for careers shaped by a changing climate. By bringing together those with subject and subject-teaching expertise we hoped to develop a well sequenced, coherent, holistic and progressive curriculum.
Critically, what should all students know when they leave school, and what should some students, through their choice of subjects, know to equip them for specific further training/ study and careers?
Since the workshop, we have worked with many of these organisations to establish the Curriculum for Climate Literacy, which we hope those now developing national curricula, exam specifications and school level curricula will find useful.
Access the full document for the detailed recommendations according to subject and level.
In compiling this Curriculum for Climate Literacy we have drawn on the work done by many organisations including, but not limited to, UNESCO’s Greening Education Partnership, TIDE, CAPE and SOS-UK.
Other core RMetS activities including quality controlling teaching and assessment resources, running an annual survey to assess the climate literacy of school leavers across the UK, and delivering teacher training.
Back in 2021 we released the Weather and Climate Teachers’ guide, accompanied by resources for the classroom and teacher CPD.
We are now happy to announce that the CPD ‘More For Teachers’ documents are now available as a series of short films on our YouTube channel.
The videos, like the guide, are aimed at secondary geography teachers to support the delivery of weather and climate lessons to 11–14+ year old students. They are not linked to any specific curriculum and should support teaching across all of the UK.
See the first video here:
We are delighted to publish a new collection of classroom resources, aimed at 14-16 (GCSE) geography teachers and students, exploring climate change, extreme weather, and adaptation to it.
Some of the resources in the collection were already available on MetLink, but most have been created for us by Rob Gamesby (Cool Geography) and are based on RMetS funded research, just completed, by Jiashu Zhu at Cambridge University. The research focusses on the causes, impacts and effectiveness of adaptation measures to river flooding in Sheffield, Extreme heat (heatwaves) in Cambridge and monsoon flooding in Pakistan.
RMetS have answered a call to make some KS2 SATs practice questions with weather and climate contexts.
These questions are taken directly from the last three years of SATs papers (specifically maths papers 2 and 3), with numbers changed to fit in with the updated context.
Context is wide ranging. Some questions refer to wildflowers, insects and grow-your-own vegetables to connect with young people’s love of nature and to empower them to act positively towards nature and our climate. Other more obvious connections include questions about the seasons, flooding, public transport and renewable energy.
Questions have been broken down into topic and are in PDF form, and available as Word documents (to make it easy to copy and paste) together with the answers for teachers (or students to self or peer mark).
The RMetS education team have written a guest blog for Geography Southwest. Geography Southwest is a project to promote geographical education in the South West of England and beyond by creating and offering a wide range of resources to support the wider geographical community.
Storm Bert: A case study navigating the truth about flooding in a changing climate details the lifetime of Storm Bert, which caused significant damage back in November 2024. In particular, flood damage caused by the River Taff (in Wales) bursting its banks, really highlighted the need to continue but also improve our adaptation methods.
In the blog we also address some of the misconceptions of how our weather here in the UK and weather further afield is changing. It is crucial that we understand what trends have been identified in our climate system by climate scientists, in order to develop and establish effective adaptation methods.
Make sure you follow the link at the bottom of the page to get the FULL blog!
We also recently wrote a careers article for Geography Southwest, exploring the term ‘green careers’, ‘green skills’ and available resource for students with an interest in a career in weather and climate, particularly with a geography background.
Make sure to scroll down to the button of the page to get the full article!
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.
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:
If you teach, or communicate with those who do teach:
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are delighted that the DfE have published the results of the 2023/ 2024 Climate Literacy Survey of school leavers (year 11 students), which builds on the initial survey we developed in 2022. Together with an expert group of Society members, we supported the development of the additional 50 questions which were included in the survey this year and we also contributed to the analysis of the data collected.
UNESCO’s Greening Curriculum guidance states that high quality climate education should develop an “action-oriented, holistic, scientifically accurate, justice-driven and lifelong learning approach to climate change”.
This survey is a very important piece of evidence about the state of climate awareness amongst our young people, as well as the key gaps in the climate education they are currently receiving.
One clear message that has emerged from the survey every year, is how poorly the 1.5°C/ 2°C key climate goals are understood, as many respondents thought that the climate had already warmed more than this and most failed to select the correct definition.
Related to this, the concept of ‘Net Zero’ is very poorly understood. As this is a phrase which is in widespread use, from politicians to schools, employers and the media, lack of understanding of it is both surprising and concerning.
Unsurprisingly, there is a correlation between those school leavers who think that climate change will affect them directly and those who are concerned about climate change.
In designing climate education and communication strategies, we rightly consider the need to avoid developing climate anxiety. However, the survey shows that, although most school leavers are ‘fairly concerned’ about climate change more are ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ concerned about climate change than are ‘very concerned’. We should therefore make sure that our focus is on making young people ‘concerned and hopeful’ as only this will lead to effective individual and collective climate action.
One important way to do this is through demonstrating the relevance of climate change to young people, their communities and careers. However, the data collected in the survey showed very low awareness of climate change in the UK, including projected impacts as well as adaptation and mitigation strategies already in place or needed, as well as the cost benefits of mitigation. This will be directly relevant to school leavers’ awareness of the green careers and wider climate action available to them.
A significant proportion do not appreciate that future global warming can still be limited or avoided, highlighting an opportunity for increasing ‘hope’ in climate action amongst young people. Similarly, there was low awareness of the extent of existing renewable energy production in the UK – again missing messages about hope and green careers.
Some specific issues related to the current National Curriculum in England were highlighted by the survey. For example, respondents had poor awareness of the fact that the expansion of water as it warms has contributed roughly as much to sea level rise as the melting of ice. This argues for the need for a curriculum which encourages the application of knowledge and understanding (in this case, that liquids expand when they are heated) to real world contexts or across subjects (i.e. from science to geography).
Another example relates to the current KS3/ 4 geography curriculum where the disproportionate amount of time devoted to teaching past climate change and in particular the Milankovitch cycles seems to have led to respondents overestimating the impact of natural forcing mechanisms on recent climate change.
A concerning finding from the survey relates to perception of the level of scientific consensus on climate change, with most respondents thinking agreement amongst scientists is significantly lower than it is. This potentially relates to the use of the ‘evaluate’ command word in geography assessments, which necessitates students to present arguments from both sides even if, in reality, the debate is essentially one sided.
While most school leavers recall having been taught about climate change, only just over half remember having covered it in their last year at school when all should have encountered it in GCSE science.
However, reassuringly, the responses indicated that students place a relatively high level of trust in their science teachers as sources of climate change information. This reinforces the need for teachers to have the time and support to keep their own subject knowledge up to date and relevant.
In delivering high quality climate education and communication, we need to be very careful to avoid confusion between climate change mitigation strategies and other sustainability issues. The data collected in the survey demonstrated confusion in particular relating to the impact of the production and use of plastics.
Related to this, there was low awareness of adaptation and mitigation strategies generally, and in particular of effective mitigation actions. The impacts of keeping pets and eating meat on greenhouse gas emissions are generally underestimated whereas the impact of switching lights off and recycling (from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions) is overestimated. Whether or not a focus on personal carbon footprints (as opposed to that of products, services or organisations) is helpful, this potentially reflects the impact of decades of teaching the ‘easier to handle’ aspects of sustainability, particularly in primary schools.
Climate justice recognises the fact that the people and countries most vulnerable to climate change are often not the ones who have done the most to cause it. Respondents indicated a good awareness of which countries are currently emitting most greenhouse gas, but less awareness of per capita or historical emissions. Similarly, there was limited understanding of regional variations in future temperature changes and their impacts.
The current curriculum review in England may provide an opportunity to improve the climate education delivered in schools.
As the DfE will no longer be funding the delivery of this piece of work, we, the RMetS, plan to run the survey ourselves in all four nations of the UK in the 2024/ 2025 academic year and annually thereafter, in order to track the impact of any changes in curriculum or education policy over time. We collected some baseline data in Scotland and Wales in 2024/ 2025.
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