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.
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.
Maths is at the centre of all things science, and climate change is no different. To understand climate change, scientists have measured many climatic and weather variables such as temperature, rainfall accumulations, pressure and atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Mathematical skills allow us to explore these observations, finding trends and looking at the statistics. Maths allows us to create equations that allow us to work out what will happen in the future, be it the weather for the weekend or predicting the future climate in 50 years. Maths also helps us to unpick the social science of climate change.
As part of Maths Week Scotland we are challenging secondary students in Scotland to explore the broad topic of climate change and the many possible links it has to mathematics by writing their own maths problems and questions.
This challenge will be split into two sections: writing questions and peer reviewing questions from another group/class.
Part 1: Writing questions
The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) has recently released the Climate Change Concept Association Tool which brings together more than three hundred climate change concepts in an engaging illustration of how they are linked.
Climate change is linked to 3 main terms – causes, policy and impacts. We are going to focus on causes and impacts.
We suggest splitting the two topics into 2 days; writing questions for causes on Monday 23rd September and impacts on Tuesday 24th September. However, the competition will be live before Scottish Maths Week so you can deliver the question making sessions when it best suits your teaching pattern.
The questions must be linked to each of the topics associated with the ‘causes’ and ‘impacts’ of climate change. The questions should be set at National 4/ 5 level in terms of mathematical skills and style.
Click below to see an example question if the topic set was ‘climate action’.
There are 8 topics associated with CAUSES (Monday):
Climate justice
Science
Feedback loops
Greenhouse gas emissions
Land use change
Natural variability
Liability
Anthropogenic
There are 24 further topics associated IMPACTS (Tuesday).
However, we are going to focus on the 10 terms in bold for the questions:
Arctic/Antarctic
Anthropocene
Adaptation
Behavioural change
Climate zone shift
Climate justice (already done on Monday)
Communication
Ecosystems
Evidence
Extreme weather
Feedback loops (already done on Monday)
Global atmospheric circulation
Health
Hindcasts/projections
Individuals
Infrastructure
Impact assessment
Land use change (already done on Monday)
Migration(people)
Oceans
Permafrost
Regional climate change
Resource loss
Society
Social science
Soil heath
Small island developing states (SIDs)
We advise breaking the class into small groups (of no more than 3) and tasking each group with a couple of topics each. You will need to keep track of who worked on which questions, as there are prizes on offer – however, please don’t tell us the students’ names. For the terms that need more explanation, there is also a glossary on our website.
You can also contact education@rmets.org at any point up to and during the week – just include ‘Maths Week Scotland’ in the subject heading.
Some topics may be more challenging than others, for example creating a maths question around liability. You can use the Climate Change Concept Association Tool for this. Click on liability and it will give you further linked topics. Looking at the glossary term will give you some hints and tips to what the context for the climate could be. Encourage your students to do research into the topics, allowing them to explore and come up with creative questions (some resources: Climate websites). Please note that if the questions involve data, graphs or specific values the references should be included. Questions written should be original. Originality will be checked as part of the reviewing process.
All final questions must be written into the submission document (which can be accessed on the competition hub) and then this emailed to education@rmets.org by 11pm on Tuesday 24th September.
Please make use of the equation editor on PowerPoint if needed, or there are many online equation editors if you would prefer. Please make sure a teacher submits the questions on behalf of the class or a legal guardian if the competition is entered by a student who is home schooled. Entries must be made from Scottish Schools or students who are home schooled from an address in Scotland.
Part 2: Peer reviewing
You will then be given the opportunity to contribute to the reviewing process for the competition. You will score the questions written by another team/school against a number of criteria provided in the score card (which can be accessed on the competition hub). This peer reviewing process will be kept anonymous. Your peer review scores will then be combined with the expert review, undertaken by the RMetS education team and supported by Dr Frost Learning. The expert review will also include the plagiarism checks.
You will receive an email from education@rmets.org by the morning of Thursday 26th September with your assigned questions for reviewing. You will then have until Friday 4th October to complete the reviewing process. We suggest that either the whole class does all the questions and scores each question together, or similarly to the creating process, you split the class into smaller groups to focus on just a few of the questions.
The scores must then be filled in on the score card. Again, please make sure that the form is sent by a teacher or adult on behalf of the group or entrant. Return to education@rmets.org by 11pm Friday 4th October.
Prizes:
18 prizes are on offer – a £5 Amazon voucher per student for the best question written in each topic (up to £15 per group). We will contact you, the teacher/guardian, if one of your questions has won. It is then your responsibility to pass the prize on to the correct group of students who wrote the winning question.
In addition to this, each school/class which submits an entry for all 18 linked questions will be awarded with a certificate.
Future use of questions:
RMetS will add the winning questions from each topic and any other suitable questions to the bank of resources that exist on our education platform, MetLink (similar to the question provided as an example earlier in this document). The questions will be uploaded anonymously to the website, referencing that the questions were created through the Climate Calculations Challenge in collaboration Dr Frost Learning, and supported by Maths Week Scotland.
All documents for the Climate Calculations Challenge, including presentations slides and entry forms, can be found on the challenges page of the Maths Week Scotland website.
As the new UK government begins its stated mission to ‘rebuild Britain’, a group of education and climate experts is calling for sustainability and climate education to be at the heart of its priorities.
In its election manifesto, the Labour party committed to making Britain a clean energy superpower and to a new, modern educational curriculum.
Launched at the Royal Meteorological Society Annual Weather and Climate Conference today (Monday 8 July) in Reading, the National Climate Education Action Plan Curriculum Mapping report shows how these two missions could be linked. The report highlights the many opportunities to bring quality climate and sustainability education into the curriculum.
Professor Andrew Charlton-Perez, of the University of Reading will launch the report today together with Professor Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society.
Professor Charlton-Perez said: “Including climate and sustainability within the curriculum review will be vital to ensuring that the new government delivers long-lasting reform that can prepare young people for the good green jobs of the future.”
Rich curriculum
The report highlights different options to improve climate education from the first week of the new government, and the pros and cons of each of these approaches.
There are opportunities for an expansion of current climate education by adjusting teaching within the current curriculum, or by making small but meaningful changes to current curriculum specifications.
It includes detailed mapping showing where and how climate can fit into the curriculum. These changes could be implemented quickly while a more comprehensive review takes place. The report also highlights how greater inclusion of climate education fits with the desire of the new government to make the curriculum rich, broad and inclusive.
In the foreword to the report, Lisa Hoerning, a recent school leaver, makes clear the desire amongst young people for the forthcoming curriculum review to incorporate climate and sustainability education as a theme that crosses subjects and educational levels.
She said: “The current curriculum studied by young people across England doesn’t educate us on the climate and ecological emergency, and, depending on your subject preferences, you can nearly skip the relevant content entirely.”
She also expressed her hope that that in the near future climate education, as demonstrated in the report, would be integrated across all subjects.
Professor Sylvia Knight, Head of Education at RMetS, said, “Bringing together this report revealed the depth and diversity of work by organisations across the country, looking at ways to improve the climate literacy and green skills of our school leavers. Whilst recognising that curriculum reform could lead to the highest quality climate education, many opportunities already exist within the current curriculum or something very like it for teachers to deliver engaging, relevant, subject- and level-appropriate climate and sustainability teaching. The key to realising these opportunities will be teacher support, incentive and assessment.”
The report was produced by a group of authors from fourteen educational organisations led by Professor Sylvia Knight, of the Royal Meteorological Society, and science education expert Sean McQuaid of the TIDE community and is endorsed by a broad coalition of 60 organisations from schools, colleges, universities, climate charities and educational publishers.
What is climate literacy? Who needs it? When should people develop it and how? What role should climate education play in developing climate literacy, and what does high-quality climate education look like? In this article, for the Teaching Times, Prof. Sylvia Knight explores some of these questions.
Climate education, green skills and careers are part of that vision, all covered by the concept of climate literacy. They also form part of the Climate Action Plans that all schools in England are being asked to create, as well as part of the Action for Climate Empowerment which all signatories to the Paris Agreement are required to report to the UN on a five-yearly basis.
In 2018, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said: ‘Climate change is the defining issue of our time and we are at a defining moment’. There are many other significant issues facing the global community at the moment – some linked to the changing climate, some not, but mitigating and adapting to climate change is an issue which will remain significant well into the future. We therefore need to ensure current school leavers are well equipped to engage with it.
“At the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS), we believe that every student should leave school with the basic climate literacy that will 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 knowledge and skills required for the green careers of the future.”
Professor Sylvia Knight, Head of Education at RMetS
Defining climate literacy
But what is climate literacy? There are many and varied definitions available, but I would argue that it:
Is not just ‘climate science’ literacy;
Can be solutions- and action-focused;
Does not focus exclusively on personal wellbeing or anxiety, ignoring the need for concern about and understanding of the climate;
Does not focus exclusively on personal responsibility or action, ignoring the role of organisations or administrations;
Equips people to be local and global citizens.
Climate literacy is developed through climate education.
At COP 27, UNESCO’s Stefania Giannini said: ‘Education is the most transformational climate adaptation action’. Climate education is both formal and informal and lifelong, but the foundations need to be laid in schools. It is a field where understanding is advancing rapidly, particularly in matters of how to teach about the climate most effectively, how to assess climate education and when to teach it.
Personally, I think that for early years and the first years in primary education, we need to focus on showing children how to enjoy, respect and look after their local environment and developing an understanding of the current weather that affects them ‘here and now’. Later, we can start looking at global issues and longer timescale concepts like climate and climate change – things that are further away both in space and time.
It is very important to consider climate education as a distinct part of wider sustainability or green education. Many teachers favour other education for sustainable development topics such as waste management and biodiversity over climate change – maybe because they are perceived to be easier to teach, more accessible, or less controversial.
Climate change is a global environmental and social issue that underpins many of the Sustainability Development Goals;
There is a demand from young people;
We need a workforce that has the skills required for the green careers of the future;
There is a mandate from the UN to do so;
We currently have low climate literacy among the general public and young people.
In an annual survey of UK school leavers that the RMetS began in 2021, the data collected demonstrated that most 16-year-olds remembered having been taught about climate change, but that their understanding of basic concepts was very poor. In time, the impact of interventions in climate education on young people’s climate literacy should become apparent.
The question then becomes ‘What should all school leavers know and what should some school leavers know, which will give them the foundations that will enable them to be the climate economists, scientists, engineers and lawyers of the future?’
What should climate education be?
Climate education should not be repetitive, delivering the same message in several subjects and levels, but should be complementary – delivering age- and subject-appropriate understanding and skills in a way that, synoptically and progressively, leads to a broad and well-balanced understanding.
Climate education should not be all-encompassing, but we do need students to appreciate, where appropriate, the relevance of climate change to what they are learning (for example, migration in geography) and to appreciate that what they are learning is relevant to climate change. For example, in a lesson covering reflection in physics, one example (just one, not all) could be linked to the warming-amplifying impact of ice melt in the Arctic, or to the efforts being made to shade the Great Barrier Reef with clouds.
Climate education should be interdisciplinary, making use of opportunities for synoptic assessment or teaching sequencing to cross-reference learning across subjects – for example, photosynthesis in biology with the carbon cycle in chemistry.
Climate education could be cross-disciplinary – or, taking it one step further, could be taught as a separate subject. However, this would miss the opportunity to show students that what they are learning in all subjects is relevant to their understanding of climate change, demonstrating links between subjects without duplication of what they are hearing, where appropriate. It would also risk becoming an optional subject or topic. However, synoptic, cross-topic or cross-discipline assessment could provide real opportunities.
Climate education should be relevant to the lives, concerns and careers of students.
Climate education should be adaptive enough to be able to remain relevant in a rapidly changing world.
Climate education should develop and balance concern and hope, avoiding fostering anxiety, hopelessness, indifference or boredom.
Where do things stand?
Many organisations have looked for opportunities for climate education in the curriculum. The National Climate Education Action Plan consortium (NCEAP) recently created a report (to be published in early July 2024) bringing together and providing an overview of these studies.
The report will loosely divide them into studies which have looked at where climate education features or could feature in the current curriculum (including work done, for example, in the Natural History Museum’s Rapid Evidence Review by the Education and Training Foundation or the RMetS report on Opportunities for Enhanced Climate Change Education), studies which have looked at where small changes to the curriculum could significantly improve climate education (such as work done by Teach the Future, the Ministry for Eco-Education and the Morecambe Bay Curriculum) or what climate education could look like in a completely new curriculum (such as the Greening Curriculum Guidance published in June 2024 by UNESCO’s Greening Education Partnership).
The NCEAP report concludes that ‘Although a substantive curriculum reform would be ‘gold standard’, significant and effective improvements could be achieved with either of the other approaches if teachers and schools were given support and incentive (including inspection and assessment) to implement them.’
So, if we did have a new, blank-sheet curriculum, what aspects of climate change should be covered? Climate change is a broad and diverse subject that goes beyond the science of how the Earth’s climate system works and how the climate is changing. So, what aspects of climate change should, could or are we teaching in schools?
These are questions relevant to those developing school Climate Action Plans or new curricula – whether at the level of individual schools, Academy trusts or nationally – or by those developing assessment questions.
The RMetS Climate Change Concept Association Tool provides an opportunity to explore and evaluate the coverage of various aspects of climate change. It enables curriculum developers to identify gaps, missed links, duplication, or inadequate progression in their approach to teaching the subject across different subjects and levels.
“Education systems are particularly well positioned to equip learners with a foundation of scientific understanding related to climate change. This foundation also should include an understanding of how society is and can respond to climate challenges, integrating a justice-focused approach, fostering constructive coping strategies, and building leadership skills for transformed futures.”
Greening Curriculum Guidance, 2024
Resources for teachers
There are many, many classroom resources already available to teachers, particularly for subjects such as geography or the sciences, or for primary-level teaching. However, many of these promote misconceptions (a common one being ‘greenhouse gases absorb the sun’s heat’), are out of date, or don’t follow best practice in climate education pedagogy (for example, through fostering anxiety). How should a non-expert, time-pressured teacher identify a high-quality resource?
To aid in this, the NCEAP developed a Quality Control framework which could be used by individual teachers to assess the quality of a source, by resource developers as a reference when creating a new resource or revising an existing one, or by experts asked to assess a given resource against the framework. Teachers can look for the associated quality mark which will be carried, for example, by all the resources with climate change content on the National Education Nature Park website.
Secondary geography teachers probably have the best opportunities for climate education currently and, with several of the exam boards in the process of reviewing the climate content of their GCSE specifications, this will only improve.
In science – surprisingly, given the fundamental nature of climate science to our understanding of the climate system, projections of the future and opportunities for adaptation and mitigation – there are currently far fewer explicit opportunities in the English curriculum. However, the opportunities are there, and they are embodied through a choice of examples and questions that we are beginning to see exemplified by AQA for their trilogy science specification and by Isaac Physics, to name two examples. The same applies to maths, with examples being provided by MEI and Dr Frost Learning.
However, all teachers have the opportunity to deliver high-quality, high-level and subject-specific climate education – given training, incentive and capacity.
Article written by Prof. Sylvia Knight, Head of Education at the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) and a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading in the Schools of Education and of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences.
In conjunction with the Field Studies Council, we have developed a new, flexible resource for secondary geography lessons which allows students to explore the impact of, and potential for adaptation to, extreme heat events (heatwaves) in their schools – both inside and outside.
Launched in time for the 2024 National Festival of Fieldwork, these resources can also be used to give school Sustainability Leads some of the information they need when completing their Climate Action Plans.
We have just updated and extended the ‘More for Teachers’ information associated with our award-winning Weather and Climate: a Teachers’ Guide. These information sheets are designed to provide CPD for teachers of geography who would like to improve or update their weather and climate subject knowledge.
The teachers’ guide and the accompanying online teaching resources, aim to give UK geography teachers all that they need to deliver relevant, engaging and thorough weather and climate lessons to 11–14+ year old students. They are not linked to any specific curriculum but should be easily adaptable to all.
There are 20 topics or chapters. Across these, there are three threads or paths which can be taken through the online resources, depending on the teaching time available:
Basic weather: Weather in our lives, weather measurements, weather and climate, global atmospheric circulation, global climate zones, air masses, pressure and wind and water in the atmosphere
Climate: Weather and climate, global atmospheric circulation, global climate zones, past climate change, polar climate, hot deserts, changing global climate, UK climate, changing UK climate, the climate crisis
all students should leave school with basic weather literacy that allows them to understand the weather that affects them, their leisure activities and the careers they choose to follow
every student should leave school with basic climate literacy that would enable them to engage with the messages put forward by the media or politicians and to make informed decisions about their own opportunities and responsibilities.
To this end, we have embedded a climate change thread throughout the online resources, showing its relevance to both weather and climate. An understanding of weather and climate is fundamental to an understanding of climate change.
There is a progression of knowledge through the topics, supported by review and assessment activities. The resources also progressively develop key geographical skills such as data, mapwork, GIS, fieldwork and critical thinking.
We also include common misconceptions which should be challenged in the classroom.
Many of the online teaching resources are available with standard or easier versions, as well as extension or alternative activities.
Find the scheme of work, teaching resources, background information for teachers, as well as the Teachers’ Guide here.
Congratulations to the following schools which achieved a MetMark in 2023:
Didcot Girls’ School Masefield Primary School Kilmarnock Academy Tanbridge House Outwood Primary Academy Danes Hill School
The MetMark is awarded by the Royal Meteorological Society and Met Office which recognises excellence in weather and climate teaching, over and above the normal requirements of the National Curriculum or exam specifications.
However, we have now made the difficult decision to end this initiative – congratulations to every setting which successfully applied for a MetMark over the last 9 years.
There are many opportunities for better climate change education within the current secondary school curriculum in England, reveals a report published by the Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS).
A key finding was that, through supplying teacher support and assessment resources, very rapid improvements can be made to the climate literacy of English school leavers.
RMetS research reviewed the GCSE specifications across all subjects and exam boards and highlighted how many concepts already taught in schools are relevant to students’ understanding of climate change and its relevance to their future lives and careers.
Climate change is traditionally taught in subjects such as Geography, however not all students take Geography at GCSE meaning that a considerable proportion of students leave school without a basic understanding of climate change. Also, there are many aspects of climate change that are relevant to subjects like Design and Technology, Art, or English.
Earlier research published by RMetS in 2022, shows that there are notable gaps in how much students understand about climate change. However, students are concerned and believe that climate change will affect them personally. With the right support and without increasing teacher workload, teachers can help students to make the connection between what they are already learning in school and climate change.
Prof Sylvia Knight, Head of Education at the RMetS, said: “The Royal Meteorological Society is working to ensure that every student in the UK leaves school with at least a basic understanding of climate change.
“This valuable report shows how teachers can be supported to deliver high quality climate education, within the current curriculum, to equip students with the knowledge and tools to engage with messages about climate change from the media and politicians, and to make decisions about their own lives and careers.
“We are indebted to the RMetS members involved in the review; without their support and expertise this work would have not been possible.”
This fantastic piece of work is something that the education sector has needed for a long time. It shows how the change that many young people have been calling for, that climate be integrated across their education in all subjects, is within reach. If all organisations with an interest in improved climate education can use these findings to train teachers, and develop materials and clear climate action plans, such as those called for in the Department for Education Sustainability and Climate Change strategy, we can make very rapid progress on improved climate literacy for all.
The Royal Geographical Society (RGS) welcomes this research by the Royal Meteorological Society which identifies the explicit coverage of climate change within GCSE geography courses.
With 283,000 GCSE entries in 2023 geography is providing the ‘lion’s share’ of teaching about climate change. Yet there is more to do to enhance this work within the current specifications. The RGS looks forward to working with the Royal Meteorological Society to help geography teachers further develop their lessons examining the causes and impact of climate change.
