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.
Category: Curriculum
We’ve been delighted to work with Mastery Science to develop two new science teaching resources which are based on the climate and biodiversity stripes.
These visually striking images instantly convey information about changing global climate and biodiversity.
In the primary resource, students investigate the potential use of green walls to increase biodiversity on their school estate and adapt to climate change.
In the secondary resource, students prepare an (imaginary) submission for the Earthshot prize based on planting Kelp to mitigate climate change and increase biodiversity.
This week, the AQA exam board has published booklets for teachers of their Science, Geography, Maths, Religious Studies, Citizenship. Design and Technology and Psychology GCSE specifications, showing how the current specifications can be used to deliver the climate education that students are asking for and need to equip them with the green skills for the future workforce.
Building on the reports we published in 2023, the booklets exemplify how teachers can demonstrate to students that the skills and understanding that they are already being taught can be applied to the context of climate change, adaptation and mitigation, without increasing curriculum content or teaching load.
In science in particular, in work led by Natalie Vlachakis and supported by the RMetS, teachers are given ideas for how, through considerations of sequencing, to link learning across physics, biology and chemistry in order to deliver a cohesive and holistic climate education.
Categories
Curriculum Review
After discussions at various of our special interest groups and committees, the RMetS’ key points about a high quality climate curriculum are highlighted below. We encourage our members and partner organisations to echo these in their own responses to the ongoing curriculum review in England or in any of the four nations of the UK.
All students should leave school with some climate literacy irrespective of their subject and qualification choices
The RMetS climate literacy survey, 2022 demonstrates that a large proportion of school leavers in England don’t remember having been taught about climate change (46%) in their GCSE years. In addition, students are calling for quality climate education, and employers identify a green skills gap in the UK workforce. The World Bank Group’s Education for Climate Action report (2024) stresses the importance of education as an instrument for increasing climate mitigation and adaptation.
UNESCO’s Greening Curriculum Guidance (2024) concludes “The world faces interconnected challenges, with the climate crisis looming as an existential threat. Addressing these challenges requires an education system that not only acknowledges these realities but actively prepares individuals to navigate them and innovate for a more sustainable future.”
Students should leave school with the ability to apply their knowledge, understanding and skills to the real world as it changes and develops as well as their personal situations and careers. Specifically, high quality climate education should allow students to develop climate literacy and green skills which students can apply to green careers and broader climate action in their personal and professional lives.
The curriculum should be flexible enough to adapt as understanding, technology, relevance and situation changes. Specifically, this relates to the state of the climate, climate impacts around the world and current issues relating to climate justice, politics, economics and communication as well as technological solutions to the climate crisis.
Climate education should make students concerned about climate change but hopeful, focussing on solutions and careers as laid out in the DfE Sustainability and Climate Change Education Strategy (2022), UNESCO’s Greening Curriculum Guidance (2024)
Students should be able to synthesise their learning in different topics and subjects. Specifically, students should be able to apply their learning in geography and the sciences to climate change and sustainability contexts and examples in all subjects, and apply their maths, data and statistical skills to climate contexts in all subjects.
Climate change is a multi-disciplinary problem, impacting on all lives and careers, that requires a multidiscipline approach to both solutions and learning. It should therefore not just be taught in self-contained units (or even a separate subject) but should be integrated, where appropriate, throughout the curriculum in all subjects, by making links between learning in different subjects to develop a climate education which is holistic, strengthens and progresses, broadens learning and is not repetitive. Geography, Physics, Chemistry and Biology are the subjects where core understanding can be developed, which can be the expected knowledge on which application of that knowledge in all other subjects can be based, where appropriate. Maths, data and statistical skills underpin high quality climate education.
Climate education in the curriculum report and Easy Wins for Climate change education in England
Teacher support and subject specific professional development is critical to develop both subject knowledge and subject pedagogy amongst the current and future teaching community. All teachers should be able to access training to improve their climate literacy as well as their understanding of how to appropriately deliver climate education in their teaching.
Many teachers don’t currently have the confidence to deliver climate education UCL survey of teachers in England
The RMetS quality control work with resource providers, publishers and exam boards has revealed widespread misconceptions and out of date materials in use.
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.
Solving climate change needs brainy mathematicians!
Challenge:
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.
The full National Climate Education Action Plan Curriculum Mapping report is published online today.
UNESCO’s Greening Education Partnership has published this extremely comprehensive report.
We are delighted to have collaborated with the resource team at Dr Frost Learning to add a new maths lesson with a climate change context to the set we published earlier this year.
The new resource, which focusses on “changing the subject of a linear formula involving brackets and fractions” has a question in the context of 2023 being confirmed as the hottest year on record.
Dr Frost Learning are working to explicitly interweave the applications of various mathematical ideas to climate change in order that students gain a better understanding from their studies.
This work follows research we published in 2022 in partnership with Ipsos, showing the need and want for better climate education in schools. The study revealed that just under half of pupils in Year 11 could not recall being taught about climate change in the past year, with 20% believing that they have never been taught about it. Over 60% of students stated they feel very concerned about the impact of climate change in their lifetimes, but many of them showed limited understanding of the science and its impacts.
Our 2023 report demonstrated the opportunities for including climate change across the secondary school curriculum in England and we are delighted to have worked with Dr Frost Learning to turn some of the recommendations from this report into classroom resources.
The resources demonstrate to students that the maths skills they are learning are relevant to their understanding of climate change, without increasing curriculum load.
Paul Turner from the Ministry of Eco Education asked Sylvia Knight from the RMetS about why it’s important to consider the quality of a climate education resource, and how the NCEAP quality control framework is being used.
Last year, Sylvia Knight, Head of Education at the RMetS, talked to a Technology teacher on behalf of Pearson.
“The teachers we worked with on our project stressed that what they needed was support, particularly in rapidly-evolving areas like D&T. They mentioned wanting things like CPD resources for themselves, case studies, data, sample assessment questions and high-quality, adaptable lesson resources. In your opinion, within the constraints of the current specifications and national curriculum, what would help you improve the climate literacy of your students without increasing workload for you and your colleagues, or information overload for your learners?“
Read the full article here.