In April 2022, the Department for Education (DfE) launched a sustainability and climate change strategy for the education and children’s services systems in England which includes a focus on the role of school sustainability ‘leads’ (DfE, 2022). This is consistent with calls for sustainability coordinators to lead each school to a greener approach, made by teachers, teacher educators and young people in BERA’s Manifesto for Education for Environmental Sustainability, published in November 2021 (BERA, 2021; Dunlop et al., 2022).
Given this focus on leadership, we explored what leading climate change education looks like in practice for primary and secondary schools and the barriers and enablers they encounter. Participants contributed to one of two online workshops held in November 2022. A total of 24 participants contributed, evenly distributed across primary and secondary settings. Here, we share our initial findings.
Primary-based educator practitioners articulated a vision for climate change education which was a ‘green thread’, integrated across the curriculum rather than a topic or subject that was ‘seasonal’ or ‘extra’. Such a ‘green thread’ could mean teachers have the agency to implement climate change education that was contextualised, for example incorporating locally relevant examples and case studies and including authentic stories in a variety of media. This is consistent with previous research which found teachers in England favour a cross-curricular approach to climate change education (Howard-Jones et al., 2021).
