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Climate change may no longer explicitly feature in the primary curriculum, but there’s every reason, and every opportunity, to get serious about sustainability in the classroom, says Ben Ballin...

In the lead up to the 2014 English National Curriculum, some panicky petitions began to do the rounds, expressing concern that schools would be prohibited from teaching climate change and sustainable development. 

In the event, the calamity failed to materialise. Primary schools are still permitted to teach about such things, if no longer obliged to do so (a subtle but important distinction). However, most explicit references were systematically removed from the new primary national curriculum. They lingered on for a while in Ofsted’s subject-specific guidance, and then disappeared from there as well. It all seems a long way from the pre-2010 days of the National Framework for Sustainable Schools.

Regardless of the changes, a quiet undercurrent persists within many schools. Eco Schools awards and local sustainability schemes continue to flourish, often with the support of surviving local authority officers. Many schools see the enduring value of these real contexts for learning: they enable to children to use and apply their knowledge, to explore their values, and to get hands-on, dirty and engaged. 

Meanwhile, the government has established an ambitious nationwide Global Learning Programme (with counterparts in the devolved administrations). This has a target of 50 per cent of all primary and secondary schools being actively engaged by 2017. The real world, with all its difficulties, injustices, and infuriating changeability, simply does not seem to want to go away.

Changing times

Out there in that complicated world, something new and significant is brewing that will, in time, influence further change. The United Nations is about to replace its Millennium Development Goals with a new set of objectives, The Sustainable Development Goals, which seek to integrate targets for human development with those for sustainability.

Universal education remains hugely important, but the new goal is more explicit about what that education is for: Goal 4.7 calls on UN member states to “ensure all learners acquire (the) knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development” by 2030.

This might seem very remote, but the former Sustainable Schools Framework came about – at least in part – because the then government wanted to be seen to be visibly meeting a similar commitment. So watch this space…

Do it yourself

Never slow on the uptake, the Cambridge Primary Review Trust has recently added sustainability and global citizenship to its priorities (they were already aims). It had already reported as long ago as 2007 that “the children who were most confident that climate change need not overwhelm them were those whose schools had decided to replace unfocussed fear by factual information and practical strategies” (Alexander, 2010).

The same paragraph goes on to praise teachers who “asserted their professional right to go their own way.”  Why not? There are plenty of hooks for sustainability in the 2014 national curriculum, if we want to use them.

The programmes of study for geography, for example, are packed full of opportunities for exploring change in the local area – as are those for history. Threaded through the geography curriculum is the big theme of how people influence places, and how places influence people. Taking that as a frame, and thinking about how people adapt to and change their environments, we are immediately into the terrain of sustainability. If we are teaching about the Amazon as part of an Americas regional study, it is going to be hard to avoid what is happening to the river and the rainforest – and why. 

The story of the Maya – one of the optional History units at KS2 – is that of a civilisation which collapsed because of its over-use of national resources. If we are going to teach this effectively, and make connections young learners will find meaningful, then we are hardly going to ignore the harsh lessons of such a story.

In the examples we use in science, the data we collect in maths, the stories we explore in English, the opportunities are already enormous. The challenge is to teach sustainability in a way that includes critical balance, real knowledge and the coherent development of skills. I am more that certain that – as a profession – we are up to, and up for, that challenge.

About the author

Ben Ballin is a primary geography consultant. On November 21st 2015, he will be working with the teachers’ network Tide~ to co-host a seminar on global learning and sustainability in primary schools.