Thanks to NAEE's weekly news round-up for an alert to a new policy brief from the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath on the climate crisis in UK national curricula.
The author, Katharine Lee, says that the report
"explores how responding to climate change is presented in secondary school curricula across the four UK nations, and points to significant limitations, both in terms of inclusion of relevant content across subjects and the presentation of available strategies to tackle climate change".
The report is brief at 7 pages and its focus is across the 4 jurisdictions of the UK. Its key findings include:
- Content about climate change is largely limited to Science and Geography curricula.
- What and how much pupils learn about responding to climate change is heavily dependent upon their at-16 exam choices and (in England) their schools’ choice of exam board.
- The type of reform needed to address climate change presented in at-16 exam revision guides is incremental, with a focus on largely technical approaches; technological fixes are seen as the solution, while social or institutional change is hardly considered.
- Individuals are confined to a consumer role; the many other relevant roles they may occupy (e.g. citizen, professional) are not presented.
The report calls upon policymakers and curriculum developers "to revise UK national curricula to incorporate content about responding to climate change into a wider range of subjects", adding that "content should also be expanded to present a wider range of possible solutions beyond technological (and supply-side) interventions, and reflect the full spectrum of actions and roles available to the public".
The key findings are broadly familiar from other studies and calls for change, particularly those from Teach the Future and NAEE itself, though neither of these sets of work are cited; indeed not very much is cited by way of sources or bibliography.
The report is surely right to say that
"Educating young people about responding to climate change is important. First, it is a means of public engagement. Second, it provides a critical vehicle for empowering and skilling young people. Third, young people themselves report wanting to learn more about climate change, especially about effective and relevant ways of addressing it." (my italics).
It is this last point that is particularly strongly made by Teach the Future (and vehemently opposed by the DfE). It is embodied in NAEE's own modelling of a preferred curriculum. *
The report draws on an analysis of references to climate change are found in the 4 sets of curricula and exam syllabuses, although little detail is specified and it is actually mostly exam sources that are referenced. NAEE did this in detail for England a while back and a lack of references to this is disappointing. It's equally disappointing that the efforts of the recent Teach the Future Track Change initiative are not mentioned either. Admittedly this is not statutory or in any sense mandatory, but it does address the very issues that this report is focused on.
I found the Dominant Discourses section of the report hard to follow. For example, there's a floating sentence inside a box: "increasing demand must be met", but demand for what is unclear. This is expanded on later in a text box:
"The case for incremental reform is underpinned by two pillars. First, that growing demand must be met and that reducing demand is not a necessary consideration. This is stated explicitly, and implicitly when content about climate change is separated from content about energy. This separation of content communicates that climate change and energy are not necessarily intertwined, and even enables environmental considerations to be considered secondary to energy security concerns.
Second, in some guides, arguments are made that highlight the difficulties associated with taking action on climate change, such as the potentially negative impact on economic development and growth. ‘Discourses of delay’– narratives that draw upon truths or partial truths to justify inaction or obscure the need for solutions beyond the incremental – are evident both in these arguments and in the overall emphasis on non-transformational solutions."
This densely written text is followed on the next page with some contextualising quotes from 3 exam boards which we're invited to see as representative of the curricula across the 4 nations. This I doubt, but they help to make a narrow point. Ideally, these would have been integrated into the text rather than separated out, but it seems that design trumped coherence in the final editing.
As far as I can work out, the second part of this quote implies that taking action around climate change isn't all that difficult, but it is, especially in a democracy as we're seeing, for example, in relation to EVs and heat pumps. The report appears to want us to engage with climate change issues, but only it seems if we promote the right sort of "transformational solutions". Can that really be right? I hope not.
The report's lament that we all tend to be seen narrowly by curricula as consumers I'd say, broadly speaking, is a valid one, especially in relation to England. The report says:
"There is no consideration of the other – potentially more impactful – roles that individuals occupy in relation to acting on climate change, as community members, investors, business owners and employees, and voters, for example."
But is this really true in schools Scotland or in Wales? And do teachers never ever focus on alternatives? That I doubt very much. We needed more quotes from national curriculum documents rather than from exam boards to tease out these issues.
A key passage from the end of the report criticises the DfE's concerns about partisanship and balance, and then says:
"An uncritical presentation of incremental reform in education, and in wider public discourse, restricts opportunities to consider both the possible limitations of incremental reform and the potential consequences to humanity and the planet of it proving ineffective."
Whilst I agree with the second part of this, and with the need for young people in schools to address the sort of future issues identified here, there is a huge unexplored issue here.
The report also says:
"... young people, ... will need to be adequately prepared to tackle the multiple challenges arising in their lifetimes from a changing climate, and ... be given the opportunity to consider and appraise all viable routes to respond to climate change."
It is, of course, currently fashionable to argue this, but isn't it a ludicrous proposition that anyone could be "adequately prepared to tackle the multiple challenges arising in their lifetimes from a changing climate".
No one is so prepared at the moment as no one is aware of these challenges, so how could schools do it now? This counsel of perfection stems from ill-formed competencies dogma which suggests that sets of attitudes, skills and dispositions can be acquired that will last a lifetime even as circumstances change around us. How could this ever be?
Youngsters leaving school can only ever be prepared for the next stage of their learning as they embark on that constant state of becoming that is human life. Even I, old as I am, know that (on a good day) my understanding is open (and amenable) to change. Long may it be so.
There's a debate to be had about the parameters of the climate change learning that schools need to be facilitating. But this report hasn't much to contribute. It would have been much better if it had had more fine detail about curricula and their differences across the 4 parts of the UK, and had been much more thoughtful about the limitations of its own arguments.
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* I should declare an interest in that I had a hand in writing this.
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