{"id":7471,"date":"2019-05-15T06:25:48","date_gmt":"2019-05-15T06:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7471"},"modified":"2019-05-15T06:25:48","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T06:25:48","slug":"the-state-of-environmental-education-in-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2019\/05\/15\/the-state-of-environmental-education-in-england\/","title":{"rendered":"The state of environmental education in England"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you're an optimistic, glass-half-full sort of person, you might be tempted to think that this is an unusually bright time for environmental education in England despite the gloom of two recent reports from King's College London,<\/a>\u00a0and the fact that schools are not exactly encouraged to do very much by official curriculum documents. \u00a0A bright time, that is, provided you see all the recent publicity about climate change and the ecological problems we face as environmental education activity.<\/p>\n

There is certainly a lot going on:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The school student strikes organised by UKSCN<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 a smart outfit who are co-ordinating action again on May 24th. \u00a0UKSCN was set up by a small group of volunteers that were inspired by the powerful and direct protests made by young people against climate inaction across the rest of Europe particularly Greta Thunberg. \u00a0They aim to radically reform the role and power of young people in national action against climate change.<\/li>\n
  2. the protests by groups of students such as those at Cheney School<\/a>, Oxford whose petition<\/a> for more climate change education has more than 71,000 signatures. \u00a0The\u00a0four 15 year old school students are deeply concerned about the damage we\u2019re doing to the planet and how it will affect our futures. \u00a0They say that climate change is the biggest issue of our time, and it must be a part of our education if their generation is to understand it and help to combat its effects.<\/li>\n
  3. the Cumbria climate education summit<\/a> organised by Graham Frost, Head of Robert Ferguson primary school, and his students. \u00a0Frost, who takes an action competence<\/em> approach,\u00a0writes<\/a>: \"Educating young people about democracy is a statutory requirement.\u00a0 As a nation we have very high expectations about educational standards in terms of communication and understanding, discussion and debate, but we should also be facilitating an audience for our increasingly informed and articulate young people.\u00a0 To equip them with knowledge, but none of the empowerment necessary to act on that knowledge is a dereliction of duty.\u00a0 What I am proposing here is that educators use their obligations as the key to providing young people with an appropriate audience.\"<\/em><\/li>\n
  4. the XR<\/a> protests and the activities of its education group that offer some of the most interesting<\/a> action in the country that I\u2019ve seen for a while.<\/li>\n
  5. the Green Schools Project<\/a>\u00a0 whose mission is to enable young people to fulfil their potential by providing resources and support to schools to engage them in environmental projects, building their skills and aspirations while encouraging them, their community and wider society to live in a more sustainable way. \u00a0Together with the admirable\u00a0NUS sustainability<\/a> team, the Green Schools Project surveyed and reported on school students' encouraging views<\/a> on environmental sustainability where \"85% agree that all schools and colleges should be encouraging and helping \"pupils like me\" to do things to help the environment\".<\/li>\n
  6. all those thousands of teachers across the land who work away in schools despite the constraints of a narrow reading of the national curriculum (see these reports from NAEE<\/a>\u00a0that show the opportunities for this). \u00a0Many do so out of conviction rather than because it's a school priority. \u00a0No one knows how many there are or what they do.<\/li>\n
  7. the thousands of\u00a0environmental education flowers cultivated (but not co-ordinated) by NGOs and other groups in their individual gardens. \u00a0Though too numerous to list, they are an unorganised patchwork of individual effort.<\/li>\n
  8. even the teacher unions<\/a> are getting involved, although the jury is out on how effective they will be.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
    The government, of course, is yet to be moved as it thinks it's already done enough: DEFRA because of the 25 year plan to improve the environment (A Green<\/em> Future<\/em><\/a>),<\/em> and the DfE because of what's in the national curriculum and exam syllabuses, and (together with DEFRA) because of\u00a0their Children and Nature Programme<\/a>. \u00a0<\/em>The latter\u00a0sets out to deliver actions that they have committed to in A Green Future<\/em> and encourages children to be close to nature, in and out of school. \u00a0This is aimed in particular at those living in areas of high disadvantage. \u00a0However, the problems of the world are not important in any of this. \u00a0As I have noted elsewhere, the programme is there just to help young people, especially disadvantaged ones, feel better.<\/div>\n
    \n

    As I have noted before, I also feel that the government thinks it's done enough in another sense as well. \u00a0Whilst environmental educators\u00a0might really want to believe their own rhetoric\u00a0that it's education in general (and environmental education in particular) that will save the world, government doesn't. \u00a0It thinks that this will be done by government, treaties, business, technology, innovation, enterprise, agencies, think tanks, trade, aid, etc where there are no children in sight. \u00a0Because of this it's happy with a pared-down curriculum offering and won't be changing the 2002 education act anytime soon. \u00a0The Secretary of State for Education Damian Hinds reiterated this view recently when responding to the proposals of the school strikers: they should stay in school and learn what is good for them (and for the country), he said. \u00a0Listen to wise elders, he implied.<\/p>\n

    But government might change something else, I suppose. \u00a0I understand that the leadership of UKSCN are to meet Secretary of State for Environment Michael\u00a0Gove at some time over the summer to see what can be done. \u00a0I expect something to be conjured up as the government is desperate to show that it takes young people seriously \u2013 but we'll have to wait and see. \u00a0Prime Minister Harold Wilson once said that he understood young people because he had grown up with them. \u00a0None of today's politicians seem to have done that.<\/p>\n

    My last point is that none of this is being led by established environmental education organisations. \u00a0 Is this why it seems to have caught the mood?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    If you're an optimistic, glass-half-full sort of person, you might be tempted to think that this is an unusually bright time for environmental education in England despite the gloom of two recent reports from King's College London,\u00a0and the fact that...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}