Sustainability and climate change: a strategy for education and children’s services — Rich Hurst

This guest article has been written by Rich Hurst, Education Advisor in Sustainability, Durham County Council and OASES.

This strategy was released by the Department for Education (DfE) on the 21st April 2022, with a formal launch at the Natural History Museum in London led by the then Secretary of State for Education Rt Hon Nadeem Zahawi MP, along with contributions from a young climate activist and Bear Grylls.

The final strategy has changed a fair amount from the one released at the COP26 event in Glasgow. The DfE led a consultation process with a range of working and user groups over that six-month period to refine and adapt the strategy. The main vision has remained unchanged, but the action areas and specific activities have changed in some cases significantly. The full strategy can be read here.

The vision: ‘the United Kingdom is the world-leading education sector in sustainability and climate change by 2030’ — a pretty bold aspiration, particularly given that the education systems in the devolved nations are administered individually, so in reality the DfE only have direct control over England.

To be clear, this strategy is for all education settings, not just schools, so it includes universities, colleges, and children’s homes.

Two significant changes from the draft are:

• The inclusion of a GCSE in Natural History to be launched from 2025.
• The inclusion of an ‘international’ action area — highlighting the importance of partnership working and sharing knowledge and ideas with education settings around the world.

The other more subtle shift is the increased emphasis on the natural environment, highlighting not only the impact the educational estate could have on improving biodiversity, but also on other issues such as flooding, water storage and air quality, in addition of course to the benefits for pupils and staff in terms of access to nature for their learning and achievement, as well as their wider wellbeing.

The action areas focus on these 5 themes:

1. Climate Education: Learning about the natural environment; support for teaching and learning in the natural environment.
2. Green Skills and Careers: Net zero skills pathways, and support and guidance for Green Careers.
3. Education Estate and Digital Infrastructure: New build schools/blocks to be net zero in operation (designed for 2°C rise and future proofed for 4°C); for existing estate — data gathering and retrofit, new operational guidance, new technology pilots including Gen Zero platform; resilience and adaptation; heating solutions; water strategy, including sustainable drainage systems and drought resilience.
4. Operations and Supply Chains: Support to embed sustainability in decision making; promote circular economy; waste prevention; resource efficiency. All settings to have a Sustainability Lead by 2025.
5. International: The UK Foreign Policy Integrated Review positions climate change as the UK’s number one international priority.

As you can see, these are very broad reaching and have different expectations in terms of how quickly they will be addressed, with some with targets by 2023, others 2025 and others by 2030.

It would be easy to pick holes in the strategy. As someone who has been involved in sustainability education for over 25 years and has seen many initiatives come and go, I am delighted that the sustainability agenda is at least back on the policy radar of the DfE. Education is in a very different place from the last major strategy which was Sustainable Schools. That strategy had targets set to 2020. I remember when I started working on it in 2006, that seemed like a long way away. Well, here we are in 2022. It is sobering to contemplate where education would be now if that policy hadn’t been shelved in 2010.

Secondly, the education system and the drive to academisation in schools means that the ways in which the system can be influenced is now very different. Local authorities have much less influence and therefore the main influencer is probably access to finance, either through capital maintenance or through funding schemes such as the Public Sector Decarbonisation Scheme, which is becoming the driver for heat based projects. The role of multi academy trusts and how they can apply for funds and drive investment in retrofit or new buildings is going to be significant.

Thirdly, there are huge opportunities here: to reduce carbon emissions; to enhance our natural environment; to improve the learning opportunities for young people in education today, and also enable them to access fantastic career opportunities in the future. The North East and Yorkshire regions are significant for the offshore renewables sector, and others such as hydrogen. If we are to reach our climate aspirations we need thousands of well educated new people in a huge range of sectors, from home insulation to heat pumps to battery production to offshore wind, to innovating the latest energy storage system that we haven’t even thought of yet.

Practically, in the next few years every education setting will be offered climate literacy training, each setting will be expected to have a Sustainability Lead by 2025 and have an individual climate action plan by the same year. These are all positive suggestions.

I’m not sure if the true scale of the change needed is realised. It is not just about green careers; every role will need to embed sustainability in the same way that we embed health and safety, or equality and diversity.

No education setting is going to be able to do this on their own, partnerships and support networks are going to be crucial with stakeholders from all sectors; public, private and voluntary.

There is a concern that the biodiversity and nature elements of this strategy may get left behind. There’s not often an easy financial return to be identified from natural environment projects, unlike energy or supply-chain related projects. I hope that they are given their due prominence, and the wider value of soil health, access to green space, mental health benefits, food growing and so on are fully supported in a joined-up, coherent approach.

This region has a strong track record in supporting schools with sustainability initiatives. We need to learn from our past successes and accelerate and expand the work, so we can ensure that the birthplace of the industrial revolution drives forward sustainable development in the 22nd century, and in particular makes real improvements in the next decade for our young people, communities, and the planet.