News

The vision of Global Action Plan’s schools work is an education system that includes all people and transforms our world.

Earlier this year, we welcomed news of the curriculum and assessment review from Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson MP. We wrote to tell her so, and we asked her to make the climate and nature crisis a core part of the review. Since then, the Curriculum and Assessment review panel has been appointed. The Chair, Professor Becky Francis (who we also wrote to earlier this summer) recently opened the review’s call for evidence, which is closing on 22 November. 

We’re now sharing the call for evidence with our community of educators via our Transform Our World newsletter and encouraging them to submit before the closing date of Friday 22 November. We’re also working on our own submission to the review and will share that in due course. 

To help de-mystify the submissions process, we will be producing guidance for educators on navigating the online form, which we will be sharing soon. 

In addition to this, Global Action Plan staff will be attending a number of the Department for Education regional roadshows that have also been announced alongside the call for evidence. You can find a list of them here – if you are attending, we’d love to talk to you, so come and find us. 

A critical moment

The call for evidence documentation specifically acknowledges the environmental crisis (“This is particularly pressing in a world where social, technological, commercial and environmental conditions are rapidly changing” – page 4) and it’s vital that this stays in focus and becomes even more prominent in the coming months.

We believe this is a critical moment and one not to be missed. The call for evidence and the regional roadshows, are the best opportunities we will have – as educators, parents, students, and citizens – to highlight to the Review panel the importance, value, and impact of climate change and sustainability education. Key to this is how we convey what this sort of education is, and does.

We can expect the national curriculum, post Review, to retain a ‘knowledge-rich’ feel. But for us, here at Global Action Plan, it is not a question of whether the reformed national curriculum will cover the climate and nature crisis more adequately than it currently does; we can reasonably expect that it will. It is a question of how it covers it, and how well.

As advocates for climate change and sustainability education, we must not be too narrow in the calls we make, nor appear detached from the wider debate.

Thankfully, the Francis review is looking at curriculum and assessment as whole. It has the potential to usher in significant changes to how children learn, and the skills, worldviews and values they develop. In many respects, we hope it does; the education system is not a benign force – right now, in England at least, it is arguably having a net negative, rather than net positive, impact on the environment.

Last time there was a call for evidence of this nature, the Department for Education received just over 5,000 responses, we can expect the number of responses to at least match that number this time round. Our hope is that at least 10% of those responses make the case for climate and sustainability education.

Submit to the call for evidence

Subscribe to our Transform Our World newsletter to receive our monthly update to educators. We will be sharing updates related to the review in this newsletter, along with our usual news stories about youth social action, upcoming opportunities for educators and useful resources.