Embedding Climate Education Across the Curriculum: Turning Ambition into Action

The government’s Curriculum and Assessment Review: Building a World-Class Curriculum for All sets an ambitious vision: to equip young people for a rapidly changing world. Climate Ed welcomes its recognition that the climate crisis presents one of the most urgent challenges facing the next generation.

The review makes several encouraging recommendations:

• Citizenship in the primary curriculum should “explore complementary and age-appropriate issues, including sustainable choices and habits and climate justice.”

• PSHE, RSE and Citizenship should include a core body of content on climate change and sustainability.

• Design & Technology should “explicitly include how to achieve sustainable resolutions to design challenges.”

• Geography should “embed climate change and sustainability more explicitly across different key stages... ensuring early, coherent and more detailed engagement with climate education.”

• Science should “develop students’ understanding of the scientific principles that explain climate change and sustainability and the global efforts to tackle them.”

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Climate Ed’s founder Ben Cuddon commented:

“The emphasis on making climate change and sustainability more explicit across subjects is a positive and much-needed step. The clarity should help schools plan relevant and coherent learning opportunities. Yet many schools already include climate topics to some extent, and it would have been good to see the review recognise opportunities in additional subjects - for example, how history can help pupils understand the role of human activity in shaping today’s challenges. The real test will come in what becomes statutory and how meaningfully it is implemented.”

The review demonstrates a welcome shift towards applied knowledge - giving teachers the opportunity to connect learning to real-world problems. Climate Ed has been developing such applied climate education for primary pupils for several years. Our five-workshop carbon literacy and climate action programme for Years 5 and 6 teaches pupils to calculate their personal carbon footprints, understand the local and global impact of emissions, and design projects that reduce carbon in schools and communities. This action-oriented approach turns abstract knowledge into tangible skills, fostering both agency and responsibility.

Yet a world-class curriculum requires more than subject-specific interventions. Embedding a “climate lens” across all areas of learning - including humanities, English, and mathematics - would ensure that every pupil develops the knowledge, skills, and agency needed to navigate and shape a sustainable future. By linking carbon literacy to decision-making, problem-solving, and critical thinking across the curriculum, we can prepare young people not just to understand climate change, but to act on it.

As the Department for Education develops statutory guidance based on the review, it will be vital to consult organisations delivering climate education at the grassroots level. Charities like Climate Ed bring practical experience and evidence of what works in schools, ensuring that curriculum ambition is translated into meaningful classroom practice.

The review is an important milestone, but the real test will be its implementation. Climate Ed stands ready to help turn this vision into action - providing teachers, schools, and policy-makers with the tools, expertise, and insight to deliver climate education that is coherent, inclusive, and transformative.

www.climateed.net